Baudrillard and 9/11

The Marriage of Postmodern Masochism and Premodern Sadism.

NB: this is the first in a series of excerpts from my book that I post here in the coming weeks, in preparation for Infidel Awareness Month, 9/11-Oct7 (website imminent). This one will go up on

Day V. September 12, 2026. Responses to 9-11: shock, horror, delight, rejoicing.

excerpt from: Can “The Whole World” be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism and Global Jihad, 2022

The day after 9-11, all around the Western world, the shock was palpable, and the sympathy for the victims―some 3000 dead Americans, among them Muslims―was widespread, at least in diplomatic circles. Expressions of condolence and sympathy poured in, even from Iran, even from Yasser Arafat (who, to compensate for his people’s embarrassing celebrations at the sight of the twin towers falling, faked giving blood to help victims who had been pulverized in the attack), only to be scorned by the Arab press for failing to stand with his people, and making a show of himself.^[1]

The notoriously anti-American Le Monde anticipated the later hashtag of #WeAreAll [fill in blank with latest terror victims], with an editorial entitled, “Today, We Are All Americans.” In it, in addition to the obligatory digs at the US for giving birth to this devil (Bin Laden), the editorial noted that any attempt to justify this attack as war on behalf of the poor third world was to

credit the authors of this murderous madness with “good intentions” or of some project where they must avenge oppressed peoples against their unique oppressor, America. It would permit them to claim the mantle of “poverty”―an offense, an injury to genuinely impoverished people the world over! What a monstrous hypocrisy. None of those who contributed to this operation can pretend to want the good of humanity. They do not want a better, more just world. They just want to erase ours from the map.^[2]

Empirically accurate, exactly right level of “us” solidarity (Western democracies), morally acute, in limpid prose. Most decidedly not stupidly pro-jihad. And given Le Monde’s deeply embedded anti-Americanism, quite impressive in its generosity of spirit. When they want to, the French can think grandly and write clearly.

And yet, two weeks later, the same Le Monde ran a piece by Jean Baudrillard, a major sociologist and philosopher (two French terms for critical theorists at the cutting edge of academic discourse), in which he articulated precisely the sentiments the editors had dismissed only days before.

All the verbiage and commentaries betray a gigantic abreaction to the very event and the fascination it exercises. Moral condemnation and the sacred union against terrorism match the prodigious jubilation engendered by witnessing this global superpower being destroyed [sic]; better, by seeing it more or less self-destroying, even suiciding spectacularly. Though it is she [the US] that has, through its intolerable power, engendered all that violence brewing around the world, and therefore this terrorist imagination that―unknowingly―inhabits us all.

That we have dreamed of this event, that everybody without exception has dreamt of it, because everybody must dream of the destruction of any power hegemonic to that degree―this is unacceptable for Western moral conscience, but it is still a fact, and one which is justly measured by the pathetic violence of all those discourses which attempt to erase it.^[3]

Here the moral clarity of the editors becomes a “monstrous hypocrisy” of Schadenfreude at America’s suffering, dressed up as a universal sense of moral offense at the American colossus.^[4] (It does have a certain refreshing honesty, though: “everybody rejoiced, don’t buy into the hypocritical pieties of those who express their sympathies.”) At the same time, Baudrillard did precisely what Le Monde’s editors had just warned against: he glorified “freedom-fighting” jihadis who struck a mortal [sic] blow at the suffocating American hegemon (“intolerable power” or what Saïd referred to as the “frighteningly global reach of the last remaining superpower”^[5]). As aberrant as it may strike some sensibilities (those who value empathy and human life), this became a defining approach on the left: One French socialist opined a month after 9-11: “Islam is, after all, the poor. And it pisses [us brave socialists] off (ça fait chier) to [see the US] beat up the poor.”^[6]

It takes a special kind of “malignant desire,” to use Baudrillard’s own term, for someone to be so struck with envy and resentment at the success of another (in this case a historical, civilizational ally/rival in the creation of democratic societies, one that twice within living memory had saved Europeans from their own madness), that one rejoices in an attack like 9-11. To cheer the blow to Americans even when that “hegemon” has been far more beneficent and far less authoritarian toward weaker nations or peoples than any earlier hegemon in history over whom it had a massive military advantage, reflects a staggering self-absorption in which American superiority to France/Europe is more unbearable than massive assaults on “innocent” infidels. An act of mauvaise foi (bad faith) worthy of Sartre’s pen at the height of his useful idiocy . . . the beginning of a genuine huis clos (no exit).^[7]

It seems hard to conceive of such a reaction, when the force (jihad) that struck the blow against one’s civilizational peer (US), also seeks vengeance against your own nation (France), known for its heartless massacres of Muslim civilians in Algeria,^[8] a force that hates progressive iconoclasts more than anyone but Jews. Who attacks one’s friends and supports one’s enemies? The answer, in the world of shame-honor dynamics, is: “the weak.” How does one shield oneself from that awareness? In adopting the foolish syllogism: “Courage is attacking the strongest, and America is strongest.”^[9]

In England, people like Seumas Milne in the Guardian asserted the real “lesson” of 9-11: that Americans, thick-headed fools that they are, can’t understand why they’re hated, why this attack represented “reaping the dragons’ teeth harvest they themselves had sown,” among other things by siding with Israel against the poor Palestinians.^[10] His whole article is wrapped in a serene certainty that this is the only viable reading of world events. Yet another way the Palestinian cause locked the Left into a politics of odium.

And many Americans, especially on the left, agreed. Susan Sontag immediately Westsplained the attack as if its motives should be obvious to all:

Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilization” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? . . . In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards.^[11]

Judith Butler described 9-11 as a “dislocation from first-world privilege, however temporary,”^[12] where “first-world privilege” and “intolerable power” described the same grand-narrative villain. Long-time progressive thinker, Michael Walzer, meditating on the guilt engendered by enjoying the privileges of living in America, listed the emotions that arise in response―“festering resentment, ingrown anger, and self-hate” and then concluded:

Certainly, all those emotions were plain to see in the left’s reaction to September 11, in the failure to register the horror of the attack or to acknowledge the human pain it caused, in the Schadenfreude of so many of the first responses, the barely concealed glee that the imperial state had finally gotten what it deserved.^[13]

Reasonably, Walzer feared that when we indulge these emotions, it “makes it impossible to sustain a decent (intelligent, responsible, morally nuanced) politics.” Salmon Rushdie expressed similar concerns: the US faces “an ideological enemy that may turn out to be harder to defeat than militant Islam: that is to say, anti-Americanism, which already then was taking the world by storm.”^[14]

Given the choice between the moral clarity and grounded empiricism of the initial reaction of Le Monde’s editors on the one hand, and the compulsive, self-destructive, moralizing, Schadenfreude of Baudrillard, on the other, French culture shifted decisively against the US and towards the joys of watching a rival get battered. Noted a French researcher into anti-Americanism:

The fury of the responses testified to a profound horror at the very idea that one could call oneself “American” and thus annul, if only during a crisis, the long work of differentiation between “us” and “them” that has mobilized for over a century, a good portion of French intellectual energies.^[15]

French intellectuals had their own “tribal,” “us-them” instincts, invidious ones, which they indulged to the fullest.

Nidra Poller described the sudden shift after Bin Laden’s attack: if Al Durah sounded the death knell for Zionism in French public discourse, then 9-11 sounded it for the US. Returning to Paris from the US only weeks after 9-11, Poller could cut the anti-Americanism in Parisian society with a knife.^[16] Dinner-table conversations, seminar rooms, street demonstrations . . . le tout Paris indulged in a collective celebration of Schadenfreude over America’s misfortune. Baudrillard, like Catherine Nay, spoke for many when he claimed that we all rejoice when we see so suffocating a hegemon receive such a painful blow. America deserved it. [NSH1]

In 2002, Philippe Roger published a history of Europe’s centuries-long unhappy relationship with America, something he had been working on for many years. He declined to comment on 9-11: “The collection of idiocies (le sottisier) of French reactions remains to be made, but I lack the heart.”^[17] Jean Francois Revel, in a book conceived in 2000, but written after 9/11 has a chapter, “Why so much hate? And why so many errors?” in which he criticizes narcissistic journalists who, to feed their indulgence “in dreams of a factitious superiority,” therefore betray their publics by so dramatically misinforming them about so important a topic as the United States.^[18] In 2004, Paul Hollander published a collection of essays on anti-Americanism globally, with a heavy emphasis on the delirium that characterized its post-9/11 behavior.^[19] Andre Markovits’s Uncouth Nation tells the sad tale of the early aughts in gory detail.^[20]

European discourse was thick with Schadenfreude, fueled by widely believed conspiracy theories about how George Bush and the US government had planned and executed the attack to justify a war against Islam. This hostility to the US in the name of “peace and justice” became emblematic of both European elites and of the movement that called itself the “global progressive left.” For them, American hegemony, the dominance of an (ironically termed) “Eurocentric” worldview, became the great foe of freedom and justice. The postcolonial paradigm, articulated at great length by Hardt and Negri in their book Empire (2000), dominated academic discourse. In this reading of global history, Western imperialism in its global capitalist form is the worst, most intrusive force ever, and the US, the most stifling of hegemons.^[21]

In England, perhaps a bit behind France’s trailblazing anti-Americanism, 9-11 prompted a wave of antisemitism [!]. Petronella Wyatt, a highly placed London journalist noted in December of 2001 that, “Since September 11, antisemitism and its open expression has become respectable at London dinner tables,” with a Guardian-reading peer remarking: “Well, the Jews have been asking for it, and now, thank God, we can say what we think at last.”^[22] As if to prove Wyatt’s comment true, three weeks later, at one of those dinner tables, French diplomat, Daniel Bernard referred to Israel, as that “shitty little country” which was leading the world into World War III.^[23] Jonathan Sacks, then Britain’s chief rabbi, admitted that he had dismissed the concerns about a coming wave of antisemitism that I had shared with him in a meeting in 1999; but that after 9-11 he thought, “Landes was right.”^[24] In an article about the third wave of antisemitism in 2002 (next chapter), Michel Gurfinkiel observed two previous spikes: after the al Durah affair and again after 9-11.^[25]

Markovits, in researching his Uncouth Nation, discovered that European anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism were not, as he thought, “kissing cousins,” but rather “twins.”^[26] And one of their (many) common aspects concerns the virulent―in the twenty-first century the near-hysterical―reaction among Europeans when either of those two countries exercises military force. The crescendo of this open hostility to both Israel and the USA came in 2003, with the anti-war demonstrations that, literally, swept the world.

One plus two plus three: From the extreme Left to the extreme Right, everyone in French politics— simple activists, members of parliament, trade unionists, cabinet ministers, and the head of state in unison— is raving against the intervention in Iraq: “Bush equals Sharon equals murderers” is the chant from the street. “Sharon equals Bush equals disregard for international law” is the pronouncement from the salons. The rise of antisemitism is really not a result of the Intifada, but rather a twin brother of the wave of anti-Americanism that has sloshed up onto the coasts of Europe since September 11 and flooded the continent since the Iraq war.^[27]

I would differ with this astute description only on its chronology. Focusing on America, Markovits missed the prelude to the madness that he, and most of us, only first noticed with the delirious responses to 9/11. But already, since the outbreak of the intifada in the fall of 2000, the Europeans had been engaged in virulent anti-Zionist invective, from the streets to the highest levels of state―Israel had become a pariah state in the minds of many for almost a year before 9/11.^[28] And of course, the USA was Israel’s major (only) supporter.

The madness, having already started on September 30, 2000, struck the major structures of the cultural Maginot Line that defends democratic societies; civic values had already crumbled in France, leaving an ever-widening stain of territories lost to the Republic―neighborhoods, suburbs, schools.^[29] It became a consensus among global progressives at Durban in August-September 2001: there “human rights” NGOs excoriated the US and Israel for racism and slavery in chorus with nations and peoples who still practiced slavery and exuded racist hatreds. The global progressives had adopted the jihadi apocalyptic narrative: US and Israel were the two Satans. This response―blame the US and Israel, side with Muslims, even the jihadis―stood at the heart of the collapse that first started in 2000 and, over the next years and decades, continued to scale the heights of folly.

Alongside Baudrillard, for example, on the same pages of Le Monde, Jacques Derrida, the father of postmodern deconstruction, co-indicted the West as terrorist. “If we can prevent human suffering and don’t, is that not terrorism?”^[30] The simple answer to that rhetorical question is, “No, that would be an abuse of an important term.” What Derrida describes as terrorism is failure to live up to the highest (messianic) human aspirations of lovingkindness for all people, a remarkably high standard, unprecedented in the history of mankind. It’s not targeting civilians.

The American, Noam Chomsky, took Y2KMind one step further. America is not as bad as the 9-11 jihadis, but worse!

The [9-11] terrorist attacks were major atrocities. In scale, they may not reach the level of many others, for example, the bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and killing unknown numbers of people (no one knows, because the US blocked an inquiry at the U.N. and no one cares to pursue it).

Chomsky estimated over tens of thousands of deaths, based on a calculus of who may have died from lack of medication that the factory would have produced (since only one person actually died in the bombing).^[31] Chomsky insisted that this accusation of Americans wantonly killing tens of thousands of Muslims did not justify Bin Laden’s attack. Bin Laden, on the other hand, had no hesitation drawing that conclusion, as did Reverend Wright in his sermon where he cited the bombing of the plant in Sudan, along with his own embellishment that “we killed hundreds of hard working people mothers and fathers who left home to go that day, not knowing that they’d never come home.”^[32] This is not history, it is weaponized fake news.

Chomsky was not alone even among Americans. Indeed, he was widely echoed, either explicitly or implicitly especially in academia. Phyllis Chesler describes her exchange with a feminist professor at an American college: “[A]fter what we did in Guatemala and all our other dirty doings in South America, you can’t say we don’t deserve having this thrown back at us on 9-11. You do understand that America deserves being hated everywhere, don’t you?”^[33] Indeed, the “Why do they [justifiably] hate us?” meme was widespread, especially in postmodern, postcolonial, and liberal Christian circles.^[34] The axis of evil here replicated precisely what Iranian theocrats had insisted since 1400 AH: the great and little Satan, in secular lingo, American imperialism and Israeli colonialism. For these thinkers, the question: “Why do they hate us?” was rhetorical. “Why would they not hate us? [We do.]”

Two days after 9-11, some German intellectuals held a public forum at the Academy of Arts in Berlin to discuss the meaning of events. At one point, a woman in the audience intervened with an extensive critique of the USA for, among other things, “creat[ing] hunger all over the world.”

György Konrad, the President of the Academy of Arts, interrupts her: “And 10,000 people have to be killed because of that? Is that what you’re saying?” The woman responds that they don’t have to be: “I’m not at all for killing people. But children are starving all over the world and I know where the people are to be found who are responsible for that.” The audience apparently knows too and shows its approval with applause.^[35]

To paraphrase Derrida on 9-11: If we can’t live up to messianic expectations, we’re moral failures; if we reduce hunger at rates no society (much less the entire globe) has seen in human history,^[36] that’s not enough; on the contrary, it’s criminal. The West―especially the US―is the world’s misfortune.

QED.

#Y2KMind: when Jihadis attack a democracy, blame the democracy.

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^[1] Al-Wafd, the daily of Egypt’s largest opposition party, was revolted by Arafat’s obsequiousness: Al-Wafd (Egypt), September 14, 2001, cited in “Egypt’s Opposition Press: Rejoicing is a National and Religious Obligation,” MEMRI, Special Dispatch 274, September 25, 2001. On the fake blood donation―Arafat abhors needles―for victims (who had been incinerated and did not need blood?), see Joel Pollak, “Enderlin: Arafat faked 9/11 blood donation,” Guide to the Perplexed, 17 January 2008.

^[2] “Nous sommes tous américains,” Le Monde, September 13, 2001.

^[3] Jean Baudrillard, “L’esprit du terrorisme,” Le Monde, November 2, 2001.

^[4] For the German response, see Clemens Heni, Schadenfreude: Islamforschung und Antisemitismus in Deutschland nach 9/11 (Berlin: Edition Critic, 2011).

^[5] Saïd, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 47.

^[6] Cited by Rénaud Dely, “Les socialistes malmenés par leur base : l’anti-américanisme perdure chez les militants, » Libération, October 16, 2001, 10; similar sentiments from Alain Gresh of Le monde diplomatique, « Les enjeux d’un dialogue. Entretien avec Alain Gresh », Regards 73 (November 2001), 20. Both cited in Pierre André Taguieff, La nouvelle judéophobie, 100n157.

^[7] Sartre, Huis clos (No Exit) in which hell is being eternally stuck dealing with others of bad faith; on Sartre’s bad faith, see Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 153-86.

^[8] Manfred Halpern, “The Algerian Uprising of 1945,” Middle East Journal 2:2 (1946): 191-202.

^[9] French journalists in conversation, February 2003, Landes, “Chiraq-Iraq: Sailing Full Speed in Iceberg-Laden Waters, Paris, March 5-16, 2003, The Augean Stables.

^[10] Seumas Milne, “They can’t see why they are hated.” The Guardian, September 13, 2001. On Milne’s letter as reflective of widespread “liberal” opinion and the powerful echoes in the more “intellectual” London Review of Books, see Andrew Anthony, The Fallout: How a guilty liberal lost his innocence (London: Random House, 2007) 10-16. For a review of “the universal and sound rejection” of Huntington’s thesis, Ervand Abrahamian, “The US Media, Huntington, and 9-11,” Third World Quarterly, 24.3 (2003): 529–544. For Milne as a representative of the anti-imperialism of fools that Saïd so effectively established, see chapter 8, n116.

^[11] Susan Sontag, “New Yorker Writers Respond to 9-11,” New Yorker, September 24, 2001. Response by Charles Krauthammer, specifically addressing the “we’re still bombing Iraq” comment: “Voices of Moral Obtuseness,” Washington Post, September 21, 2001. More broadly, Andrew Anthony, The Fallout, esp. 3-19.

^[12] Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (NY, 2004), xii.

^[13] Michael Walzer, “Can There Be a Decent Left?” Dissent, Spring 2002. For an extensive discussion of the manichaean left and its response to 9-11, see Michael Bérubé, The Left at War (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

^[14] Salmon Rushdie, “Anti-Americanism takes the world by storm,” Guardian, February 5, 2002.

^[15] Roger, L’ennemi américain, 578.

^[16] On Poller’s reflections on the early years of the new century, see Troubled Dawn of a New Century (Paris, 2017).

^[17] Roger, L’ennemi américain, 578.

^[18] « . . . ils [les erreurs] gonflent sans doute ceux qui s’y adonnent d’une illusion de revanche et de la jouissance onirique d’une supériorité factice. » Jean-François Revel, L’obsession anti-américaine : Son fonctionnement, ses causes, ses conséquences (Paris : Plon, 2002), 99-140, citation p. 101.

^[19] Hollander, Understanding Anti-Americanism: Its Origins and Impact at Home and Abroad. See, for example, Adam Garfinkle’s “The Peace Movement and the Adversary Culture,” 301-21.

^[20] Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

^[21] Hardt and Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). Favorable review: Slavoj Zizek “Have Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Rewritten the Communist Manifesto For the Twenty-First Century?” Rethinking Marxism, 13:3/4 (2001); critical: Mitchell Cohen, “Un empire de la langue de bois: Hardt, Negri, et la théorie politique postmoderne,” Controverses, 1 (2006). See further discussion chapter 8.

^[22] Petronella Wyatt, “Poisonous Prejudice,” Spectator, December 8, 2001

^[23] Tom Gross, “A Shitty Little Country: Prejudice & Abuse in Paris & London,” National Review, January 10, 2002.

^[24] Jonathan Sacks, “Making the Case for my People,” Standpoint, September 2009.

^[25] Gurfinkiel, “France’s Jewish Problem,” Commentary, June 2002.

^[26] Markovits, Uncouth Nation, chapter 5.

^[27] Markovits, Uncouth Nation, 150.

^[28] Robin Shepherd, State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel (London: Orion, 2009).

^[29] See Atlas des Zones urbaines sensibles (ZUS), https://sig.ville.gouv.fr/Atlas/ZUS/. After the attacks on the Bataclan in November of 2015, the controversy heated up about ZUS as “no-go zones,” or “Sharia-zones.” Some had insisted on their pervasiveness (Soeren Kern, “European ‘No-Go’ Zones for Non-Muslims Proliferating: ‘Occupation Without Tanks or Soldiers,’” Gatestone Institute, August 22, 2011, while others denied their existence (Catherine Thompson, “How Did The Muslim ‘No-Go Zones’ Myth Get Started Anyway?” Talking Points Memo, January 21, 2015). Five year later, undercover cop Noam Anouar published a book about these neglected and denied no-go zones: La France doit savoir: Un flic chargé de la surveillance des Islamistes raconte (Paris: Plon, 2020). Predictions of a future explosion much worse than 2005: Milliere, “France’s No-Go Zones: The Riots Return,” Gatestone, May 10, 2020. Death threats to journalists and residents who expose the shari’a zones: Henry Samuel, “French Left-wing ‘abandon’ journalist who received death threats over radical Islam,” Telegraph, February 2, 2022.

^[30] On Derrida’s essay, see chapter 8, nn23-25.

^[31] Chomsky, “On the Afghanistan War, American Terrorism, and the Role of Intellectuals,” Salon, January 16, 2002. Christopher Hitchens, “A Rejoinder to Noam Chomsky,” in Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays (New York: Nation Books, 2004), 421-29. On Chomsky’s presence in Caliphator reading materials, see below n102.

^[32] Reverend Wright, “The real sermon given by Pastor Wright,” 04:37.

^[33] Phyllis Chesler, ​​The Death of Feminism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 21.

^[34] See also Joyce Davis, “A Minister’s Question: What Have We Done That They Hate Us So?” Martyrs: Innocence, Vengeance, and Despair in the Middle East (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003), chapter 1; Peter Ford, “Why do they hate us?,” Christian Science Monitor, September 27, 2001; approvingly cited by Abrahamian: they hate the US because of its support for Israel, “US Media, Huntington and 9-11.” For a survey of the more outlandish responses to 9-11, see John Leo, “Learning to love terrorists,” US News and World Report, Oct. 1, 2001.

^[35] Henryk Broder, “The Americans are to Blame,” from Kein Krieg, nirgends [No War, Nowhere] (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 2002), translation by John Rosenthal, http://www.theaugeanstables.com/2022/01/03/8156/. Note that Academy President Konrad does not challenge her ludicrous assertion about hunger.

^[36] “In 1820, 94% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. In 1990, 34.8%, and in 2015, just 9.6%.” Alexander Hammond, “The World’s Poorest People Are Getting Richer Faster,” Foundation for Economic Education, October 27, 2017.

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