The 9/11 Lesson America Can’t Afford To Forget

Twenty-five years after 9/11, a quarter-century after Muslim terrorists murdered nearly 3,000 Americans, here is where we currently stand: The mayor of New York is an Islamic terrorist sympathizer. So is the Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan. So are congresspeople from New York to Michigan to Minnesota.

The West has imported millions of immigrants from Muslim countries, a huge swath of whom do not support Western values. The West has continued to excuse and appease Islamic radicalism across the globe, with some rare exceptions. Many Americans, nearly the entire Left along with the horseshoe Right, now agree with the anti-American worldview promoted by Osama bin Laden that the United States and the West are chiefly responsible for suffering around the world, and that Islamic terrorism is simply blowback for Western sin.

Let’s start with a history lesson, a lesson in memory. There are a lot of people listening to my show and walking around the United States who weren’t alive for 9/11.

You have to be about 30 or older to remember 9/11. For a lot of folks, this is the first time they’re even experiencing what history was.

That’s just a reality. As time moves on, things become more distant.

But for an entire generation of people, for several generations of people, this was the worst moment in American history. What ought we remember on the 25th anniversary of 9/11?

Of course, we should remember the pain Americans suffered and still suffer.

When we remember, it is not enough to be vague about that day, but that seems to be the purposeful tendency: to be vague.

Who did it and what did they think? If you listen to our politicians, they have no idea. It is a mystery wrapped in an enigma. It’s just a bad thing that happened, and we have no idea why or how it happened, or what the people who did it thought, or what people who still agree with them today think.

Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York — a man who once rapped in solidarity with the Holy Land Five, the people who went to jail for material support of terrorism via the Holy Land Foundation — has nothing but sympathy for a wide variety of Islamic radicals.

He issued this statement:

We remember 9/11 as the darkest day in our city’s history, but we also remember what so many New Yorkers did in that darkness. We remember the thousands upon thousands of New Yorkers who lined up for hours to donate blood. We remember the people who opened their homes to those who could not get home. We remember the workers who carried their colleagues down hundreds of stairs, then turned around and went back up to find someone else who needed help. 

25 years later, we have a sacred obligation to those who were stolen from us to care for one another as they cared for strangers, to live lives worthy of the sacrifices they made, and to build a city worthy of their courage. A city where we run toward one another. That is how we remember.

Everything that Mamdani is saying here would be equally applicable if the towers had simply collapsed on their own.

If you were just watching this, if you didn’t know anything about it, if you were a young person who didn’t live through 9/11, if you were an alien who landed on planet Earth today, you would have no idea who did what and to whom.

There is a purposeful attempt to obscure what happened on 9/11, who did it, and why they did it.

The top of The New York Times web page had the following three headlines. Headline number one: “25 years after 9/11, a nation gathers to remember and to mourn the lives lost.”

Headline number two: “Trump personifies a nation moving on.”

Headline number three: “Islamophobia shaped a generation of Muslim New Yorkers.” There was also this headline from The New York Times: “Facing Islamophobia. Mamdani keeps focus on 9/11 victims.”

Never mind that many of the 9/11 victims don’t want him around. They certainly don’t want him attending their events.

This is worse than useless. It is counterproductive. It is a total betrayal of the American people and the victims of 9/11 and their families and all the people who fought to defend America in the aftermath. We have to remember and relive the evil that happened on 9/11, because if we don’t, what we forget is the nature of our enemies, who are still out there and still doing things and still think the same things.

On 9/11, 2,977 Americans were murdered while two American airplanes were hijacked and flown directly into the World Trade Center. Flight 11 was the first flight that hit; it hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. There were 87 passengers on board, including the crew. Everyone was killed instantly. Every stairwell route above floor 91 was severed. No one could escape if you were above that floor.

There are many, many, many tapes of people who were located in the towers who were calling their families to tell them they loved them because they knew they would never come home to them. 

Firefighters immediately started rushing the buildings, trying to get people out. Hundreds of firefighters were killed on 9/11.

The second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, hit the South Tower at 9:03 a.m. The 60 passengers who were on board, including the crew, were instantly killed.

People on the street tried to dodge the debris as it began raining down from the towers.

The footage is astonishing. Much of this footage wasn’t made publicly available for years because there was essentially a conspiracy of silence to keep these images from becoming ingrained in an entire generation of Americans beyond the basics. Why?

Because Americans might respond terribly.

People began leaning out of the towers, trying to breathe, trying to survive, if they were above the stories that had been hit. They had nowhere to go. At least 37 people, probably well over 50, ended up jumping to their deaths from the North Towers because people were trapped in the heat.

It is important to recognize what America’s enemies are willing to do. This is what they celebrated. People were dancing in the streets in certain places on planet Earth.

There was a third plane, American Airlines Flight 77, that hit the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m. The 59 passengers and crew were killed instantly. One hundred and twenty-five military and civilian personnel died inside the building as well. It was like a missile hitting the Pentagon.

There was the horrifying sight of the South Tower collapsing at 9:59 a.m., with somewhere between 600 and 1,000 people dying inside the South Tower, including 343 New York City Fire Department firefighters and 71 law enforcement officers.

Meanwhile, one of the great stories of heroism in American history was taking place aboard United Airlines Flight 93. That flight to the fourth plane had been hijacked. It was likely headed for the Capitol building, and the passengers breached the cockpit and counterattacked the hijackers, forcing the plane to crash. All 40 of the passengers and crew died.

In an iconic moment in American history, passenger Todd Beamer told the others, “Are you guys ready? Let’s roll.” That became a battle cry for Americans.

The North Tower collapsed at 10:28 a.m. One thousand six hundred people died inside the North Tower. Everyone above the impact zone died.

Most of midtown Manhattan was a war zone. Lower Manhattan was a war zone.

The 9/11 Commission released its full report in July 2004. Of course, conspiracy theorists will claim the report was rigged from the start and other nonsense. But the reality is that the commission produced an incredibly thorough report. 

The report summarized institutional breakdowns before 9/11 and the failures of intelligence to communicate with one another. The commission reviewed some 2.5 million pages of documents and interviewed 1,200 individuals.

The chief failure was the failure of imagination. People just did not think that Islamic terrorists could carry off anything of this size and scale. Terrorism was not regarded as a paramount national security concern before 9/11. Counterterrorism was treated as a law enforcement issue rather than as a foreign policy and intelligence issue. Our intelligence agencies failed. The FBI was more reactive than proactive. The CIA had been weakened.

A Chinese firewall separated the CIA and the FBI, so they could not share information. The FAA had a no-fly watch list with a total of 12 people; none of the hijackers were on it.

Al-Qaeda, which carried out the attacks, obviously had a strategy in the lead-up to 9/11. Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaeda in 1998, declared it a religious duty for Muslims to kill Americans anywhere in the world, both military and civilian, and Al-Qaeda built a network of state sanctuaries during the 1990s in Sudan and in Afghanistan under the Taliban.

We know why Osama bin Laden did this. It is not a mystery. The answer is that Osama bin Laden was a terrorist devotee of Islam. This does not mean that all Muslims are terrorists or that all Muslims agreed with Osama bin Laden.

Osama bin Laden wrote a letter to America in 2002, and you can break it down into two parts: the excuse-making and the real reason. The excuse-making is about how Muslims everywhere are victims of America.

That’s nonsense. It’s not true. It is factually untrue. It is a victim mentality, unsupported by the evidence.

The real reason Osama bin Laden did this is that he was a Muslim fundamentalist who believed that everyone in the world ought to convert to Islam.

He knew the West lacked the courage to stand up and say we have a civilization worth preserving and defending. He believed we would tire and become stupid. That was his premise.

Our enemies thought we were weak. They thought that we would blind ourselves to reality.

As it turns out over the subsequent 25 years, they were not wrong. Just days after 9/11, the president of the United States appeared at the Islamic Center of Washington to explain that Islam was a religion of peace.

By saying this and many things like it, President Bush essentially defanged the entire Western movement against our actual enemies. That doesn’t mean every Muslim is an enemy of the United States, but if you want to make the argument that our enemies hate American freedom, you need to explain why they hated American freedom and what motivated them.

President Bush believed the false idea that all human beings around the world believe the same kinds of things, and that we are all, at root, exactly the same in our orientation toward the world.

This is untrue. Not every human being on Earth is oriented toward freedom the way Westerners believe in it.

As Ayaan Hirsi Ali noted in Tablet: 

Islam is not an “Abrahamic faith” that functions anything like Protestant Christianity or rabbinic Judaism. There is no equivalent in Islamic doctrine for such foundational Western concepts as the separation of church and state, secular law, or the idea of individual freedoms and rights, including the freedom to worship freely. Rather, Islam is animated by the beliefs that the Muslim world suffered a historical dispossession with the abolition of the caliphate and that this loss must eventually be reversed, including the retaking of all lands that have ever been ruled by Muslims. In the temporal sphere, Islam as much resembles totalizing and irredentist political ideologies as it does a religion.

In the frame in which both ordinary Muslims and their self-appointed political spokesmen see the world, America and the wider West are not just geopolitical rivals. They are civilizational obstacles: powers that uphold a secular, liberal, and postcaliphal order that Islamists seek to overcome. 

Americans have been lied to. We’ve been taught the opposite of this for a generation.

When you refuse to acknowledge the reality of Islam’s role in geopolitics, people are left to speculate about the motives behind acts like 9/11, and then they glom on to precisely the worldview that Osama bin Laden was counting on: The idea that if only the U.S. and the West weren’t so mean and cruel and interventionist, there’d be no problems and 9/11 never would have happened.

The belief system held by a huge percentage of Muslims across planet Earth — and a heavy percentage in the West as well — is not conciliatory with basic ideas of the West such as separation of church and state and freedom of religion.

That does not mean that there aren’t Muslims who don’t support terrorism; it does not mean that there aren’t some moderate or reform Muslims out there. There are some, and I truly hope they win.

But if we refuse to acknowledge who did 9/11, why they did it, and what the overall problem is, we will import it.

And it will be our fault.

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