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, years have passed without significant Islamic terrorist attacks taking place on American soil. In past surveys, concern about Islamic terrorism ranks in the low single digits behind everything else.
In 9/13, culture wars, COVID, pronouns and other concerns 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.
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.
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.
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.
Americans recalibrate quickly. We believe that the world is always changing. TikTok, machine learning, quiet quitting, 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 then 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.
The demographic conditions are coming 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.
Our otherwise excellent second President, John Adams, kicked the Islamic War Against Everybody down the road but his successor, Thomas Jefferson, had read the Quran and knew what he was dealing with. He sent the Marines right to the shores of Tripoli and trashed the bastards where they lived. The reign of terror of the Barbary Pirates was effectively ended, and although the raiding and slaving by other Islamic pirates practicing their Religion of Peace continued throughout Europe and against Atlantic and Mediterranean shipping for some years to come it never assumed the horrible proportions of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Unfortunately it pops up from time to time now, too.
Daniel, you speak of Americans seeing the past, even yesterday, as dead and gone. Note the one-day news media mourning for Queen Elizabeth, WWII’s last surviving leader, or the near-total ignoring of the assassination of Former PM Shinzo Abe, and then back to the usual stupidity. A bit like Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergon’s world. But remember William Faulkner’s remark, “The past is never dead, It’s not even past.” We need to heed Faulkner’s advice now more than ever.
if it doesn’t fit into the lens of the narrative, it didn’t happen. The debates in the early 19th century were conscious debates about where we wanted the country to go. They had foresight and so they could make decisions. These days only the side of evil seems to exercise foresight.
Death and destruction are commonplace for some but the memory of 9/11 for me is some CNN reporter who actually seemed to resent the jumpers for reminding people this was real. That’s why none of this is surprising, only ominous.
That was a long time ago but nothing has changed.
By some measures Bin Laden succeeded but not because he dragged people into reality. Only because they were lacking the capacity to look inside.
Some people want only the superficial unity that existed before it was tested. In that sense they are 9/10 forever. On some clear skied day.
It would take a whole lot more to wake up people than a few thousand dead. Or for that matter little girls shredded by shrapnel outside a concert. The media will dig up a narrative, change people’s minds, deploy weapons of mass distraction and the show will go on.
I don’t know at this point if millions dead would do it.
A few thousand dead woke up a lot of people because 2001, for all of its cultural issues, was a saner time before everyone had their brains wired to a Skinner box.
It was an untested time, that’s why the skies look look bluer. If anything could wake people who can say? We know only that someone is awake, If people choose their media lies then that is also a choice.
As for girls shredded by shrapnel we are as completely aware of this as we are of girls in Rotherham. Just as my grandmother was completely aware of troops coughing up lungs and blood after near drowning in water burning with oil.
There is nothing new in this except delusion. When it comes to delusion there are plenty of choices like Christopher Hitchens who is more Chamberlain than Chamberlain and all the pleasant lies.
Excuse me, his brother Peter who is so many respects so much worse.
I use the name Cassanndra because I am unfortunate enough to have read a lot of history and today is just another turn around the sun to see what’s coming.
The muslims’ jihad is in 3 stages.: immigrate, infiltrate the gov’t and then sharia law, that of course does not strike out any of the murderous and enslaving verses in Chapt.9 of the Koran, where it doesn’t pretend to be peaceful.
Houston is literally surrounded with their mosques, aka arms depots. At a pre-planned time that city would fall.
Our cities are trashed, it can only be hoped they go after those hollowed out places and not across the continent’s nfrastructure. The Communist regime in power will do nothing to bring it back. And Communism would be a cake walk compared to Sharia.
What do you say to those who believe our government was in on it and that the collapse of the three towers (don’t forget WTC 7) was due to explosives, not jetliners? I used to dismiss these theories, but having looked into it a little bit more in recent years, it’s hard to square the facts with the official narrative. That’s not to say Islamic terror isn’t a real problem, but so is government terror on its own citizens.
Yeah, those planes everybody saw fly into the Towers were special effects from Hollywood. So were all the dead people.
I don’t pretend to know how it all went down and what was fake and what was real, but when you go back and watch the videos of the towers collapsing (including tower 7) and then try to square it with the official narrative about the fires causing steel failure, it just doesn’t add up. It looks like they were blown up in controlled demolitions, and that’s what most people would believe had they not been manipulated into thinking otherwise by our corrupt media and government who seem to have something to hide. A lot of architects and engineers have gone on record saying that the planes could not have brought down the towers without explosives.
Thanks, Jeff!
I’ve been saying what I’d say on some social media site but to no avail . But I won’t say what I say here because some of you, including the esteemed author, are my friends and are gentlemen and I am a lady.
Now go spread your CG theory and other BS and I am sure it will soon slide into bizarre anti-Srmitism. It’s always the Mossad and poor Mr Rothschild (our neighborhood shoemaker back in the Bronx- why does everyone blame him?!?!).