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As another 9/11 anniversary arrives, we are not in 9/10, a world before the fall of the towers, nor 9/12, the world that was born in the aftermath of the attacks, rather we are in 9/13.
In 9/13, the attacks of September 11 are not considered especially significant.
In 9/13, concern about Islamic terrorism ranks in the low single digits behind everything else.
In 9/13, a thousand trending concerns, some vital and some completely unimportant, have vastly eclipsed not only the barbaric mass murder of thousands, but the recognition that we are at war.
And that war is far from over.
In 9/13, the people who once specialized in talking about the threat of Islam have increasingly moved on. And it’s hard to blame them. No one really wants to hear it anymore. It’s yesterday’s news.
America’s Islamic population is growing. The open border doesn’t just bring in drug dealers and gang members, but massive numbers of people from the Muslim world. The Afghan airlift and visas will probably end up importing at least a quarter of a million as family reunification kicks in. Our national demographics are being transformed with the same eventual outcome as Europe.
But it’s 9/13. When I write articles about Islam, they perform worse than anything else. And I don’t have the same raw feeling toward the day that I used to. The ash used to haunt my nightmares. I snuck past the law enforcement and military presence downtown to make it to the site, the twisted mess of what was left, because I needed to know up close that what I had seen was real. But it’s not the same.
I hope it is for you. But I don’t think it is for most of us.
Back then, afterward, I wondered how it was possible to move on and to forget. I was still young then and I concluded that the answer had to be time. With time, pain dulls, what seems fresh grows stale. Such things were abstractions then. I hadn’t lived through phases of history or seen generations change.
That’s no longer true. I’ve seen how people can change. How they can go mad. And how they can forget.
9/13 is all about forgetting.
9/13 means we’ve done it. We fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s time to move on now. Maybe take a day to remember the people who died in the towers, in a field, bow our heads and go on with what really matters today.
What’s the alternative? Fighting a forever war?
After WWI, most people were done with world wars. But world wars weren’t done with them. That’s a poor analogy because the Jihad isn’t some nationalistic European grudge match. It’s a thousand-year assault on the rest of the world that will not stop just because we’ve decided to move on.
Early on WW2, wags joked that it was the Bore War because nothing seemed to be happening on the western front. The jokes made sense at the time. But they stopped being funny really fast.
We’re in the Bore War now. But thousand-year-old wars don’t remain boring forever.
Americans recalibrate quickly. We believe that the world is always changing. TikTok, AI, lazy girls, this week’s trend. The past is… past. We quickly forgot about the airline hijackings once they became yesterday’s news. We’re more than ready to forget Islamic terrorism all over again.
But Islam does not forget.
Reality is what exists even when you stop paying attention to it. Ideology and opinion don’t matter. Marxist ideologies claim to know the future and believe it will be dramatically different from the past. But the only reliable way to predict history, as Patrick Henry told a bunch of men long since dead, is with the lamp of experience. The best way to know the future is to know the past.
And sometimes that may even mean living in the past.
Living in the nanosecond has not served our sanity, our reality or our culture very well. But it means that we are always leaving things behind. History keeps vanishing in the rearview mirror. The outrage of the moment fills our minds. And then the next and the one after that. And all the others to come.
September 11 is not just a day. It was a wake-up call. And many of us woke up. But it’s easier to wake up than it is to stay awake. And yet the war we’re in isn’t going anywhere. It’s only getting worse.
Islamists and Islamic terrorists accomplished their main purposes which were to drag America into political and military engagements with them, ones that they were bound to win through sheer staying power, while they infiltrated our political system and spurred massive immigration into our country.
Islamic terrorism became a partisan issue. And then it ceased to be even that. Democrats have embraced Islam and Republicans, as usual, are tagging along for the ride. Even the conservative landscape is dotted with apologists, truthers, conspiracists and other sympathizers. Meanwhile, we’re losing.
The demographic conditions are falling into place for a next wave of Islamic terrorism which will depend not on internationally coordinated attacks, but domestic terror cells following up on the ‘lone wolves’ like the Boston Marathon bomber and the Pulse nightclub shooter.
Every few weeks another Islamic terror plot is broken up. I wrote about them sometimes. Sometimes someone even reads the article.
It’s 9/13 after all.
Before 9/11, I had a sense of a dimly understood future rushing toward us. I still have that sense now.
Islamic terrorism is not the only thing that matters. It’s not the only thing that will determine our survival. But it is one of those things. And it’s the one that we’ve forgotten. And one of these days we will once again wake up to blood and horror and mass death. Let us hope that this time we stay awake.
islam has been at war with civilization since 622 ANNO DOMINI.
Today is a great day for islam………. candy is being passed out all over the muslim world.
This is why you will not see any “shame” by muslims who reject what was done by muslims on 9/11 and are out there marching on the streets denouncing the evil of islam and the curran.
Where are the “moderate” muslims………….. not out on the streets protesting the curran.
Yes, two traumas that day for me – right there in NYC I watched two planes hit buildings, then one building disintegrate with people in it. I called home to say Goodbye just in case. All that and more was trauma number one.
Trauma number two was my muslim coworkers cheering it as it happened. (we were quite close with a view). These were my “friendly coworkers.” Making sense of that took some time. It makes sense now. Loud and clear.
Its never quite 9/13 for me.
Nothing has changed Mr. Greenfield, nothing has changed. Philosophy is what determines the choices a man makes and the course of history.
“Religion is an early form of philosophy, the first attempts to explain the universe, to give a coherent frame of reference to man’s life and a code of moral values, were made by religion, before men graduated or developed enough to have philosophy.” – Ayn Rand
Why do Muslims do what they do? They follow the religious, supernatural, mystic, primitive, philosophy of Islam.
What is destroying the West? Immanuel Kant’s anti-reason philosophy. His philosophy of self-sacrifice and altruism inspired by Plato and Christianity. Jesus Christ is the ultimate sacrificial victim, sacrificial animal, human sacrifice. That the West has held up as the moral ideal for 2,000 years.
If self-sacrifice is the highest moral ideal and virtue then America and the West are being very virtuous.
Self-sacrifice or self-preservation, pick one or the other, you can’t have both. Jesus Christ or Joh Galt, pick one or the other, you can’t have both. The philosophy of Objectivism or religion, pick one or the other, you can’t have both.
Reason and Objectivism will save America, religion and secular unreason are destroying it.
“America’s inner contradiction was the altruist-collectivist ethics. Altruism is incompatible with freedom, with capitalism and with individual rights. One cannot combine the pursuit of happiness with the moral status of a sacrificial animal….
From her start, America was torn by the clash of her political system with the altruist morality. Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society. Today, the conflict has reached its ultimate climax; the choice is clear-cut: either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its consequences of freedom, justice, progress and man’s happiness on earth—or the primordial morality of altruism, with its consequences of slavery, brute force, stagnant terror and sacrificial furnaces.” – Ayn Rand
As a wartime vet, I still live in 9-11 as many other vets do, Daniel. We haven’t, nor shall we, forget. Ever.
Sadly, you, Daniel, and I are increasingly in the minority. See my comment appearing after today’s article by Bruce Bawer. You’ll understand. Thanks.
I didn’t even realize today was 9 11 until I woke up and turned on my TV. I hope nothing bad happens.
Fake President Biden is in Alaska today for some weird, seditious reason, not that the dotard knows where he is or which day it is or cares either way. He’s such a scumbag and his handlers are downright evil.
I know an Eskimo and I can say they hate him. Vern the Eskimo. A great guy.
Where are John Wilkes Booth, Charles Guiteau, Leon Czolgosz or Lee Harvey Oswald when we need them? Or maybe those “Mars Attacks” freaks could blow up the White House and Capitol Building.
I seriously wish most of those scum would die. There are good guys and gals in Congress but most of them are trash.
“Quinn — The Mighty Eskimo” is without a doubt one of my favorite empowering, happy, songs of all time. It makes me feel like I’m a child again and the world is a wondrous place to triumph in.
THX 1138,
This is probably the best thing I’ve seen you post – keep this up!
Exactly.
Hats off, young one.
At the foot of the grave I weep, and I mean literally, for my blessed country.
Anthony Quinn Played Quinn in the movie.
He always played ethnic roles so well even though he was Mexican. Greek, Arab, whatever, he was good.
Good song show. Thanks! 🙂
And the Big Apple shows its concern for the memories of those who died that day in 2001 by setting up loud speakers to call Islams to prayer and clogging up the streets
It is not the city that does this. It is the corrupt leaders.
I know the NYC of the past has moved on but millions of Nyers have not moved on and don’t want to hear the chest thumping conquest call.
>>and don’t want to hear the chest thumping conquest call.
That hasn’t stopped enough people from voting for appeasers.
At the end of the day, and because of the follies of Western Civ, Islam will win. Why is this? Easy:
– fertility
– family formation
– belief in a higher power
– non-enfranchisement of females.
If you don’t recognize or consider the last important you have not noticed the increased – vastly-increased – number of columns discussing the impact of a feminized West, nor do you understand that all our current social pathologies are downstream from suffrage and the feminism it wrought; all begin with “Oh that poor…: Illegal alien, socially-promoted student, crappy teacher doing her best, incarcerated thug, etc. These pathologies include, of course, below-replacement fertility, without which no civilization can survive – it WILL be displaced by a more fertile society.
Western Civ rose for millennia without female suffrage. If we are to continue, we must reverse that. It’s an existential, binary choice: Freedom and prosperity – OR – female suffrage.
Reality sets in, It takes both parties to get us where we are now, down the hill toward the end. The whole world is in a crisis now, not just the United States.
“The farther you are from the last one……..the nearer you are to the next.”
That applies to earthquakes and Muslim terror attacks.
Islam has been attacking the West for 1400 years.
I doubt we’ve seen the last of it.
THX 1138,
How will ‘reason and objectivism’ save America? I’d like you to clearly lay out what would be needed to ‘save America’.
Imagine that the majority of Americans lived according to the philosophy that you espouse. What, then, would be the result of such thinking – what actions would America take to preserve herself (thinking about immigration, Islam, feminism, transgenderism, LGBTQ+, birth rates, etc., etc., and so on and so forth)? I’m really curious.
Alexander Scipio in a comment below (September 12, 2023 at 1:35 am) made some interesting observations about why Islam would ultimately win:
‘– fertility
– family formation
– belief in a higher power
– non-enfranchisement of females.’
From what you have stated in previous posts, you (THX 1138) are all for LGBTQ+ and abortion – as well as an individualist lifestyle (much like we see today: people choosing to have small families – or none – in favour of pursuing their on ‘happiness’, etc., instead of being bogged down with a load of kids around the ankles.
At any rate, it’s quite clear the Mohammedans are outbreeding Americans and Europeans.
It’s evident that western women are ‘at liberty’ (found in most work places), but not that common in the home – looking after children (many single parent families – too, usually a mother raising the kids, the boy having no father figure). Young western women are found in bars and clubs engaging frequently in ‘free love’ most weekends, etc. Educational establishments are dominated by women – to the further detriment of boys.
There has been a massive decline in ‘church’ attendance – building their supposed spiritual life around their hedonistic lifestyle.
The militaries of some countries is being filled with, what appear to be, mentally unstable individuals.
Meanwhile, the Mohammedan has large families; women are kept in a submissive state. Men are patriarchal heads of their homes. Mohammedans pray 5 times a day ( & Mosque regularly). I could go on.
I can see why the ‘natural man’ would look to return to a strong Catholic foundation – the traditional family & marriage; faith in God – a bulwark against invading Islam (Crusades).
Nevertheless, I await, with anticipation, the solutions you have to these issues from your philosophical perspective.
The important fact about islam is that it is a social construct masquerading as a religion. A creation of the Caliph of Damascus to unify the arab conquerers of the Mediterranean, is has just as much factual foundation as Scientology. The tenets of islam are to lie, chest, steal, conquer, and force submission (peace) on the whole world in the name of the mythical prophet of the moon god Allah. No “freedom of religion” argument applies to the practitioners of this political system. To tolerate this practice in our land is no different than to tolerate National Socialism or communism. A view of government that amnesties the evil of these organizations is culturally and civically suicidal.
Islam must be expunged from the western world.
The domestic Left is doing so much harm with its open borders and gender games that the possibility of Islamic terror is to the side, rightly or not.