Anyone who was an adult 25 years ago can remember where they were when they heard news that Muslim terrorists had flown two passenger planes into the World Trade Center.
It was one of those cataclysmic events that marks one’s mind indelibly and creates a permanent refraction, from before to after, like B.C. and A.D., or before COVID and after COVID. There was the world before 9/11 and the world after it.
I was driving to work in Toronto that morning, listening to a news show hosted by a Vietnam War draft dodger who had fled America when his country needed him and had, in the decades since, achieved a degree of media stardom in Canada. If I recall correctly, he speculated, reasonably enough in those earliest seconds of the all-consuming news cycle, that a small plane carrying tourists to see the skyscrapers close up had met with disaster. If only that had been the case.
Shortly after I reached the office, the second plane hit. Reporters and editors who had been watching on TV as the first tower belched smoke into the blue sky, gasped in shock and horror when the second plane flashed across the screen and exploded in a ball of flame before a live worldwide audience.
Global revulsion at the attack was instantaneous, and there was an emotional understanding among people everywhere, particularly in the West, that this was an act of war against our civilization. Yes, there was Article 5 of the NATO agreement, which states that an attack on one member will be treated as an attack on all members. But there was more than that. There was a feeling of genuine solidarity and civilized horror. Foreign leaders and pundits declared, “We are all Americans.”
Some dissenting voices took the side of our enemies, and there were one or two utterly cynical responses, such as that of a British civil servant who advised colleagues to release any bad news while the world was distracted by the enormity perpetrated by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.
Mostly, however, and overwhelmingly, there was a sense of reeling disbelief combined with genuine sympathy for America, and a nearly universal understanding that a great evil was abroad in the world. Like so many others, I lost a friend murdered that day; she was on the plane that the hijackers smashed into the Pentagon.
Men and women stopped what they were doing, collected their children early from school, and rearranged their lives long term. There was a rallying to the flag. Men and women quit their jobs to do whatever they could to help. Young men abandoned their careers to join the armed forces, stand with their country, and go to war with the newly declared and terrible enemy.
President George W. Bush stirred and emboldened the nation when he stood on the apocalyptic rubble of southern Manhattan and told workers doing the grim work of retrieving bodies, “I can hear you. …The rest of the world hears you … and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”
It was a rallying cry for just retribution and seemed also to contain a new clear-sightedness. In the aftermath of the attack, watching the national and international reaction, I wrote that the passion released on 9/11 might bring epochal change and initiate a new age of revived American patriotism, a restoration of understanding in the West that some cultures are better than others, and ours is worth fighting for. I expressed hope and some confidence that, galvanized by the atrocity just visited upon it, our society would get up off its knees, end its cultural cringe, and finally see that tolerance of cultural difference should not be allowed to slump into self-abasement and retreat.
Alas, I was 180 degrees wrong. The resurgence of patriotism did not last. Bush himself stressed that the murder of 3,000 people should not taint America’s view of Muslims. As we went to war in Afghanistan, the Left found its voice and, furrowing its brow, suggested that the most important thing was to avoid “Islamophobia.”
Its adherents recovered their composure after the patriotic setback and started wearing badges declaring, “War is not the answer.” (That depends on the question. If it is “how can we make sure America defeats its foes?” then war may be very much the answer). As our armed forces went into action on foreign battlefields, skeptics and naysayers lectured us on the home front that we must not act or think ill of Islam.
“Islamophobia” was then, and today remains, a lie. It is a term intended to denigrate as bigots those who rationally dislike Muslim culture, values, and deadly aggression. It attempts to reframe a reasonable antipathy as gut prejudice that should be shunned by civilized people. Thus began a process, still with us today, by which America’s enemies, foreign and domestic, seek to shut down discussion of the obvious problems that Islam poses to the way of life and security of the West.
Some months after 9/11, my newspaper was approached by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which was unhappy with what we’d write about Islam’s incompatibility with the preservation of the West as we know it. The organization did not like our advocacy of military action against jihadis. It objected to our labeling the killers and devotees of their creed as “Islamofascists.”
This was unsurprising, for the CAIR is a front group for imperial, terrorist Islam. Just this month, prosecutor Lara Burns testified to Congress about evidence from a 1993 wiretap in which members of the Palestine Committee, a body which, naturally, was established by the United Nations, discussed their Islamist conspiracy against the West.
Burns said it “included supporting Hamas abroad and infiltrating universities, media, and politics here in the U.S. … to begin normalizing Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood extremist ideology in American society. They stated, ‘War is deception’ when plotting to lie to Americans. They also noted their intent to cleanse the curriculum in K-12 schools because ‘we don’t want our children growing up surrendering to the idea of peace with Jews.’ … They agreed to continue to pursue their agenda by cloaking themselves under the cover of legitimacy. … It was out of this conspiratorial meeting that CAIR was created to protect the other elements of the Hamas support network.”
Islam’s anti-American plot has been spectacularly successful. We can see its results all around us. Grade schools are teaching Islamic propaganda: A California school district uses bin Laden’s 2001 manifesto as evidence that America is “targeting Muslim communities.”
Our top universities have been transformed into hotbeds of extremism supporting Islam’s foreign policy of jihad. A Muslim woman in hijab was invited to recite verses from the Quran during a multifaith ceremony opening Harvard University’s baccalaureate program in May. The Muslim call to prayer reverberates through the air of New York; Dearborn, Michigan; and other cities before dawn. Infidel residents are told to suck it up because it’s no different from church bells.
Hardly a day goes by without institutional capitulation to Muslim cultural imperialism. One can pick examples almost at random because they are so common. Many Muslims in America grieved for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei after he and other leaders of the Iranian terrorist state were killed in the first hours of war with the United States. Among them was Ali Akbar Shdid, a Henry Ford College professor who lamented his “beloved leader” and said, “We are going to continue on his path. We are going to hold his blood and ideology and teach it to our children.” Why does America allow such a man to live here?
Islamist propagandists have bombarded Americans for two and a half decades, taking advantage of our tolerance, and have persuaded much of the decent public that criticizing, opposing, and pushing back against Islam is racist.
By appeasement and retreat, America is fulfilling bin Laden’s prophecy: “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.” America is, of course, strong, but it is acting weak. Under multicultural leftist pressure, it is afflicted with what professor Gad Saad calls suicidal empathy. The nation is making itself the weak horse.
And now comes perhaps the biggest downward step of all. Voices are not just emerging on the Left, but are running for office and sometimes winning, who say 9/11 was our fault, we had it coming, and who sympathize with the attackers rather than the victims.
We should have known the terrorist pogroms against Jews on Oct. 7, 2023, would build support for the attackers rather than the victims because we’d seen it before in our own country. Twenty-five years after being attacked by members of a belief system geared for conquest, we are letting more of its adherents into our country, giving them positions of power, and making excuses for their acts of domination and demands that we assimilate to them, rather than the other way around.
Shortly after 9/11, when Muslims planned to build a mosque near ground zero in southern Manhattan, the move was mistaken for mere bad taste. But it is part of a pattern of Islam building on the wreckage of crumbling Western culture. Like Sultan Mehmed II turning Constantinople’s great church, the Hagia Sofia, into a mosque in the 15th century, or the Emperor Charles V building a cathedral in the middle of a Muslim mosque in Cordoba in the 16th century, it was an assertion of a new order, in this case not yet established but intended. Now there are thousands of mosques all over America.
Finally and most shockingly, New York itself, ground zero of Islam’s attack on our civilization, has elected Zohran Mamdani, a radical Muslim on the side of expansionist Islam, as mayor. To mark America’s 250th birthday, Mamdani sat on the wrong side of a desk once used by George Washington, facing our nation, as it were, from the outside. Then, surrounded by 10 naturalized citizens and no native-born Americans, he excoriated the country that has accepted him and uplifted him and the leaders who have made it the great nation it is. “They will tell you,” he said angrily, that America “belongs only to those with the right accent and the right shade of skin. … How small they are, how weak, how unoriginal.” Some celebration.
Mamdani is dressed in the garb of socialism and doubtless believes some of its Marxist tenets, but he is more interested in the Islamist agenda of takeover, as outlined by the Palestine Committee. So much so that Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) recently told the New York Times that Mamdani needed to change and focus more on his own city than on Israel.
Mamdani is not alone. Several New York supporters of Islamist terrorists were recently chosen by the Democratic Party as candidates for the House of Representatives. And in Michigan, the party chose Abdul el Sayed, the Muslim son of Egyptian immigrants, as its nominee for the Senate. El Sayed is a Hamas sympathizer, and his ties to Islamist extremism are close. Just in the past few days, he has declined to distance himself from Hasan Piker, a vile Jew-hating streamer with whom he campaigned in the primary. Even some Democrats say el Sayed is “whacked out” and “part of the problem” and that his behavior should be “disqualifying.” But he has been embraced by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who refers to the Democratic Party as a “big tent.” Isn’t a party that includes such people too big?
El Sayed’s mother worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency until the U.S. Treasury designated it a terrorist organization in 2004, and his sister blessed Hamas terrorists, calling their murders, tortures, rapes, and kidnappings on Oct. 7 “morning freedom.”
These and countless other acts and words betokening the advance of political Islam might seem small in each individual case. But taken together, they have wrought a huge and deleterious change on American society. And they continue. They continue not organically or haphazardly but with planning and determination from people who hate this nation and want to reshape it in their own ugly image.
The late Rabbi Jonathan Sachs identified the danger America now faces in a speech he made to the House of Lords in London. He was talking of Britain, but his words apply equally here. He said, “The greatest danger any civilization faces is when it suffers collective amnesia. We forget how small beginnings lead to truly terrible endings. … Antisemitism or any hate becomes dangerous when three things happen. First, when it moves from the fringes of politics to a mainstream party and its leadership, second, when the party sees that its popularity with the general public is not harmed thereby, and third, when those who stand up and protest are vilified and abused for doing so. All three factors exist in Britain now. … I never thought I would see this in my lifetime.”
MAMDANI IS A KEY FIGURE IN GLOBAL JIHAD
It is nearly as bad here. America, since Sept. 11, 2001, has come down with a bad case of collective amnesia. We have forgotten or refused to contemplate the evil perpetrated against us and declined to look squarely at its perpetrators. Small beginnings are leading to terrible trouble. Antisemitism and assimilation to Islam have moved from the fringes and are occupying the Democratic Party and are also camped on the fringes of the Republican Party. We have yet to see whether the popularity of Democrats will be harmed by their party’s embrace of Islamists.
The midterm elections will be a test. Whatever the result, it is hard to say 25 years after the most deadly attack on American soil in our 250-year history that the horror of that day has put us on alert.
Hugo Gurdon (@hgurdon) is editorial director of the Washington Examiner.