Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, the political order built in their aftermath continues to shape Europe. The Global War on Terror (GWOT) helped far right parties in Europe gain political prominence they had long been denied. Islamophobic narratives that shaped global policy after 2001 legitimised an anti-Muslim racism that had already been building within Europe’s far right for years.
Before September 11, far right parties in Europe had been largely marginalised within the continent’s multi-party systems. Even where some won significant electoral support, many remained politically stigmatised or excluded from power, and were better known for anti-Semitism and open nostalgia for their fascist origins than as credible contenders for government.
But the ground was already shifting before the towers fell. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the far right’s long-standing racism began to sharpen its focus on Islam specifically. Parties such as the French Front National (now the Rassemblement National) and the Austrian Freedom Party discovered Islam as their new “enemy within”: Arabs and Black communities in France became, in far-right rhetoric, simply “Muslims.” So did Turks in Austria. The People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) was arguing as early as 1991 that Islam posed a threat to liberal democracy and stood in the way of immigrant “integration.” By the late 1990s, Pim Fortuyn had written a book titled Against the Islamisation of Our Culture, introducing a cruder, more overt strain of Islamophobia to Dutch politics.
Then came September 11, which handed the far right an opening it hadn’t had to build for itself.
When 19 al-Qaeda hijackers crashed four planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, killing 2,977 people, President George W. Bush declared a ‘Global War on Terror’. The far right no longer needed to manufacture anti-Muslim sentiment on its own; political speeches, media coverage and wars waged across Muslim-majority countries did much of that work for them.
Bush insisted the fight targeted “terrorists” who had perverted the message of Islam, not Islam itself. But the rhetoric and policy that followed routinely treated all Muslims as suspects, casting the religion itself as inherently violent — a framing that helped mainstream and globalise Islamophobia over the course of the ‘War on Terror’.
Bush’s declaration that “either you are with us or you are with the terrorists” left European governments with little room to manoeuvre. More than 13 European countries joined the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, with British forces most directly engaged in combat. Twelve joined the invasion and occupation of Iraq; the UK and Poland took on major combat roles, while France and Germany, this time, opposed the war.
Blatantly Islamophobic media coverage across the continent accompanied these campaigns, reinforcing an image of the violent, threatening Muslim. Attacks by al-Qaeda affiliates in Madrid and London deepened the sense that the enemy was already “within,” casting suspicion on any Muslim as a potential threat. Meanwhile, European governments — with the far right still largely excluded from power — enacted their own Islamophobic policies: countering violent extremism and deradicalisation programmes, including the UK’s Prevent strategy. They also cooperated in hosting secret CIA ‘black sites’ and facilitating rendition flights to Guantanamo Bay and other torture sites. These programmes rested on the premise that Muslim religious belief was itself a kind of dormant threat, always capable of being “activated” into violence against the West. Guantanamo Bay became the era’s most infamous symbol of this logic — a lawless site where innocent Muslims were shipped and held on unfounded suspicion, without legal grounds.
Self-styled experts on “extremism” and “terrorism” — Pamela Geller, Frank Gaffney, Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer — built careers legitimising this framework for American audiences and soon forged connections with Europe’s strengthening far-right movements. Together they formed the self-described “Counter-Jihad Movement”, a transatlantic network of anti-Muslim organisations, political parties, writers, bloggers and activists united by the claim that “Western civilisation” is under attack by Islam. Beginning in 2007, the movement used the OSCE’s annual Human Dimension Implementation Meeting to spread its ideology within European and North American policy circles. Far-right leaders from Austria, Belgium, England, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and Norway convened at annual counter-jihad conferences held in cities across the continent.
Years before Pamela Geller mobilised against the falsely named “Ground Zero Mosque” in New York in 2010, her European counterparts were already organising transnationally against mosque construction. In 2008, the Cities Against Islamisation initiative brought together far-right leaders from the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Austria, France and Italy, marching alongside anti-Muslim activists from the United States.
Slowly, anti-Muslim mobilisation proved electorally successful. As opposition parties, far-right movements gained ground — first by pressuring mainstream rivals into adopting their rhetoric, then by becoming coalition partners in national governments from Austria to Bulgaria, Hungary, the Netherlands, Italy, Norway, Poland, and Finland. In Denmark and Sweden, they became kingmakers instead, shaping policy from outside the cabinet.
Anti-Muslim policy has only expanded since. Far-right parties, and mainstream governments pressured by them, have passed a growing list of restrictions on Muslims’ religious freedom: bans on the full-face veil in several countries, bans on the hijab for teachers, students, or public employees in others, and severe restrictions — in some places outright bans — on mosque construction. Muslims, who make up a disproportionate share of Europe’s working poor, have been pushed further to the margins as a result.
Even as more Muslims pursue education and professional advancement, a securitised discourse — built on the logic of the GWOT and fused with far-right “great replacement” conspiracy theories — has adapted to meet them. The old accusation that Muslims refuse to integrate has given way to a newer one: that Muslims who succeed pose an even greater risk, secretly working to subvert Western societies. It is the same role historically assigned to Jews — the “enemy within” who can never be trusted.
Several governments have institutionalised this suspicion by targeting Muslim-led civil society organisations. Strict surveillance of mosques and NGOs, paired with curtailed civil liberties, has become standard practice across many European states — framed variously as combating “political Islam” (Austria), “Islamist separatism” (France), or “legalistic Islamism” (Germany). In each case, the tolerated Muslim is the invisible one: the individual who does not claim a seat at the table or protest injustice.
The language and infrastructure built by the ‘Global War on Terror’ allowed all of this to take root and expand largely unchallenged. With much of Europe still unwilling to reckon with its own histories of colonialism, racism and fascism, Islamophobia has become a broadly accepted political position — one the far right did not simply exploit, but actively cultivated into its own success.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
