It is almost a quarter-century now since the Sept. 11, 2001 jihad attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York City and Washington. Many Americans assume that the jihad threat was somehow neutralized and contained in the immediate aftermath of those attacks, such that a large-scale jihad attack can never happen again in America, and the public discourse has moved on to other issues: mass migration, skyrocketing crime in the cities, tariffs, and the like. In reality, however, the jihad against the U.S. has not ended, and in the near-quarter century since 9/11, the jihadis have made immense gains. The jihad is still being fought, and the forces of freedom aren’t winning.
The biggest victory that the jihadis won in the wake of the 9/11 attacks was to divert attention away from the ideology that motivated those attacks, and to stigmatized and demonize those who spoke honestly about that ideology. George W. Bush famously walked into a mosque six days after the attacks and proclaimed that Islam was peace; several years later, Barack Obama made that statement the official policy of the United States government, overseeing a purge of all U.S. intelligence and military training materials on counterterrorism of all mention of Islam and jihad.
Ever since then, our entire military and intelligence apparatus has been intentionally ignorant regarding the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat, and this has deformed our response to it in numerous ways. Most notoriously, Bush sent American troops into Iraq and Afghanistan, fondly assuming that the people of both countries would welcome those troops as liberators, and hoping to transform both into Western-style secular republics that would become beacons of freedom and prosperity, and examples for the rest of the Islamic world to follow.
In doing this, Bush and his advisors completely disregarded both the nature of Islamic law as a political system, and the attachment that most ordinary Muslims in both countries have for that law. There was never any chance that the majority of people in either nation would accept what they considered to be a manmade system over a divine one, and Bush should have known that. Instead, the U.S. government wasted trillions and lost irreplaceable personnel and materiel, and went a long way toward one of Osama bin Laden’s main goals in mounting the 9/11 attacks in the first place: weakening America economically as a first step toward its eventual collapse.
Domestically, the unquestionable dogma that Islam was a religion of peace led to massive growth of the Islamic presence in the U.S. There were 1,209 mosques in America in 2001; by 2020, there were 2,769, and there are many more than that today. No one is concerned about this growth, any more than they would be about an increased number of churches. Yet many of these mosques have links to the Muslim Brotherhood, which is dedicated in its own words, according to a captured internal document, to “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within, and sabotaging its miserable house.”
The major Muslim organizations in the U.S. also have Brotherhood links. Not only does this cause no concern among intelligence or law enforcement officials, but intel and law enforcement agencies, as well as politicians, frequently court these agencies in efforts to gain political support for Muslims. Either they’re ignorant of this objective, or think that no Muslim individuals or groups take it seriously, or assume that they won’t be able to attain this goal anyway, so it isn’t worth worrying about.
Meanwhile, we now have three Muslims in Congress. One of them, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Mogadishu), has compared the U.S. unfavorably to her Somali homeland, and a Somali leader has praised her for putting the interests of Somalia, not America, first. Another, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Ramallah), has said that American “political structures” were “built on slavery, and genocide, and rape, and oppression.” Both strongly support the jihad against Israel and have helped mainstream that support.
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There will soon be more such officials. Muslim organizations, again with Brotherhood links, are working energetically to elect more Muslims to all levels of the U.S. government. Zohran Mamdani, an adherent of Twelver Shi’ite Islam, the official religion of the Islamic Republic of Iran, is about to become mayor of New York City. The Twelver Shi’ites, you may recall, are the ones who enjoy screaming “Death to America.”
And so nearly twenty-five years after 9/11, the ideology that motivated Osama bin Laden is steadily and confidently advancing. There hasn’t been another jihad attack of the magnitude of 9/11, but there have been numerous successful initiatives that will make such an attack unnecessary. The goals of the jihadis will be obtained soon enough without the need to engage in such a large-scale act of violence again.
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