Was bin laden and 9/11 successful in making you more aware of islam?

My significant other happened to be watching CNN that day and yelled to me that an airplane had hit the World Trade Center. We assumed that it was some kind of accident. I came into the room not long after she called me and saw the second jet hit. I immediately thought that it was a deliberate attack and that's what I said out loud, along with, "I can't believe this!" When the first tower collapsed it came as a complete surprise. Then it became a tense wait to see what would happen to the second tower. What a nightmare and a day that literally changed the country and its direction.

 

To answer the question at face value- yes, because I was six years old .

As to Bin Laden's motives; 9/11 didnt really create the situation he envisioned. Note:
- US troops are still in Saudi Arabia; and this doesn't even to seem to be a point of contention or discussion the way it was 20 years ago.
- US support for Israel remains strong.
- US support for autocrats in Egypt and The Gulf remain strong and the autocrats remain strong. Even after the revolts in the 2010s. Yes, Mubarak as gone but Sisi is no different. Meet the old boss, same as the old boss.
- American economic dominance continues.
- (to paraphrase another direct OBL statement) the US still continues to cause environmental harm.
- Most importantly, Bin Ladens apocalyptic vision of an all out clash between Muslims and the West and the established governments in MENA never happened. The US response did not trigger an intense backlash of violence from all 1 bil+ Muslims across the planet like he intended.

Al-Qaeda, IMO, would have been much more successful if they stuck to their 90s MO. A loose cooperative cartel of jihad "franchises" that shared branding, funding, recruiting, and training strategies. AQ was supposed to be LinkedIn for waging jihad around the world. Instead 9/11 (to paraphrase Khalid Sheikh Mohammed when he watched it on TV) was biting off more than they could chew.

 

You know, I say now that this thing was news to me (this methodology)...
...but looking back, I'm amazed at how UN-surprised I was.

Shocked, most definitely, but...

...I was working in an ad agency then. Some of my colleagues and I were in early that morning...we'd all huddled around a small TV set after we heard some news reports on the radio about the (first) plane hitting the tower. We couldn't believe what we were seeing when the second plane hit.

I'll never forget...in the silence of that moment, watching it unfold, one of my friends asked, haltingly: "Could this be some kind of PR stunt? Is somebody shooting a movie, maybe...?"

I answered almost immediately that..."...no, these were terrorists. Middle-eastern, most likely".

And I remember saying that almost dispassionately...like maybe the way you would say something that you expected or knew could happen HAD happened, just like you might have guessed or imagined.

I knew a little bit more about this than I probably needed to know, in hindsight.

Just a little more than a year or so earlier, I had done some contract work for an airline services company in Houston. This company specialized in commercial air security, flight planning, weather reports...kind of a comprehensive travel information resource for commercial and private clients. The lead security agent in this firm had spent 20 years or more as an Israeli intelligence agent (read: Hamas), and I'd worked on a project with his department that created both video and multimedia presentations of outstanding international security issues. They made a point in the presentations to highlight the fact that one of the modern tactics of international terrorists was to use mass transit as vehicles for spreading as much fear and discord among a populace as possible. Not at all a new tactic in most of the world...mainland America wasn't dealing with this, unlike most of the rest of the world...but its application was becoming more widespread among western nations.

Three guesses who the star of those presentations was...

...I'd been in the Army for four years. In at the time of the first gulf war. I was hardly naïve about what people were capable of, after what I'd seen not just in Kuwait, but also in South Korea and Europe...

...but it was still tough to see that happen. And in some ways, even tougher for me to have been made aware of it so often that I almost accepted it out of hand...