Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, the political landscape forged in their wake continues to define Europe. The Global War on Terror (GWOT) propelled far-right parties to political prominence they had long been denied. Islamophobic narratives that shaped global policy after 2001 provided a veneer of legitimacy to anti-Muslim racism, which had been entrenched within Europe’s far right for years.
Prior to September 11, European far-right parties existed largely on the margins of the continent’s multi-party systems. Even when achieving significant electoral support, they remained politically stigmatized or excluded from governance, recognized more for anti-Semitism and nostalgia for fascist origins than as credible contenders for government.
However, the political ground was already shifting before the towers fell. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the far right’s longstanding racism began to pivot toward Islam. Parties such as the French Front National (now the Rassemblement National) and the Austrian Freedom Party identified Islam as their new “enemy within,” reframing Arab and Black communities in France, and Turkish communities in Austria, simply as “Muslims.” The People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) was arguing as early as 1991 that Islam threatened liberal democracy and hindered immigrant “integration.” By the late 1990s, Pim Fortuyn had published *Against the Islamisation of Our Culture*, introducing a more overt strain of Islamophobia to Dutch politics.
Then came September 11, providing the far right with an opening it did not have to construct 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 independently; political speeches, media coverage, and military campaigns across Muslim-majority countries performed this work for them.
While Bush insisted the fight targeted “terrorists” who had perverted Islam, the subsequent rhetoric and policy routinely cast all Muslims as suspects, treating the religion itself as inherently violent. This framing helped mainstream and globalize Islamophobia throughout the duration 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 maneuver. More than 13 European countries joined the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, with British forces most directly engaged in combat. Twelve nations joined the invasion and occupation of Iraq; the UK and Poland took on major combat roles, while France and Germany 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 perception that the enemy was already “within,” casting suspicion on any Muslim as a potential threat. Concurrently, European governments—still largely excluding the far right from power—enacted their own Islamophobic policies. These included countering violent extremism and deradicalization programs, such as the UK’s Prevent strategy, and cooperating to host secret CIA “black sites” and facilitating rendition flights to Guantanamo Bay. These programs operated on the premise that Muslim religious belief was a dormant threat capable of being “activated” into violence. Guantanamo Bay became the era’s most infamous symbol of this logic—a lawless site where innocent Muslims were held on unfounded suspicion without legal recourse.
Self-styled experts on “extremism” and “terrorism”—Pamela Geller, Frank Gaffney, Daniel Pipes, and Robert Spencer—built careers legitimizing this framework for American audiences and soon forged connections with Europe’s strengthening far-right movements. Together, they formed the “Counter-Jihad Movement,” a transatlantic network of anti-Muslim organizations, political parties, writers, bloggers, and activists united by the claim that “Western civilisation” is under attack by Islam. Beginning in 2007, the movement leveraged the OSCE’s annual Human Dimension Implementation Meeting to disseminate 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 across the continent.
Years before Pamela Geller mobilized against the misnamed “Ground Zero Mosque” in New York in 2010, her European counterparts were already organizing 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.
Gradually, anti-Muslim mobilization proved electorally successful. Operating as opposition parties, far-right movements gained ground—first by pressuring mainstream rivals to adopt their rhetoric, then by becoming coalition partners in national governments across Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary, the Netherlands, Italy, Norway, Poland, and Finland. In Denmark and Sweden, they became kingmakers, shaping policy from outside the cabinet.
Anti-Muslim policy has only expanded since. Far-right parties, alongside mainstream governments pressured by them, have passed an increasing number of restrictions on Muslims’ religious freedom. These include bans on the full-face veil in several countries, prohibitions on the hijab for teachers, students, or public employees in others, and severe restrictions or outright bans on mosque construction. Muslims, who disproportionately constitute Europe’s working poor, have been pushed further to the margins as a result.
Even as more Muslims pursue education and professional advancement, a securitized 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 yielded to a newer one: that successful Muslims pose an even greater risk, secretly working to subvert Western societies. This mirrors the historical role assigned to Jews—the “enemy within” who can never be trusted.
Several governments have institutionalized this suspicion by targeting Muslim-led civil society organizations. 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.
