What We Never Learned From 9/11

First we learned to love our killers. Then we learned to hate ourselves.

After 19 Muslim terrorists killed nearly 3,000 people in the United States, the most sensible thing would have been to close the borders and keep out the people most likely to carry out attacks.

25 years later and with hundreds more dead and wounded in Islamic terrorist attacks since then, we’ve done the exact opposite and allowed the Muslim population to more than double from 1.8 million to 4.5 million. In New York, the epicenter of the attacks, the insurgent Muslim population shot up from 400,000 to over 700,000 so that New York City is now run by an Islamist politician.

Before 9/11, there had been a handful of Islamic terrorist attacks on American soil. This year alone there were three terror attacks and plots in New York and the summer isn’t even over yet. Multiple mosques in New York City openly preach hatred and terrorism in videos posted to social media and nothing is done since Zohran Mamdani has visited some of those mosques.

Mamdani appointed a lawyer for the 20th 9/11 hijacker who had argued that the terrorists were not driven by evil and that “the legacy of 9/11 ought to be recounted primarily through the stories of Muslims” as New York City’s Chief Counsel. More of the Muslim candidates running for office, like Mamdani, or Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, and Dariazilia Avila Chevalier in New York City “I just wiped my hand on the American flag”, express hostility and contempt towards America.

The political ascension of Islamists who openly despise us reflects our hatred for ourselves.

Mamdani, an Abdul El-Sayed, Avila Chevalier or Aisha Wahhab exist because large numbers of voters agree with their pal, Hasan Piker, that America deserved 9/11. The initial protestations of innocence, the clamor that it was only a ‘tiny minority of extremists’, has given way to pride. That’s why Mamdani, El-Sayed and all the others keep grinning at us even while they lie to us.

And it’s a justified pride. Muslim terrorism killed thousands of New Yorkers and now run the city.

Islamists in America celebrate 9/11 and claim that we had it coming the way they say Israel had Oct 7 coming. And in their religion, we did and still do. That’s why they keep killing us.

After 9/11, we learned to love our killers and when they proved unlovable, blamed ourselves and learned to hate ourselves for not being able to save them, for not being worthy of their love.

It didn’t have to be this way, but our leaders clung to the zombie ‘democracyism’ of three world wars, and set off to find the Kaiser, Fuhrer or Commissar holding Islamic terrorism together to replace him with ‘democratic’ elections in the certainty that would make it all better. We would unselfishly send generations of our young men to bring elections to a culture that can only think in tribal power whether it’s in Basra, Iraq or Dearborn, Michigan, with all the predictable results.

And then we learned the hard way that they really did hate us, not because of some mustachioed dictator, but because their religion teaches them from the earliest age to hate us.

But by then we had also learned to blame ourselves.

When Republicans decided to reach back to Woody, FDR and Ike, Democrats reached back to the Vietnam War movement. If Republicans were going to borrow their old ‘War for Democracy’, they were going to fast forward to LBJ and chant, “How many Iraqi kids did you kill today?”

Before long, Islamic terrorists had switched from being a vital part of the Republican coalition, back when it was run by oil money and the regime change ambitions of the Iraqi Shiites of Dearborn, to becoming a vital part of a new Democratic coalition against democracy, for terrorism and ultimately for the destruction of Israel, India and the United States of America.

Along with any other countries that got on the bad side of the Ummah and its Islamist operatives who by the 25th anniversary have a death grip on the Democrats, have bought up academia, wield significant influence over the media and are swallowing up much of social media which increasingly consists of Pakistanis and the Americans they pay to echo their propaganda.

Rather than creating clear boundaries between ourselves and the perpetrators, America after 9/11 perversely opened itself to the Muslim world, began feverishly studying Islam, seeking to fix Muslim countries with democracy and regime change, and inviting Muslims to come here as ‘refugees’ so when they carried out attacks, they no longer needed to do so on temporary visas.

Not only did we fail to fix the Muslim world, but we Islamized America so that terrorist attacks stopped being a rarity and are now a regular phenomenon that we do our best to ignore.

First we blamed the lack of democracy in the Muslim world. Then we blamed our own intolerance. We blamed Israel. We blamed global warming. We blamed mental illness.

And we blamed everything except Islam.

We contorted our worldviews, our foreign policy, our culture and our military into pretzels and went to great lengths to evade the conclusion that most people, including liberals, reached in those immediate shocking moments, hours and days after the September 11 attacks.

The heretical conclusion, the one you can spot only in the negative images of the propaganda that shot out from George W. Bush, from the media and from every good liberal and not a few good conservatives and libertarians, was that we could absolutely co-exist with Islam.

No one dared to discuss the possibility that we couldn’t. And what to do if indeed we couldn’t.

25 years later we would still rather hate ourselves, agonize over our folly in wasting blood and treasure in Afghanistan and Iraq, conduct circular firing squads blaming each other (“I was against the Iraq War”, “No, I was against the Iraq War first”), mainline conspiracy theories (“The CIA was really behind 9/11”) or suggest that an Islamic takeover would actually be a good thing (according to Tucker Carlson, no one steals cars in the UAE) than speak the unspeakable.

And so the thing that we can’t say has instead led us to accept truly unspeakable things.

We’ve accepted that an Islamist whose associates defend the 9/11 attacks runs New York City and we’ve accepted that an Islamist can run for the Senate in Michigan while accompanied by a streamer who celebrated 9/11. These are just the latest outrages we’re willing to accept rather than even entertain the possibility that we cannot co-exist with the people who think this way.

And so we’ve learned all the wrong lessons from that Tuesday morning twenty-five years ago.

We’ve learned to keep quiet. We’ve learned to hate each other. We’ve learned to die for Muslim elections. What we haven’t learned to do is live and fight for our country. And if we truly want to remember the attacks and the dead, that is the real unspeakable thing to be spoken.

Over the years I have rebuked the foolish liberal Zionists who hold up Golda Meir quotes like, “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children, we cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children” and “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us” as arguments for Israel. These quotes and their sentiments are completely backwards.

A people who would forgive the killers of their children but turn to self-hatred for having to kill their enemies is not moral or honorable: it is a contemptible people that doesn’t know how to survive. The people who unthinkingly repeat such slogans should be ashamed of themselves and ashamed before the children they would sacrifice to show their suicidal moral nobility.

The ability of a people to live in peace should never depend on the goodness of their enemies.

Governments do not exist to tell their people how to die well, but to defend them. America’s liberal elites imploded in the face of the Islamic enemy just as they formerly imploded in the face of the Communist enemy during the Cold War: momentary patriotism quickly giving way to shame, guilt, and outrage for wanting to live in the face of killers with the ‘right’ politics.

We’ve spent generations experimenting with governments of national suicide and it has nearly killed us. Now we’ve been exploring the controversial notion of a non-suicidal government.

And everyone is deeply upset over it.

The lesson of 9/11 is that we cannot co-exist with those who want to kill us. That simple. And the day we truly understand it, we won’t need any more anniversaries, tearful tributes, and candles on concrete, and we won’t need the self-hatred, because we will finally stand up for ourselves.

When America arises, then the thousands of dead, turned to ash, will finally be able to rest.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.

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Thank you for reading.

Read my book ‘Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left’ to discover the true origins of the American Left.