Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, begins at sundown tonight. This year, it falls at the same time as the 25th anniversary of the September 11th attacks and weeks before the third anniversary of the October 7th attacks, offering an opportunity for reflection that extends beyond the past year. I’ve written about when I first learned about the Hamas terror attacks on October 7th, but not about 9/11.
On September 11, 2001, I was working at my desk at home when messages about a plane hitting the World Trade Center popped up on an Internet law email list. I had moved to Ottawa from the New York City area a few years earlier and immediately rushed to turn on the television for what would become hours of panic and fear. My particular focus was a friend who worked at the Twin Towers. Marc Zeplin, whom I had known for years before I moved to New York, worked at Cantor Fitzgerald on the 104th floor of the north tower, a few floors above where the first plane hit. He was 33, with a wife and two young sons. Several weeks later, I would fly back to New York for a memorial service.
What I remember about the weeks that followed is not the confusion and dread of the first hours but the speed with which three principles were emphasized: that this was an act of terrorism and hatred that was called out clearly rather than contextualized away, that we needed to be careful to ensure that a community or religion did not bear collective responsibility for the actions of terrorists or foreign governments, and that confronting terrorism and its associated harms required legal reforms that did not sacrifice fundamental rights in the process. Yet reflecting back on 9/11 and the response that followed, I am struck by how these principles have seemingly gone missing since October 7th.
Nobody spent much time in 2001 debating whether 9/11 was terrorism, an issue that recently resurfaced when a leaked memo revealed that the CBC instructed its journalists not to describe the attacks as terror attacks. The CBC changed its policy guidance, but the reticence that now attaches to even 9/11 has shaped coverage of the October 7th attacks and the accompanying rise of antisemitism. Within a week of the 9/11 attack, Hezbollah’s Al-Manar broadcast a false claim that 4,000 Jews or Israelis had been warned to stay home from the World Trade Center. That report circulated for years but largely stayed on the fringes, with no supportive statements from student unions and faculty associations or endorsements from mainstream institutions. October 7th was far different. CUPE Ontario president Fred Hahn posted the day after the attacks that he was thankful that “resistance is fruitful.” The York Federation of Students and two other York student unions described the attack five days later as “a strong act of resistance” against “so-called Israel.” Specific atrocities were disputed, false-flag disinformation circulated, hostage posters ripped down, and reports of sexual violence met with weeks of silence from organizations that purport to speak for victims. Those trends continue to this day. As I wrote in October 2024, antisemitism no longer shocks, and as the replies to my writing on the subject have shown, the denial now extends beyond the events of October 7th to the sharp increase in antisemitism that followed.
The 9/11 attacks also sparked fear in September 2001 that the Muslim community would be blamed for the attacks. Indeed, FBI data recorded 481 anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2001, up from 28 the year before. Yet political leaders responded immediately as President George W. Bush visited the Islamic Center of Washington days after the attacks in a show of solidarity. In Canada, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien visited an Ottawa mosque later that month to say he was ashamed of the attacks directed at Canadian Muslims. Leaders did not hesitate to speak out, yet since the October 7th attacks, leadership has given way to a silence that is impossible to ignore. Synagogues, Jewish schools, community centres, and businesses have been targeted as proxies for a foreign state. This post will likely draw the familiar hateful replies insisting that it is not antisemitism to hold Jewish institutions and individuals answerable for the decisions of a government in another country. They are wrong. As I wrote last year about being Jewish in Canada, the effect of that targeting has been to push people toward hiding their identity and building larger walls. This weekend it will mean High Holiday services with security measures that few other communities face.
The third principle on balancing security and civil liberties was the hardest to navigate. The USA Patriot Act passed within weeks, Canada’s Anti-terrorism Act received royal assent in December 2001, and the lawful access debate, which used anti-terrorism measures as justification, is still ongoing, now as Bill C-22. I have spent years focused on civil liberties in these debates, but the argument was fundamentally about how to address real harms without sacrificing essential freedoms. Rather than engaging in that debate, too many today deny the harms that come from the weak responses to antisemitism, lax enforcement of campus policies, or amplification of harmful content.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, the consequences of the attacks remain part of our daily lives, visible in border controls and surveillance law. But responsible institutions never seriously disputed the basic facts of the attack. Rosh Hashanah is a time for accounting, and the accounting this year is that the principles that were essential in responding to the 9/11 attacks have not been extended to the Jewish community in the years since October 7th as evidenced by the prominent police presence I will pass through in order to attend synagogue services this weekend. Shana Tova.
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