As another 9/11 anniversary arrives, we are not in 9/10, a world before the fall of the towers, nor 9/12, the world that was born in the aftermath of the attacks, rather we are in 9/13.


In 9/13, the attacks of September 11 are not considered especially significant. 


In 9/13, years have passed without significant Islamic terrorist attacks taking place on American soil. In past surveys, concern about Islamic terrorism ranks in the low single digits behind everything else.


In 9/13, culture wars, COVID, pronouns and other concerns have vastly eclipsed not only the barbaric mass murder of thousands, but the recognition that we are at war. And that war is far from over.


In 9/13, the people who once specialized in talking about the threat of Islam have increasingly moved on. And it's hard to blame them. No one really wants to hear it anymore. It's yesterday's news.


In 9/13, Mehmet Oz is the GOP Senate candidate, and he's not the only one, Saudi Arabia is our ally again and the vast majority of Americans polled don't think that there's anything wrong with Islam.


America's Islamic population is growing. The open border doesn't just bring in drug dealers and gang members, but massive numbers of people from the Muslim world. The Afghan airlift and visas will probably end up importing at least a quarter of a million as family reunification kicks in. Our national demographics are being transformed with the same eventual outcome as Europe.


But it's 9/13. When I write articles about Islam, they perform worse than anything else. And I don't have the same raw feeling toward the day that I used to. The ash used to haunt my nightmares. I snuck past the law enforcement and military presence downtown to make it to the site, the twisted mess of what was left, because I needed to know up close that what I had seen was real. But it's not the same.


I hope it is for you. But I don't think it is for most of us.


Back then, afterward, I wondered how it was possible to move on and to forget. I was still young then and I concluded that the answer had to be time. With time, pain dulls, what seems fresh grows stale. Such things were abstractions then. I hadn't lived through phases of history or seen generations change. 


That's no longer true. I've seen how people can change. How they can go mad. And how they can forget.


9/13 is all about forgetting.


9/13 means we've done it. We fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. It's time to move on now. Maybe take a day to remember the people who died in the towers, in a field, bow our heads and go on with what really matters today.


What's the alternative? Fighting a forever war?


After WWI, most people were done with world wars. But world wars weren't done with them. That's a poor analogy because the Jihad isn't some nationalistic European grudge match. It's a thousand-year assault on the rest of the world that will not stop just because we've decided to move on. 


Early on WW2, wags joked that it was the Bore War because nothing seemed to be happening on the western front. The jokes made sense at the time. But they stopped being funny really fast. 


We're in the Bore War now. But thousand-year-old wars don't remain boring.


Americans recalibrate quickly. We believe that the world is always changing. TikTok, machine learning, quiet quitting, this week's trend. The past is... past. We quickly forgot about the airline hijackings once they became yesterday's news. We're more than ready to forget Islamic terrorism all over again.


But Islam does not forget. 


Reality is what exists even when you stop paying attention to it. Ideology and opinion don't matter. Marxist ideologies claim to know the future and believe it will be dramatically different from the past. But the only reliable way to predict history, as Patrick Henry told a bunch of men long since dead, is with the lamp of experience. The best way to know the future is to know the past.


And sometimes that may even mean living in the past.


Living in the nanosecond has not served our sanity, our reality or our culture very well. But it means that we are always leaving things behind. History keeps vanishing in the rearview mirror. The outrage of the moment fills our minds. And then the next and the one after that. And all the others to come.


September 11 is not just a day. It was a wake- up call. And many of us woke up. But it's easier to wake up then it is to stay awake. And yet the war we're in isn't going anywhere. It's only getting worse.


Islamists and Islamic terrorists accomplished their main purposes which were to drag America into political and military engagements with them, ones that they were bound to win through sheer staying power, while they infiltrated our political system and spurred massive immigration into our country. 


Islamic terrorism became a partisan issue. And then it ceased to be even that. Democrats have embraced Islam and Republicans, as usual, are tagging along for the ride. Even the conservative landscape is dotted with apologists, truthers, conspiracists and other sympathizers. Meanwhile we're losing. 


The demographic conditions are coming into place for a next wave of Islamic terrorism which will depend not on internationally coordinated attacks, but domestic terror cells following up on the 'lone wolves' like the Boston Marathon bomber and the Pulse nightclub shooter.


Every few weeks another Islamic terror plot is broken up. I wrote about them sometimes. Sometimes someone even reads the article.


It's 9/13 after all.


Before 9/11, I had a sense of a dimly understood future rushing toward us. I still have that sense now. 


Islamic terrorism is not the only thing that matters. It's not the only thing that will determine our survival. But it is one of those things. And it's the one that we've forgotten. And one of these days we will once again wake up to blood and horror and mass death. Let us hope that this time we stay awake.

Comments

  1. Tsquared11/9/22

    We have been under continuous Islamic terrorist attacks since 9-11. There are traitorous islamic congressional members that have been subverting Judeo-Christian values at every possible opportunity. Islam is a disease that needs to wiped out.

    ReplyDelete
  2. A very appropriate commentary on an undelicate subject. DG Matters.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous11/9/22

    The dimly understood onrushing future belongs
    to the sublime eternal present and forgotten
    past of an existential drug trip. Where am I?
    How did I get here? What comes next? As if I
    have any choice in the matter.

    Fake news floods us with a kaleidoscope of
    bunk, obscuring the realities of our dangerous
    world. Our fatal nemesis, Islam, has grown and
    poisoned the minds of billions of killers since
    the Dark Ages. It is implacable and relentless.
    It knows no moderation or mercy.

    An aware, unified secular World could defeat
    this curse if it ever decided to.

    Thomas

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Anonymous11/9/22

      So, for you, an “aware secular World” is the “answer.” Without G-d there is no objective morality. Without G-d all is chaos. You seem to equate Islam with other religions. Here’s the answer to tour nonsense: Islam is a political system masquerading as a religion. That is why it is evil.

      Delete
    2. Anonymous11/9/22

      I think Islam is a religion masquerading as a political system. Their deity is none other than the fallen spirit who has been warring against the living and true God since before Eden. It's the spiritual that powers the political, and the West has been hollowed out because our cultures have, for the most part, departed from the knowledge of God and joined the rebellion.

      Delete
    3. Anonymous11/9/22

      Dear Two or Same Anons;

      God's Objective Morality is essential against
      Islam? OK, which one? Ten Commandments, Book
      of Mormon, Watch Tower, Buddha, Moses, Hubbard?
      We'll never settle our internal differences.

      A secular approach works fine getting to the moon,
      advancing science, technology, medicine. Just
      keep your Beliefs personal where they belong.
      Our greatest human power is rationality.
      Universal problem solving and coordinating
      are ours if we use it.

      Seeing this as Moses/Jesus vs. Mohammad or
      God vs. Satan puts us in their psychological
      lair. Rather, fight this crazed mob as a
      pack of rabid dogs, it is finally winnable.

      Thomas

      Delete
    4. Anonymous14/9/22

      A secular approach solves? Zip for a belief in nothing allows one to allow credence of anything. We have seen where this secular approach ends on the open drug markets of San Francisco; the groomers libraries, the closed minds of universities and Biden's Nuremburg decrees.

      As I recall Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao all advocated secularist approaches. Thanks but no thanks.

      Delete
  4. Anonymous11/9/22

    Thank you for reminding everyone. I've been saying similar things myself for a while, and it sometimes seems that no one even remembers what jihad is any more. I've even begun thinking that the current crises du jour are deliberate distractions from the increasing stealth jihad -- or at least are being taken advantage of in that way. Certainly the attacks on our children through the lockdowns and the sterilizations through jabs and "trans" medicals insure that demographics will swing in the direction of the conquerors.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Anonymous11/9/22

      There has been cultural "Jihad" going on in this country since atleast 1965. America hating Democrats don't really care how it's done, just that it gets done.
      America is no longer a sovereign nation, protected by the rule of law and a border.We are simply a land mass, where everyone is free to come and get on the Democrat grievance against whitey plantation. I imagine the path was quite similar regarding the once great Roman empire.

      Delete
    2. most people are plugged into a social media matrix that distracts us and teaches us to forget

      Delete
  5. Anonymous11/9/22

    Excellent analysis. We can see what is happening in Europe due to their importation of Islamic colonizers.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Yes. I've also grown older and sadder and less convinced that we in the West have any clue--because we don't have any strong desire--how to stop the next Tragedy (the tragedies continue and for most people are barely worth a pause before turning the page). That apathy, that forgetting, seemed impossible on 9/12. Now it is indeed always 9/13.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. We never really had a clue. So not much has changed in that regard. We've lost any sense of a bigger historical picture beyond our feelings of the moment. Apathy is just another emotional response.

      Delete
    2. Anonymous11/9/22

      I love your writing, Daniel.

      Delete
    3. Anonymous12/9/22

      Dear Lori; Yes, many people consider it as
      virtuous to withhold judgment of Islam's doctrine
      and consequent actions. As if we need to be
      perfect before concluding we are being attacked
      and need to do something.

      NO! Suicidal humility is a gift to murderous
      Islam. They rip away lives with disgust for
      the weakness of their victims. --Thomas

      Delete
  7. Anonymous11/9/22

    A goldfish has a memory retention of eight seconds. Social media - Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, have all contributed to a society where the collective memory is less than that. We rush from post to post, or tweet to tweet, clicking 'Like' or 'heart' without even reading. If I posted an article describing all the creative ways Nazis treated the Jews and others, but I put a picture of a cute puppy on it, I would have a thousand 'Likes' or 'Hearts'. Thus while we collectively flit from tweet to tweet, or post to post, or dog picture to dog picture merrily clicking 'Like', Islam studies its targeted culture and society. Islam studies our Constitution, our laws, far more thoroughly than our high school and college 'educated' citizens. So while half the country now believes the Constitution is now simply a useless document produced by white supremacists, Islam advances, filling the voids our collective ignorance have created. The concept of Civilizational Jihad is lost to many; it interferes with their daily social media 'fix' and is consequently rejected even before it's thought about. There are only two numbers that need be recalled - 1400 (years) and 270 million (dead). Dress them up with a picture of a cute puppy or fish being held by a gorgeous girl in a scanty bikini, and you'll get a thousand 'Likes' or 'Hearts'. Islam knows this.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. we've lost our sanity, our retention, our focus, our principles and our intellect as a society

      Web 2.0 has become a poison that makes it all too easy for us to be conquered because we are conquering ourselves

      Delete
    2. Anonymous11/9/22

      100% agree! Wonderful article. Love your writing and thoughtful commentary.

      Delete
    3. Anonymous11/9/22

      Hey Anon; It seems like you have some good
      points. Problem is, I haven't seen such an
      impenetrable, monolithic paragraph since the
      last time I looked at the Tax Code.

      Please, do us a favor with a little white space.

      Thomas

      Delete
  8. Anonymous11/9/22

    Thank goodness I'm older and will not be around when the collapse finally comes. But it's coming. It's 1933 all over again, except this time, it's white conservatives on the list and rabid liberals are making the list.

    America hating Democrats will keep importing millions of nonwhite third worlders, just as they have been doing since 1965.

    The destruction is almost complete.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Anonymous11/9/22

    Well said, Daniel Greenfield!

    ReplyDelete
  10. AislaPS12/9/22

    The range of responses , as well as their volume , will give you encouragement in regard of "Islam not being your more popular threads"( sic).
    Of course, you set it in a new fangled parochialism. The rest of the world learned even less than the US , in its response to that appalling day.
    Can we first be honest?
    Bin Laden achieved everything that he set out to do. He won.
    He was perversely blessed by the idiots and mummy's boys, deviant toy soldiers that had been shoehorned into office on a vote that was a rigged and worthless as the recent ones. It didn't matter who won, G-d made a mockery of western votes at that time, that we've never recovered from. The global unaparty took the reins and that weak white horse of theirs is evil.
    Bin Laden won, and we see the results. Whether it's AOC or Omar, Emmanuel or Brennan?
    We scuttled to war to keep Haliburton in readies, greenies. We chose to remove Saddam and Gadhaffis etc , but had no idea of post war requirements to serve the west. At least Kissinger knew to fund the losing side in the eight year war between Iraq and Iran .
    Once we accept that Islam, like China is here? Then pick the Hui or the Ugyhar...and fight as they do.
    Because otherwise you'll get Xi in the Chinese characteristic mosque, with Zuck and Bezos as rent boys in borrowed harem pants , by way of entertainment.
    You write honestly and truthfully.
    But have fun too ..are maggots and cricket meal halal or not?
    Jews and Jesus people have the jokes and morality ..let's fortify each other whilst we still can!

    ReplyDelete

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