I was a child when a bunch of Saudi terrorists hijacked some airplanes and crashed them into buildings, killing thousands of people. I watched it live as it happened while I was in class. I was a child when I watched the US use that terrorism as an excuse to start a "global war" with a coalition of many other countries invading the middle east, starting with blaming al Qaeda in Afghanistan for the attack.

The US is still occupying Afghanistan nearly 2 decades later, and there is no end to the occupation in sight. Furthermore, in the years since the initial invasion of Afghanistan, the Obama and Trump administrations have both been allied with al Qaeda groups in Syria and Yemen respectively. In the case of Obama in Syria, that was an al Qaeda off-shoot calling themselves "al Nusra", they were one of the many "moderate rebel" organizations that the US supported in their attempt to remove President Bashar al-Assad from power. In the case of Trump in Yemen, the Associated Press themselves reported that US soldiers and al Qaeda were fighting on the same side to help Saudi Arabia with their siege of Yemen. The US going on to be allied with these salafi jihadists in various ways these past few years happened when I was an adult, but I think the modern context on that is important to understanding the wider scope of the injustice that I had witnessed as a child. Looking back with this hindsight makes the bullshit that was fed to us even more obvious.