24 Years On And Many Still Don’t Understand…
Twenty-four years on from the murderous attacks of September 11, 2001, and many who experienced that horrific day—and the immediate aftermath—still don’t get it; they still don’t understand what motivated 19 hijackers to orchestrate acts they knew would ignite a war. Yes, many still recall the horrors of that day, and many more think they understand, thanks to all the recounts they’ve heard and images they've seen, even though they weren’t born yet. But few truly understand the horrors of that day, and even fewer comprehend the motivation behind it, the catalyst.
And that’s the lingering problem.
Two thousand nine hundred seventy-seven people were murdered on September 11, 2001—2,753 at the World Trade Center, 184 at the Pentagon, and 40 souls on Flight 93. They were slaughtered by 19 hijackers, all devout Muslims—15 from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates, and one each from Egypt and Lebanon. For the murdered, the slaughtered, their ends came out of the blue skies of another promising day. For the murderers, the terrorists, it was the end of a well-thought-out and planned attack to make a larger statement.
Think about that. Two thousand nine hundred seventy-seven people’s lives extinguished; 2,977 families forever disrupted because a group of fanatics wanted to make a statement. I’m sure Charlie Kirk’s family understands the insanity of that idea.
And what was that statement? That they saw the free-world West as their foe in a clash of civilizations and a foe to be killed by any means, at any time, always. So, they did. They flew three hijacked airplanes into three buildings, slaughtering thousands: some by blunt-force trauma, others who choked to death on smoke and fumes, others who burned to death or plummeted hundreds of feet to slam into the Earth. Forty others were incinerated in an instant in a Pennsylvania field after bravely fighting back, or at least trying to.
In the hours immediately following the attacks, our elected officials, potentates, and media scions urged everyone to think with a level head; they urged us not to fall prey to “Islamophobia” or to place blame on any one demographic. They told us that it was a group of radicals and that an entire culture shouldn’t bear the blame for their actions.
Twenty-four years later, I can’t say that was the wisest way to approach the issue.
Yes, we all—all of us—needed to educate ourselves on the so-called “great religion” of Islam. Many of us did, and we paid a price for trying to spread the truth about this violent, conquest-centered dogma. Many of us who explained Islam’s tenets—jihad, al taqiyya, etc.—were censored and even demonized by those who just didn’t want to admit the facts of the matter.
Western society made a grand mistake by providing a blanket absolution for acts of murder without saddling the Islamic community with the responsibility to own those acts—acts whose genesis was of their religious dogma, without placing the burden of rectification on Muslim shoulders so as to prevent violence and murder committed in the name of Islam from even happening again—much like the reformation that occurred within the Christian dogma.
And so the culture of violent conquest has been allowed not only to continue, but expand; to encroach further on societies that exist anathema to their misogynistic bully-culture.
Around the world, the Islamic culture is advancing, sometimes through violence, terrorism, and murder, illustrated by the murderous acts of Hamas on October 7, 2023, in Gaza, or Iran’s ruthless oppression of the indigenous Persians in a land they hijacked to incubate their radical ideology, but most often by land and cultural occupation through “immigration,” which the Western free-world is delinquent in understanding. In both cases, the Islamist movement is encroaching on lands where indigenous cultures are antithetical to the Islamic culture.
This, in and of itself, is not enough to indict the whole of Muslim society or the Islamist culture, as unsymbiotic with individual freedom as it is per the edict of its dogmatic texts. But when you consider that an overwhelming majority of foreign-born Muslims in Western Europe and the US refuse to assimilate, well, now we have a very serious problem, and one the “establishment” has made extremely hard to discuss.
I have personal friends who are Muslim but who have assimilated into Western culture, and more fierce proponents for freedom, liberty, and opportunity for all are seldom found. Common to each of them is this: They insist that a reformation of the Islamic faith is necessary to expunge the hatred—especially towards Jews—and justification for the use of violence as a means of expansion. They also see the chances of that occurring as slim because the Quran, in the Islamic faith, is considered a text of the literal words of Allah (their god) and not subject to interpretation. Therefore, it cannot be reformed; it cannot be altered. The tenets stay as they are.
And so the global conundrum over Islam, its violent nature, and its bloodlust for global supremacy—according to their own religious text, not my opinion—will continue.
Here is something to consider as we continue to listen to the disingenuous debate over Israel’s right to defend itself against violent, murderous, Islamist aggression and the “plight” of the Palestinians, who no other Islamist country cares to absorb into their society for the chaos and carnage they perpetrate everywhere they go.
At the end of World War II, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, as the titular head of the Muslim world at that time and whose fatwas aligned the Middle Eastern Muslim world with Hitler’s Nazis, did not surrender to the Allied forces. Instead, he fled from Germany as the Third Reich was collapsing to parts unknown. The Muslim world, because of that, is still officially at war with the free world.
As we reflect on the slaughter of 2,977 people on this, the 24th rememberance of the September 11th, 2001, attacks on the United States by 19 devout Islamofascist terrorists, it is obvious we still have to address the issue of Islam’s incompatibility with the free Western world and how we are losing the clash of civilizations, if not by the continuation of their violent deeds, then through the metastasization of their numbers.
To all those affected by the events on this day 24 years ago—to my brothers of the badge and their families, especially—I remain standing with you in your grief.
