9/11, 25 Years LaterA quarter of a century after the worst foreign attack on US soil in our history, what have we learned?
It was a bright, clear, sunny, almost unseasonably warm Tuesday morning. It was a week or so after Labor Day and the summer season was finally over. Kids were back in school, people were back at work, and everyone was seemingly trying to get back into the rhythm of normalcy. It was primary day for the mayoralty of New York City, with various candidates jockeying to succeed the term-limited Rudy Giuliani. Baseball was deep in its playoff push, with the Seattle Mariners chasing the best record in baseball history and the New York Yankees pursuing a fourth consecutive World Series title. The NFL and college football were just kicking off their seasons, with great expectations for the St. Louis Rams’ “Greatest Show on Turf” and the loaded Miami Hurricanes, respectively. People were gearing up for the big last quarter push before the holiday season. And then, in an instant, none of that mattered. At 8:46am Eastern time, al Qaeda hijackers deliberately piloted American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan. Just over 15 minutes later, at 9:03am, a second group of Islamist terrorists flew United Airlines Flight 175 into the South Tower. About half an hour later, at 9:37am, a third set of hijackers crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon in Washington, DC. At 9:59am, the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed into a cloud of smoke, dust, rubble, and humanity. At 10:03am, the heroic passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 overpowered the terrorists who hijacked their aircraft and crashed the plane into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, averting what may have been a planned attack on the White House or Capitol building. At 10:15am, the section of the Pentagon that was hit by Flight 77 collapsed. Less than 15 minutes later, at 10:28am, the North Tower in lower Manhattan came down, burying thousands of Americans, living and dead, under the rubble. On that morning, 2,977 Americans were murdered. They were burned alive, crushed under the weight of concrete and steel, suffocated from smoke inhalation, blown apart by the explosion of airliners, and forced to hurl themselves out of windows 80 stories up simply to avoid those other, more painful fates. In just under two hours, the world had irrevocably and permanently changed. So had my life. At 8:46am, I was sitting in 7th grade English class in Ramsey, NJ, just about 30 minutes as the crow flies outside of New York City, talking to my friends about what we did over the summer, how excited we were for the Yankees going into the playoffs, and what we were going to be doing in class that day. All of a sudden, our teacher stepped out into the hallway and returned a moment later, completely ashen-faced. We were told that a small plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers, but nothing more. As time went on that morning, I realized something much worse than what had been told to us had happened. Whether it was the terrified visages of the adults around me, the whispered rumors of other ‘crashes’, or the way that everyone seemed to be scrambling to figure out what to do, I knew something was badly wrong. By 10am or so, the truth could no longer be hidden, especially as teachers just stopped teaching and parents began to rush to the school to take their kids home to safety. But not everyone’s parents could show up. Many worked in the city, some downtown, some in the sprawling WTC complex. I distinctly recall the feeling of dread when I got in the enormous line to wait for the lone payphone in our school, hoping to talk to my mom or dad, the former of whom worked a few dozen blocks north of the Trade Center in midtown Manhattan. Thankfully, both were safe, but I was one of the lucky ones. Several of my classmates were sadly not. Landlines were down across the region, cell phones were rare, and chaos reigned. Most kids could not reach their parents, sparking fears of the worst. And even though many of those parents were safe, the interminable wait for contact was visibly emotionally wrecking these children. Tears flowed from middle schoolers as though they were teething babies, completely inconsolable. On the seemingly perpetual drive home, we went down Route 17 in northern NJ, as usual. What was not usual was the view. Instead of the picturesque skyline of the greatest city on the planet, the city I grew up admiring and visiting, I saw clouds of smoke and fire, looking like God had slashed a line of utter blackness through the clear late-summer sky. I knew then that things were never going to be the same. When I went home that day, I was glued to the news, watching the images and videos of the planes hitting the towers, the people leaping to their deaths to avoid being burnt alive at their desks, and the genuinely terrifying clips of the towers coming down onto the busy streets below. I am not a particularly visual person when it comes to memory, but those images are seared permanently into my mind’s eye. I could not forget them, even if I tried. But I do not want to try. Because the memory of the reality of that day, September 11, 2001, must live on. We must understand the truth of what happened – not a sanitized version. We need to understand who did this to us and who supported it. We need to confront the demonic ideology that murdered nearly 3,000 of our countrymen on one Tuesday morning. We need to remember the heroic actions of ordinary Americans, the lives evilly stolen from us, and the lives that continue to be lost due to that heinous terrorist attack. Most of all, we need to learn the lessons of that awful day and apply them today – because they are as relevant as ever.
Perhaps the most immediately pertinent such lesson revolves around Islamic terrorism, Islamism more broadly, and the threat of global jihad against Western civilization. Contrary to popular belief, the United States did not lose the Global War on Terror that we launched in response the monstrous assault on our nation that bright September day. We have not fully won it either – yet. That is because the war against Islamic terrorism is an ongoing project, one that has waxed and waned over the past quarter century, but remains active today. In one way or another, we have fought al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen; ISIS in Iraq, Syria, and Africa; Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and the Houthis in Yemen; al Shabaab in Somalia; and myriad other smaller affiliated groups across nearly every continent. We have degraded them all, but the threat has not been totally eliminated – nor can it ever be. The vitriolic hatred of the West, represented most clearly by the United States of America, that these Islamic terrorists maintain cannot be scoured from their brains. We cannot change their minds, nor their hearts. What we can do, however, is make it far more difficult for them to act on those malignant impulses. And that we have done well and can continue to do – if we have the willpower and fortitude to do so. Many may not remember the regnant feelings in the nation during the immediate aftermath of the attacks 25 years ago, but I do. At that point, the idea that this enormous attack would be a one-off and that no Islamic terrorist would succeed in doing anything remotely similar in terms of destruction or death toll in America felt like a pipedream. Everyone expected these sorts of catastrophic attacks to be the new normal, that everyday Americans would become targets across the country, wherever they were. People anticipated mass attacks on shopping malls, religious facilities, sporting events, concerts, and more. And, of course, everyone expected more hijackings and bombings of airplanes and airports. But, thanks to our vigilance, our law enforcement, our intelligence agencies, and our military, we were spared those horrendous outcomes – and not for lack of trying. Since 9/11, thousands of plots have been foiled or disrupted, saving countless lives in the process. There has been a great deal made of our ‘security theater’ and the infringements on civil liberties that came with things like the Patriot Act, but these interventions and others like them have been incredibly successful at preventing large-scale mass casualty attacks. In other countries, whether Indonesia, Spain, India, France, Belgium, or the United Kingdom, they have been less successful. Still, it is impossible in a free society to stop every lone terrorist while still maintaining our liberty – and we sadly have not stopped them all. But our success rate is astonishingly high, especially when viewed in light of the predictions at the time. A great deal of that is due to our focus on fighting terrorism abroad, stopping it from being able to grow its power and strike in our own country in a large-scale, coordinated fashion. And right now, on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Islamic terrorists and their global backers are weaker than they have been in decades, although the threat remains. Iran – the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism and the force behind much of the terroristic chaos of the past 20 years – is on the run, with a decimated military, a kneecapped nuclear program, a dead Ayatollah, and the inability to prevent us from exercising our will on them. The war against the mullahcracy, seeking to prevent it from gaining nuclear weapons and using them to destroy their enemies (that’s us!), is part and parcel of the War on Terror. In fact, it is about as close as we have come to directly, kinetically going after the actual sources of the problem, the funding networks that allow these cancerous jihadist movements to grow and expand. Tehran’s proxy network is similarly degraded, largely due to Israeli action after the atrocities of October 7 – the high-water mark of the Iranian axis. Since then, Hamas is being systematically destroyed in Gaza, Hezbollah is in shambles in Lebanon, and the Houthis are distracted by an internal Yemeni civil war, limiting their ability to project power against the US. All of these groups have been starved of Iranian funding through joint US-Israeli action, making it harder to execute their ignoble plans. Still, they remain in existence and continue to seek to harm us. ISIS, also known as the Islamic State, is a shell of its former self, being dispersed throughout the world – primarily finding a foothold in the ungoverned spaces of Africa – and having its physical ‘caliphate’ in the Levant destroyed and reconquered. Its ability to execute and inspire terror attacks in Western cities, once a major threat that was very hard to predict and interdict, has been seriously limited. It has instead focused on carrying out its terror locally, often in the form of killing Christians or Muslims they deem heretical. Their ability to inflict such terror on local populations has not completely abated, but it is significantly reduced from its heyday a decade or so ago. The US continues working with local partners to stem this terroristic tide, but there are challenges in terms of their enforcement ability that allow these groups to persist. Perhaps the most serious ‘defeat’ we took in the War on Terror, and one that is particularly relevant to the immediate aftermath of 9/11, is the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban and its return to enmity and terrorist sympathizing. When the Biden administration picked up and left Kabul in ignominy in August 2021, it handed the country – one that had been moderately stabilized and was requiring relatively little in terms of American investment – back to the same regime that aided and abetted the al Qaeda terrorists who carried out the murderous September 11 attacks. They left behind massive amounts of materiel, myriad Afghanis who had made the dangerous choice to support us, and 13 American soldiers who died during the evacuation. This was a deliberate policy choice, one that was completely unnecessary and counterproductive. It was also bipartisan. Both candidates in 2020 were dedicated to leaving Afghanistan to its fate and both parties had meaningful levels of support for the idea among their voting base. The loss of Afghanistan was, therefore, not inflicted from without, but from within.
And that is the biggest failure that we have seen in the aftermath of September 11: the manifestation of anti-American, anti-Western, Islamist sentiment here at home. This – not Afghanistan, not Iraq, not Iran – has been the most profound and destabilizing threat to our freedoms emanating from the jihadist movement. It has not resulted in dozens of large-scale mass casualty terrorist attacks, but it has led to the undermining of American culture, of American politics, and of American society. This problem, one that is rapidly metastasizing across the West – much more so in Europe than America thus far – has two key components: suicidal migration and integration policies that have imported millions of radicalized Islamists into our countries and failed to assimilate them, and the progressive left’s choice to align itself with this movement and use it as a cudgel against everything they despise about their own nations. Over the past 25 years, due to a plethora of factors ranging from conflict in the Middle East and ungoverned spaces in borderland regions to transnational human smuggling enterprises and the allure of economic prosperity in the West, migration flows from Islamic countries rose dramatically. But that is only one side of the ledger. Had governments across the West, including here in America, chosen to oppose those flows and enforce stricter immigration controls and a more thorough vetting of asylum claims, the problem we face today would be minimal. Instead, though, they incentivized those flows by embracing these new migrants and ushering them into our societies with nary a concern for how they would be integrated into those societies. The choice to support these large flows of people from Muslim-majority states – cultures often deeply opposed to everything the West stands for – was a poor one. The choice to support those flows while simultaneously discarding the idea that new migrants should assimilate into the dominant culture extant in the nation was a cataclysmic one. These new arrivals have largely maintained their own separate and distinct identity, keeping hold of the backwards and anti-civilizational values systems they lived under in their home countries. They are a society apart in many ways, living under socio-cultural rules that would normally be anathema to the developed liberal nations of the West – values systems that are often diametrically opposed to the liberalism that has made our nations uniquely successful. These self-segregated communities, built around ideologies of radical Islamism that are fundamentally incompatible with Western civilization, are easily exploited by the promise of jihad against the supposed infidel decadence that surrounds them. Many of the perpetrators of the successful attacks against Western nations in the past quarter-century have emerged from these insular communities, serving as something of a fifth column against our societies. But the real danger here is, paradoxically, not the threat of terrorist violence. It is the political activation of these communities and the cynical embrace of their noxious ideologies by the progressive left for partisan gain. This Red-Green Alliance, so named for the colors commonly representing socialism and Islamism, respectively, is a grave risk to modern liberal democracy across the West. And unlike the degraded state of the organized jihadist threat abroad, it is on the march. The left has ridden this alliance of convenience to electoral success in various countries and seeks to do so in even more. In that quest, they have allowed these unassimilated voting blocs to have an outsized role in coalition politics, kowtowing to their demands on issues like antisemitism, opposition to jihadism, and regulation of speech. They have outwardly celebrated or joined in Islamist marches to support terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, have downplayed or ignored evidence of rank antisemitism devolving into assault and intimidation, and have even made excuses for acts of Islamist terror carried out against their own fellow countrymen. When it comes to the United States, this alliance has become quite powerful over the past few years, with the rise of political figures like Mayor Zohran Mamdani in New York City, congressional candidate Adam Hamawy in New Jersey, senatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, and current congressmembers Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib from Minnesota and Michigan, respectively. Every last one of these figures embodies the Red-Green Alliance, pushing progressive socialist economics alongside Islamist hatred for American ideals, Western civilization, and the Jewish people. Their own words and associations – including support for the murderous ideology behind the September 11 attacks, direct relations to al Qaeda front groups, and close ties to convicted terrorists and terror fundraisers – should be enough to indict them as unfit for office, yet they have gained prominence among Democrats and look poised to enact a veritable takeover of one of America’s two major political parties, warping it to support their malignant creed. This unholy alliance of leftists and Islamists follows the progressive playbook to a T, using many classic rhetorical tropes to push their heinous brand of political activism. They embrace a false victimhood narrative, reverse causation to excuse murderous terrorism, and cry bigotry whenever they are pushed on these spurious claims. This is most commonly seen in the cowardly invocation of ‘Islamophobia’ at every turn when faced with criticism of this nakedly violent anti-Western ideology. This approach is nothing new, having been perfectly parodied by the late great comedian Norm Macdonald on Twitter in December 2016, but it has been ramped up meaningfully since the atrocities of October 7 and the outpouring of support for them among the Red-Green cohort in the West. This idea that opposition to a despicable, evil, murderous ideology is somehow bigoted or beyond-the-pale is absurd. It is only deployed as a cudgel against opponents of the Red-Green partnership, used instrumentally to automatically label legitimate criticism as racist and shut down dissent. When it comes to the horrific events of 9/11, this has been a constant meme. For decades now, the left has claimed that the real victims of the September 11 attacks are the Muslim communities who faced backlash for the actions of people completely unrelated to them. This is quite obviously (excuse my French) bullshit. Not only was the backlash essentially non-existent – there have been vanishingly few instances of anti-Muslim violence in the West, especially as compared to population figures – many of the communities that have purportedly been unfairly tarred with association to this violent dogma actually embrace it. This is a serious and growing problem, particularly as these sentiments are even stronger among younger Muslims and recent arrivals. Are all Muslims responsible for the attacks of 9/11? Absolutely not. But they are certainly not its primary victim group – that would be, contra the claims of the Red-Green cohort, Americans. And the widespread and increasing support for Islamist politics and jihadist violence, specifically against Jews, is not helping their case. The only reasons that this false victimhood narrative have been promulgated so widely on the left are that it degrades our historical memory of the atrocities that took place that day and allows for the reversal of blame and victimhood, privileging the aligned minority over the antagonistic majority. Let me be perfectly clear: the attacks of September 11 were perpetrated by Islamists in the name of Islam against ordinary Americans for the mere sin of being who they were, and they were cheered on at the time by broad swathes of the global Islamic community. That is a big problem and one that cannot be swept under the rug with cynical invocations of ‘Islamophobia’.
And that brings us to the other false narrative pushed by the Red-Green cohort around the events of 9/11: that America somehow deserved it. This has been part and parcel of the leftist and Islamist narrative since the day of the attacks, that American policy choices in the Middle East brought this completely foreseeable consequence down upon our heads. This trope has been pushed by prominent professors of Middle Eastern Studies, popular online influencers with huge megaphones and close ties to Democratic political superstars, and even the former pastor of the church attended by Barack Obama before his presidential run. And it is utter nonsense. First off, nothing America could do in terms of national policy toward Arab nations could ever justify the senseless murder of 3,000 American civilians. Our policies toward the region were not unduly destructive, nor did they deliberately impoverish or brutalize its people. They were normal decisions that would be taken by any major power seeking to make geopolitical strides in a far-off land. The biggest grievances espoused by people like Osama bin Laden and those who buy his rhetoric were our support for the world’s lone Jewish state against repeat genocidal onslaughts from its Arab neighbors, our choice to work with Arab monarchies to stabilize the region against violent, radical Islamist politics and Soviet influence, and our investment in the region’s energy sector. None of these come close to justifying the terrorism carried out on that Tuesday morning in September 2001. Even if they did, attacking our policies means attacking our government, not our people. And 9/11 was a deliberate attack on our people, ordinary Americans who were doing nothing more than going about their day. This was an assault on them directly as well as on our society as a whole. But when we abstract the real victims from the events that caused their deaths, we lose perspective and fail to understand the ground truth of what happened – which is precisely what the Red-Green cohort seeks. When we re-center those victims, the narrative completely collapses. Did the janitors, maintenance workers, and security guards who were killed deserve it? Did the commuters, subway drivers, and cabbies deserve it? Did the secretaries, paralegals, and bodega workers deserve it? Did the flight attendants, passengers, and pilots deserve it? Did the fathers, sons, and brothers deserve it? Did the mothers, sisters, and daughters deserve it? Did John W. Farrell, a loyal husband, dedicated father of four and my neighbor down the Jersey Shore, deserve it? Did his kids deserve to grow up without their dad? To go to college, get married, and have children entirely in his absence? What did he do to deserve his murder? What did they do to deserve this fate? These are the questions that must be asked of those who spout this abject nonsense. Do not let them claim ignorance. Make them state outright which of the 2,977 victims who were murdered that day deserved to be killed and why they deserved to die. And make them deal with the reality of what they are arguing – that American citizens should be killed by foreign terrorists for the crime of simply existing as Americans – instead of hiding behind vagaries and abstractions. This is the challenge of our time: whether we choose complacency in the face of this continued evil or whether we choose to confront it head-on and excise this cancerous coalition from the body politic. We cannot afford the former if we wish to survive as the America that we know and love. We cannot allow the Red-Green Alliance to overtake American politics and inculcate future generations with their sick ideology and warped narrative of the atrocities of September 11. Although jihadist terrorists may be on the run abroad, Islamism is on the march at home. The War on Terror is not over. When we think of it as being in the past – as the folks who seek to build a War on Terror memorial in Washington, DC do – we threaten our future. We may no longer care about Islamist terrorism, but Islamist terrorism sure does still care about us. Recognizing that reality and acting accordingly is the most important lesson we can take away from the devastation we saw 25 years ago today.
But it is not the only lesson. A far more profound revelation was handed down that day, one that, if we remember it, will lead us through any challenges we may face as a nation, including the rise of the progressive-Islamist faction here at home. And that is that no matter the circumstances, no matter the odds, no matter the danger facing us, Americans are courageous, selfless, generous, sacrificial, resilient, and valiant when times are tough. Because we were not only victims that horrendous day. We were heroes, too. I think of the brave men and women who found themselves on United Airlines Flight 93, a plane that had been hijacked and was on its way to being used as a missile to attack other Americans, likely in our nation’s capital. I think about the choices they had to make in the face of immense peril and certain death. I think about what it must have taken them to get up and rush the cockpit, overpowering the hijackers and crashing the plane into a field in rural Pennsylvania, saving hundreds, if not thousands of lives – at the cost of their own. Their courage in the worst situation imaginable is a testament to the American spirit. The words of one passenger, Todd Beamer, echo through history as a paean to action, even against all odds: “Let’s roll.” I think of Stephen Siller, the off-duty FDNY firefighter who donned his gear anyway, ran several miles through the shuttered Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, and emerged to try and save his fellow countrymen from the murderous assault that had been unleashed upon them. He never made it back alive, dying in the collapse of the towers while trying to rescue victims. I think of Rick Rescorla, the Vietnam veteran chief of security for Morgan Stanley in the South Tower, who ignored directives to shelter in place and directed nearly 3,000 of his charges to evacuate, saving their lives. He was last seen going back into the South Tower, looking for more people to help. His remains were never recovered. I think of Welles Crowther, the young equities trader and Boston College alumnus, who donned a red bandanna to protect his face from smoke and fire and brought over a dozen people to safety, including carrying an injured woman on his back down 17 flights of stairs. He died after going back into the flames to find more survivors. I think of the men and women who worked for months at Ground Zero to put out the fires, dig out survivors, clear rubble, and identify the deceased; many of whom died premature deaths due to the toxic chemicals and smoke they inhaled while doing these dangerous jobs. I think of the people who saw the towers being hit and immediately decided to sign up for the US military to avenge the murders of their fellow Americans. I think of the leaders who helped unite the country and bring us through one of the darkest nights our nation has ever faced. I think of the impromptu speech given by President George W. Bush while he was standing on the still-burning rubble just 3 days after the attack, in which he delivered perhaps the most impactful and stirring words ever spoken by an American politician this century: “I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” 
These are the truly representative stories from that day, the selfless and courageous acts of ordinary Americans to save the lives of their fellow citizens, often at the cost of their own. This is what America is. This is who we are. And just like the beautiful, gleaming, 1,776-foot-tall tower that was erected at the World Trade Center site – a building I watched go up when I lived in Manhattan – we can overcome any challenge and come back even stronger and better. That is what we do. Because we’re Americans, goddamnit, and we are the stewards of the greatest nation in the history of the world. Never forget the victims of 9/11. Never forget the perpetrators. Never forget the continuing dangers posed by Islamist terrorism. And never forget that the American spirit is indomitable and unbreakable. Twenty-five years later, that is a lesson we can all take to heart. God bless the United States of America.
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