Name the Enemy: The 25th Anniversary of 9/11 Still Demands It

Original article here

September 11 is not a day for vague emotional uplift. It is not a seminar on American foreign policy. It is not an occasion to distort a massacre into “differences with the United States.” It is the anniversary of a morning when Islamist terrorists murdered nearly three thousand people on American soil.

Calls to unite Americans and “do a good deed” to honor those murdered by these terrorists are fine if they come with a clear account of who attacked this country, why they did it, and a hard commitment that it must never happen again.

The al Qaeda terrorists did not hijack those planes because of political differences with the U.S. They did it because they despised the civilization those towers represented: democracy, mixed societies, individual liberty, women in public life, Jews and Christians, and secular people living without clerical veto. Al Qaeda’s leaders said so. Their documents said so. Their sermons said so. Pretending otherwise is not nuance. It is amnesia.

There is a persistent effort to minimize that record or invent “another side” to the story. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) reduced the attacks to “some people did something.” Hasan Piker, who campaigned with Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, said in 2019 that “America deserved 9/11.” A New Jersey curriculum produced with CAIR-NJ and “Teaching While Muslim” has told students that the attacks were a response to U.S. support for Israel, the Persian Gulf War, and the American military presence in the Middle East.

Even worse, according to a September 5 New York Post article, two-thirds of American Middle East studies professors say college kids cannot identify who attacked the U.S. on 9/11 or why. The Post article attributes this to a lack of mandatory teaching standards about the terrorist attack, which has allowed woke ideology blaming the attacks on U.S. policy or “Islamophobia” to be taught instead. Some of these lesson plans reportedly have been funded by far-left billionaire George Soros.

This is not teaching history. It is a radical woke attempt to rewrite history and explain away murder.

Some school systems are fighting back. For example, the Texas Board of Education recently sparked controversy when it approved changes to the state’s high school social studies curriculum that say radical Islam motivated the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

This excuse-making matters because it is not unique to 9/11. The same instinct—to explain away Islamist violence as a response to policy differences rather than an expression of extremist ideology—shows up every time such terrorist attacks occur. London in 2005. Madrid in 2004. Paris in 2015. Brussels in 2016. Bali in 2002 and 2005. Mumbai in 2006 and 2008. The 2017 siege of Marawi in the Philippines. These attacks can’t be linked to differences with the U.S. or the American military presence in the Middle East. They were assaults on democracy, freedom, and modern society.

The October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre against Israel also belongs on that list. Hamas murdered about 1,200 people—including babies, children, and the elderly—burned homes, took hostages, and filmed their murderous work. Hamas did not raid Israeli communities over a zoning dispute. It attacked because its ideology cannot tolerate a free, neighboring society that it cannot defeat except by terror. Some details differ from 9/11. The civilizational contempt does not.

Remember this when radical leftists like Hasan Piker try to recycle their blame-the-victim arguments to explain the 9/11 massacre.

The morning of September 11, 2001, belongs first to the victims and family members of this massacre. It belongs to the heroic firefighters and police officers who ran toward the fire and climbed stairs while others fled. It belongs to the brave passengers on Flight 93 who understood they were already dead and chose to fight anyway. It belongs to office workers who carried strangers down darkened stairwells. These were acts of duty and patriotism under conditions designed to produce panic. Their sacrifice deserves a sober memory, not an effort to minimize this atrocity.

The killers were Muslim fanatics who rejected the modern world. That is not an indictment of every Muslim. The vast majority reject that fanaticism and have often been its victims.

We are seeing a version of this Islamist fanaticism now in Iran, where the IRGC and the ruling mullahs are executing protesters and people who talk to the Western media. A regime that hangs its own people for demanding a normal life is not resisting some vague threat from the U.S. or Israel. It is at war with modernity itself. When such a state talks about resistance, look at what it is resisting: dissent, pluralism, and the idea that sovereignty belongs to citizens rather than the regime’s armed thugs.

Good deeds are not enough. Name who did this. State why. And say, without embarrassment: never again.

Heroes. Sacrifice. A radical Islamist enemy that named itself. Reject euphemism and denial on this solemn day. Teach our children that kindness will not protect our freedom or our lives from those who want to destroy us. We must recognize the foreign threats to our nation, be willing to defend it, and be ready to fight.