On Wednesday, 9/11, Old Joe Biden was “doing 9/11” in New York City. Kamala Harris and Donald Trump were there as well, along with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-Sinister) and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (D-Has Been). In a show of bipartisan generosity that is unusual in these overheated days, Biden, Harris and Schumer didn’t have Trump clapped into irons and led away to Rikers Island.
The assembled dignitaries, however, could just as well have been commemorating a long-forgotten Civil War battle. The whole thing had the feel of an important civic occasion that no one really wants to attend but everyone thinks he has to do so. The September 11, 2001 jihad attacks are part of our history now, but they are not part of our present-day reality. If someone said that Islamic terrorism was a genuine threat to the United States today, Barack Obama or someone like him might respond: “The early 2000s called. They want their foreign policy back.”
It's a fine quip. In real life, Obama used it against Mitt Romney in 2012, when Romney said that Russia posed a major threat to the United States. Obama’s flippancy regarding Russia, however, looks quaint today, and it’s likely that seeing the jihad threat as a thing of the past is going to look quaint before too long as well.
At this point, however, 9/11 was a very long time ago, and we have other concerns now. The far-left British government is working on criminalizing “Islamophobia,” although it can’t explain exactly what that is. The Network of Sikh Organisations (NSO) in Britain has written a letter of concern to Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, pointing out that the definition of “Islamophobia” that the ruling Labour Party has adopted would make it a criminal act to enunciate such demonstrable truths as “Muslims spread Islam by the sword.”
That definition is the predictable leftist farrago of nonsense: “Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.” The Sikhs pointed out quite reasonably that “Adoption of this contested definition into law would have serious implications on free speech, not least the ability to discuss historical truths.” It would also criminalize any honest discussion of why the 9/11 attacks happened, who perpetrated them, and what they intended to accomplish. It wouldn’t criminalize someone screaming “Allahu akbar” while setting off a bomb; it would criminalize noticing that someone screamed “Allahu akbar” while setting off a bomb.
Whatever happens with Britain’s attempts to criminalize “Islamophobia,” it’s clear that there has been a sea change since 9/11. The problem is not jihad terror; it’s being concerned about jihad terror. Sweden is putting two men on trial for the crime of desecrating the Qur’an. Burning a book, whatever its distasteful associations, has never been a crime in the modern West; it has been understood as an integral aspect of the freedom of expression. But no more. The fact that they burned the Qur’an as an expression of protest against jihad violence made no difference to Swedish authorities.
An illegal migrant on the terror watch list tried to enter Quantico Marine base on false pretenses. No one is particularly concerned and few people even know it happened. One hundred sixty-nine people on the FBI’s terror watch list were caught at the border in 2023; nobody knows how many people on that watch list got across the nonexistent border without being caught.
Here again, the problem is an abstraction until somebody gets hurt, and at that point, it will be too late. America is far more concerned about making sure boys can become girls and win awards in girls’ sports than it is about preventing another catastrophic jihad terror attack. Those who should be guarding us against such an attack are warning us about a terror threat from “white supremacists.”
For all the attention that is paid to their root causes and the possibility that they could be repeated, the 9/11 attacks might as well have happened on Sept. 11, 1001. In late August, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan hailed the Turkish victory in a battle that really did take place almost a millennium ago: the Battle of Manzikert in 1071. But Erdogan is one of the only people who remembers Manzikert or knows why it was so important. You can read about the Battle of Manzikert, now called Malazgirt, in my book, Empire of God: How the Byzantines Saved Civilization. In that battle, which took place in the year 1071, the Seljuk Turks smashed the army of the Roman Empire, devastating it to the extent that the whole of Anatolia, which had been the heartland of the empire, was open for their conquest.
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This battle, in other words, paved the way for the land, a cradle of Hellenic civilization, to become what is now Turkey. The Turks are still in the process of completing the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian people of Anatolia, most of whom they have by now forcibly converted to Islam, driven into exile, or killed. It was one of the most decisive battles in the history of the world, but today almost no Westerners know that it happened or what its significance was.
9/11 is getting to be like Manzikert, in every respect: it set in motion immense changes in world civilization, most of which were not immediately felt, and now neither its causes nor its effects are properly understood. And so the stage is set for more battles like it.
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