The 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 radical Islamic terror attacks on America is one of those rare, stubborn anniversaries that refused to go away when the clock struck 12 for the start of Sept. 12. Too many things, large and small, happened around this anniversary which have begged further examination, further discussion, and further debate. Most of it had to do with the way Islamic America has decided to insert itself in this particular solemn anniversary.
As aggressive as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan Senate Candidate Abdul El-Sayed were in trying to pretend they cared about the victims of radical Islamic terrorists, they have made it clear in numerous ways that their sympathies aren’t as genuine as yours and mine when it comes to the victims of the attacks.
Mamdani and AOC spotted laughing at 9/11 ceremony while families cry https://t.co/iUC2gq7dN7 pic.twitter.com/nrLsdrzWv7
— New York Post (@nypost) September 11, 2026
This interview from April provides the better “context” that El-Sayed seems to want, right?
🚨 NEW
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) April 7, 2026
Michigan Democrat U.S. Senate Candidate Abdul El Sayed DEFENDS Hasan Piker for saying "America deserved 9/11" and "it doesn't matter" if rapes happened on October 7th.
EL-SAYED: "It's important to talk about context." pic.twitter.com/2OtiXQq6Ma
Mamdani started the events off on a bad note when he made sure that an Al Qaeda sympathizer received a ceremonial pen at his own 9/11 proclamation ceremony.
Mamdani under fire after symbolic 9/11 pen goes to former al Qaeda defense lawyer https://t.co/pB7DJMxR52 #FoxNews
— Bob Ogden (@BobOgden7) September 11, 2026
Look at the face of the cop in the background. 🤨
The families of the 9/11 victims in New York tried for weeks to keep Mamdani away from the Friday morning event, but he insisted and got his way, regardless of how his presence felt to those people.
This all has heightened the sensitivities around Islam and its role in motivating those 19 hijackers whose actions led to plane crashes into the two World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, and into a farm field in Shanksville, Pa. That’s why it’s gotten old when so many people throughout the left still try to pretend that we’re still not clear on why 9/11 happened.
Steven Simon is a visiting professor at Dartmouth College, after having served as the senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton. He later served in the Obama administration in a number of roles, including jobs at the State Department.
To mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11, he penned an opinion piece that’s been widely published in the nation’s newspapers through the Tribune New Service. It’s titled, “Sept. 11 hasn’t yet found its meaning.” On the basis of the headline alone, I thought, “You’ve got to be kidding me. We knew what 9/11’s meaning was 25 years ago when we first heard reports that those hijackers shouted 'Allahu akbar!'"
We’ve been reminded of the meaning of 9/11 for the past 25 years, every time we see radical Islamic sympathizers shout, “Death to America!”
And yet, in his piece, Simon has the nerve to contend that after all of the annual rituals we follow to help remember 9/11, proper meaning still has yet to be assigned to the event. This search for meaning is what he calls the second phase of a long-term process: “The second phase has not yet coalesced. A shared understanding of the catastrophe and its long, unfinished aftermath remains elusive.”
The meaning of 9/11 can only remain elusive to those who don’t want to confront the event for what it was.
Excuse me, Mr. Simon, but we do understand the meaning. You may not like that meaning, that truth, but in the end, you can't change that part.
People such as Simon want to create gray areas where none exist. They want to create nuance where there is none. They want to change the history of 9/11 when given the chance, so that younger generations and future generations will live by and govern by fake history — the fake history they concocted.
The meaning of 9/11 is the lesson of 9/11. We learned that Islam is not built to peacefully coexist with other religions and other cultures. It is not a religion of peace, contrary to what President George W. Bush said in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, motivated by concern that Americans might take vigilante justice to random, unsuspecting Muslims. By the way, he doubled down on that take during his appearance in New York in 2026.
George Bush reflects on the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks: "I made it clear that Islam was a religion of peace." pic.twitter.com/YDOltLvl2X
— TheBlaze (@theblaze) September 10, 2026
The problem with all of this is that while Bush and other Americans are caring about the feelings of Muslims, American Muslims aren’t reciprocating. The rise of antisemitism in America is directly tied to Islam's rise in American politics.
In July of this year, Raul Morales was charged with attempted murder as a hate crime, after he allegedly stabbed two men, one of whom was Jewish, wearing a kippah after just exiting a synagogue. The prosecution in his case say that he screamed “Allahu akbar” and “Justice for Islam” at the crime scene. Police found Qurans in his apartment during the investigation.
In March of this year, in Bloomfield, Mich., Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, a Lebanese-born American citizen, rammed a truck loaded with fireworks into a synagogue where kids were inside attending preschool. He then exchanged gunfire with on-site security and died at the scene. According to the FBI, this was a Hezbollah-inspired terrorist attack that specifically targeted Jews.
In Boulder, Co., in June 2025, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, an Egyptian, threw Molotov cocktails at a peaceful gathering of people who were in support of those Hamas hostages in Gaza. He told police that he wanted to “kill all Zionist people.” One 82-year-old woman died from her injuries from the attack.
If you want to know where all these perpetrators are getting ideas like this, maybe it’s because they are hearing speeches from people such as Islamic scholar Ibrahim Yassine, who are extremely clear about what they are trying to do, what their mosques are trying to do, and perhaps what those 9/11 hijackers were trying to do.
Islamic Scholar Ibrahim Yassine at Dearborn Heights Mosque: Islam and the Shiite Faith Are Coming to America; We Will Build America on the Basis of Moral Civilization and Islam 🕌 🎤 💣 #NeverForget 911 pic.twitter.com/A8cpR7Xyu2
— CanadianExMuslim (@ExMuslimAz) September 10, 2026
Dartmouth’s Simon wrote that, “Sept. 11 felt more like an asteroid strike – sudden, catastrophic, driven by forces most Americans could not name, let alone place in a story with a beginning and end. Only in recent years have historians begun filling those gaps. The fact is you cannot assign meaning to an event you do not understand.”
I’m sorry, but I can’t pretend that Simon is even attempting to incorporate reality into his most recent propaganda piece. While beforehand, most Americans had never heard of Osama bin Laden, they got up to speed pretty quickly – like within 24 hours. By then, they knew very clearly that this story had a clear beginning, and that they were in the middle of it. They also knew how it had to end — with the arrest or killing of bin Laden.
Right after the 9/11 attacks, it didn’t take long for the media to try to actively take the heat off of radical Islam. On Oct. 15, 2001, Newsweek ran a cover story under the headline, “The Politics of Rage: Why Do They (Muslims) Hate Us?”
Pretty soon, social media sites were restricting the sharing of photos and video of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center. President George W. Bush called this new war a “global war on terror,” carefully avoiding any phrasing that might place the blame where it belonged, on radical Islam.
Providing any clarity or specificity to the issue has been a sure way to get labeled Islamophobic, and this continues right up to this day. “Islamophobia” accusations are used to shut down debate, to silence people who are guilty of noticing what radical Islam has been doing and then saying something about it.
Why is everything "Islamophobic"? Is it possible to critique or criticize or comment on Islam without being called "Islamophobic?" Seems like a bizarre scare tactic and perhaps a conscious effort to not allow people to criticize a religion. https://t.co/i3RY7BBPEp
— Elisabeth Lemke (@ealemke) September 13, 2026
That is the place where Simon and others like him are coming from. The meaning behind 9/11 must remain elusive so that the truth is never confronted, so that the truth never becomes the dominant, universally accepted narrative.
If that would happen, political leaders and policymakers would be forced to treat radical Islam more soberly as a huge outlier segment of the population who have no desire to coexist. The left does not want anyone to more fully see radical Islam as the threat that it is.
On March 18, 1923, the New York Times asked famous explorer George Mallory why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, and he said, “Because it’s there.”
The reason radical Islam hates America as founded is because we’re here, we're not like them, and they refuse to tolerate this. It's not that deep. It's not that nuanced. The meaning of 9/11 is that simple.
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