One of the nightmares that periodically jolt me awake is the image of an American jumping from the inferno-ravaged upper stories of New York’s World Trade Center into the dust-plumed streets below. He is tormented and maybe praying and then gone. More than anything else, that horror from 9/11 haunts me.
In the first few years after the Islamic terror attack, news programs would replay some of those desperate moments caught on video, when workers trapped between floors of fire were forced to make a final decision about how they would die. Many of the videos showed pairs (co-workers, friends, strangers?) holding hands as they leaped from billowing smoke into the bright sunlight of that Tuesday morning, their bodies clearly visible against the blue sky before vanishing into the grayness below.
As the years went by, those videos disappeared. Even during the annual memorials for 9/11, the sight of Americans falling from the sky was gradually obscured in the historical record. When I finally noticed those erasures, I realized that the significance of the Islamic attacks on the United States was being rewritten in real time. People who had the means to shape public “narratives” no longer wanted Americans to relive the agony of 9/11. They did not want us to reflect upon the horror of Americans being forced to choose between dying from flames or a thousand foot drop onto city streets. They wanted us to forget.
I was in favor of the post-9/11 wars because I naïvely believed that Western civilization was finally prepared to defend itself from the barbarians at the gate. After 9/11, Americans generally agreed about two things: (1) We were in a civilizational war, and (2) militant Islamists were our enemies. President Bush defined America’s military response to the attack as a “crusade.” For a while, it felt as if Western civilization would fight for survival.
That feeling did not last. In hindsight, even our government’s designation of the conflict as a “Global War on Terrorism” indicated early on that American leaders were not prepared to defend Western civilization from Islamic jihad. “Terrorism” is a nebulous and dangerous word. It is nebulous because almost anything can be described as an act of terrorism. It is dangerous because almost anyone can be described as someone else’s terrorist.
During the Obama and Biden presidencies, the federal government redirected resources from the “war on terrorism” abroad to target political conservatives here at home. After the January 6, 2021, protest against election fraud at the U.S. Capitol, the federal government and the entire corporate news media described Trump supporters as “domestic terrorists.” I would argue that broadcast news anchors used more pointed rhetoric to attack MAGA voters than they did to describe Osama bin Laden’s followers after 9/11.
Ultimately, the “Global War on Terrorism” — at first painted as an operation to preserve Western civilization and eliminate Islamic supremacists — transformed into an operation to strengthen Islamic civilization’s grip on institutions of power inside the West and to eliminate defenders of Western civilization by defaming them as bigots. Men and women who fought in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Levant, and parts of Africa went to war for many reasons. However, the vast majority were dedicated to defending Western civilization, not surrendering it.
It was astonishing how quickly the defense of Western civilization collapsed after 9/11. Before President Bush even left office, government and cultural institutions had already transitioned from actively encouraging American citizens to be vigilant against potential acts of Islamic terrorism to actively condemning American citizens for being “Islamophobic.”
During the Democrat primaries leading up to the 2008 general election, Barack Obama regularly attacked Hillary Clinton for her vote in favor of the Iraq War. By the time Obama took office, the corporate news media had already begun framing U.S. military engagements overseas as imperial occupations carried out by American “oppressors” against “oppressed” adherents of Islam.
Once again, the Marxist dialectic was in full force: Americans bad; everyone else good. Or more generally: Western civilization bad; multiculturalism good. The election of Barack Hussein Obama two years after the execution of Saddam Hussein for crimes against humanity marked a watershed in the GWOT. Obama wasn’t elected just because he appeared to be the anti-Bush. He was elected because his very name repudiated the civilizational defense of the West that had begun after 9/11. Following the rise of Obama and the emergence of a politically correct war on “Islamophobia,” warriors wondered aloud, “What the hell are we fighting and dying for?”
Those who clearly remember this transition in public policy will recall two events that occurred during the first decade after the 9/11 Islamic terror attacks.
The first one involved an unknown and mediocre intellectual named Ward Churchill, who was a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder until his dismissal in 2007. Churchill wrote an essay one day after 9/11 in which he argued that the Islamic attacks were justified. Framing the murder of 3,000 Americans as a legitimate military operation against American imperialism and describing the Americans who had worked in the World Trade Center as “little Eichmanns” who deserved their fate, Churchill blamed innocent Americans for the acts of Islamic murderers.
When his work gained widespread attention a few years later, Americans were furious. The backlash against Churchill was so intense that the University of Colorado Board of Regents publicly apologized and eventually fired Churchill for unrelated acts of academic misconduct. Yet it is highly unlikely that he would have suffered any consequences today.
Another event worth remembering was the effort to build a mosque and Islamic community center just two blocks away from the World Trade Center. The developers claimed to be interested in “interfaith dialogue,” but the construction of a mosque so near the 9/11 terror attacks in Lower Manhattan offended Americans across the country who saw it as a symbolic act of civilizational conquest. Although public outrage forced investors to shelve the project’s original blueprints for a “Ground Zero Mosque,” plans for an Islamic cultural museum continue to this day.
With Muslim Zohran Mamdani most likely taking the mayor’s office in New York City in January, there is every reason to believe that developers will finally be able to implement more of their vision for the original “Ground Zero Mosque.” When they are done, a building reflecting classic Islamic designs will cast its shadow near the mass gravesite of Americans murdered on 9/11. When that happens, warriors who risked their lives all over the world to fight Islamic terrorism will be forced to swallow a hard pill: We came. We saw. They conquered.
A few years ago, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar minimized the significance of 9/11 and portrayed Muslims as the real victims. “Far too long we have lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen,” she told the Council on American-Islamic Relations in 2019, “and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it…CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.”
In an America where a member of Congress describes 9/11 as a time when “some people did something,” it is clear that Ward Churchill would never be fired today. He would probably be promoting his latest book on the evils of America.
Islamic mayors are winning elections all over Europe and America. A Michigan police department recently designed a patch written in Arabic. The World Economic Forum might as well revise its promise to Westerners: You will own nothing and become Muslims.
The 9/11 nightmare never ends. Western civilization is in retreat. We must awaken from our sleep. The West is worth saving.
Image via Pixabay.