9/11, 25 Years On: The Word the UN Never Dared to Define

On September 11, 2001, nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four airliners and killed 2,977 people. Seventeen days later, on September 28, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1373. Placed under Chapter VII of the Charter — and therefore legally binding — it required every state to criminalize terrorism, cut off its financing, deny terrorists any safe haven, prosecute them and share intelligence. A Counter-Terrorism Committee (CTC) was created to check each country's compliance.

On paper, it was the most ambitious arsenal ever voted. Twenty-five years on, a West Point study cited by JNS finds that terrorism has expanded in geographic reach, in the volume of attacks and in the speed of radicalization. Above all, while the world was hunting al-Qaeda, Iran was quietly building its "Axis of Resistance": Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Houthis, the Iraqi militias. On October 7, 2023, that axis unleashed the war we are still living through.

Why the failure? JNS's analysis identifies three cracks, and every one of them concerns Israel first and foremost.

The first is outright refusal. Iran, North Korea and Myanmar all sit on the blacklist of the FATF, the world's watchdog on financial crime. Tehran did not work around the resolution: it did the exact opposite, becoming the leading state sponsor of terrorism on the planet.

The second is compliance for show. The FATF found that Qatar was not applying the basic rules against terror financing — the same Qatar which, far from denying safe haven, housed Hamas leaders in luxury hotels for more than a decade. A Turkish bank was caught facilitating tens of millions of dollars in transactions for Iran. And the Palestinian Authority secured a "minimally respectable" FATF rating even as its Martyrs Fund financially rewards the perpetrators of attacks: all it had to do was file those payments under "civil service salaries" to place them beyond the reach of its own anti-terror laws.

The third crack is the gravest, because it is structural: Resolution 1373 never defined terrorism. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the Arab League and the Organization of African Unity hold that killing in the name of an "armed struggle" for "self-determination" is not terrorism. Their compliance regimes therefore come with a back door — and that is the door Hamas walked through.

This is what Jewish readers should take from the anniversary. The word "resistance" chanted in European streets is not a spontaneous slogan: it is the militant translation of a legal exception negotiated a quarter-century ago. Iran's axis christened itself "of resistance" precisely because that word opens the breach the law left gaping. The October 7 massacre is not an accident of the global counter-terrorism architecture: it is its product.

Yet the remedy already exists. Resolution 1566, adopted in 2004, affirms that terrorism is "under no circumstances justifiable by considerations of a political" nature. Western states abide by it, in principle. The question for Israel, then, is not to obtain one more condemnation: it is to demand that every capital, European ones included, apply 1566 to Hamas with no exception clause.

And if that demand were taken seriously, it would offer a concrete test to everyone calling for a "reformed" Palestinian Authority: as long as its salaries to terrorists are booked as "civil service," the PA will remain, in the strict sense of 1373, a state that finances terrorism. JNS compares counter-terrorism to the watertightness of a hull: one badly caulked seam, and the whole cabin floods. Israel is that seam. It takes on water first — and that is also why its war is everyone's war.