"Where were you when...?" was the question asked before Sept. 11, 2001, about the Kennedy assassination or the Moon landing. For my parents, it was Pearl Harbor or Franklin Roosevelt's death.
Memories are powerful talismans that we touch and stroke to recall not just events, but what we were doing, what we were thinking, what it smelled and tasted like, who we were with. It's our mind's way of imprinting the memory on engrams to be stored away and brought up quickly in an emotional context the next time we're hit over the head with a two-by-four, gut-punched, and body-slammed by an event.
Another September 11 is impossible, right? We learned our lesson. We fought terrorists, smashed their networks, killed their leaders, dried up their funding sources, and rooted them out of their hideouts.
Sure, there are plenty of "lone wolves," but they only kill a few people at a time, so those are acceptable losses. Besides, we've learned a most important lesson from 9/11: don't hate the Muslims because it's racist, and 9/11 was our fault anyway.
No? As we approach the 25th anniversary of the attacks on America, it might be instructive to look at coverage from the 20th anniversary.
USA Today, for instance, posted a story with the tease, “Eight influential Muslim Americans discuss how 9/11 and Islamophobia affected life in the U.S. over two decades.” CBS News reported a story it titled “Muslim Americans still face hostility 20 years after 9/11.” A CNN story led with the headline: “Too many US Muslim children dread 9/11 every year.”
I am going to watch New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's address at Ground Zero next Friday with great interest. Mamdani, and those of his ilk, have done their best over the last 25 years to make it a question of "racism" to place the blame for the attacks on the political/religious ideology that is exclusively Muslim.
We are still being told that 9/11 can't be blamed on Islam or Muslims, because there are a billion followers of Allah in the world, and the terrorists represent only a fraction of Muslims. Of course that's true, but bringing it up is a distraction. Islam motivated the 9/11 terrorists. The 2004 government report, though some maligned it as a "cover-up," nevertheless pulled no punches about what motivated the hijackers to seize planes with hundreds of innocents and fly them into buildings.
"Many Americans have wondered, ‘Why do “they” hate us?’ Bin Laden’s grievance with the United States may have started in reaction to specific U.S. policies, but it quickly became far deeper. Al-Qaeda’s answer was that America should abandon the Middle East, convert to Islam, and end the immorality and godlessness of its society and culture.” —Page 51.
“In February 1998 … Bin Ladin and a fugitive Egyptian physician, Ayman al Zawahiri, … called for the murder of any American, anywhere on Earth, as the ‘individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it. We do not have to differentiate between military or civilian. As far as we are concerned, they are all targets.’” —”The Foundation of the New Terrorism, A Declaration of War,” Page 47.
"Teachers, parents, elected leaders, and the media do a disservice to the republic by hop-skipping past the religious “why” behind 9/11," writes Todd Bensman in MEF. "In supposedly protecting a new generation of Americans from knowing the why, they will fail to apply the time-tested wisdom that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it."
In the last 25 years, have we been lucky or good in avoiding another mass-casualty attack? We're currently fighting a war in Iran, where most Americans seem to have forgotten that our goal is to prevent the most destructive weapon in world history from falling into the hands of the most unbalanced, primitive, fanatical society in modern history. That's a worthy goal in and of itself.
It's too late to make a deal. They still have 400 pounds of uranium enriched to 60%, which is just a hop, skip, and a jump from the 90% enrichment necessary to build about eight bombs. Depending on the number and quality of centrifuges they have left, they could spin up that 60% uranium to 90% in anywhere from 10 days to three months.
The acquisition of power or territory doesn't motivate the Iranian clerical-fascists. What motivates them is a hatred so profound that they are willing to wipe an entire people off the face of the Earth. In a righteous world, the nations would be united to remove this regime before it could carry out its genocide. Instead, some nations see an advantage in allowing this nation to threaten Israel and the West, because anything that weakens the U.S. or Israel, they believe, strengthens them.
This is why another 9/11 is inevitable. We may have sophisticated tools to surveil threats and potential threats, but the mindset of the American people has reverted to 9/10. The media, the left, and even some on the right downplay the threat of terrorism, pointing to the threat to civil liberties and the unlikelihood of a serious attack. Others claim to fear that a president could use the expanded powers given to the government in the aftermath of 9/11 for nefarious purposes.
I'm not saying those aren't legitimate concerns. Citizens should always be vigilant about government overreach. In some ways, the fact that some in government overreacted to 9/11 made us less free and initiated actions detrimental to our Constitutional republic.
But those concerns are often used as a psychological device to let us bury our heads in the sand once again and avoid the cold, hard realities of the world. There are people who do nothing all day except plan ways to kill Americans. We forget that at our peril.
"Never Again" has morphed into "Never Mind" — a convenient delusion for a country determined to forget the threat until it arrives back at our doorstep.
