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Twenty-five years after nineteen Islamist terrorists murdered nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, a familiar sickness has returned. Public institutions now treat the plain facts of September 11, 2001, as a self-invoked embarrassment to be managed instead of a crime to be named. They sanitize language, invert causality, and lecture the living about “Islamophobia,” while the dead are reduced to a teaching aid. This is historical vandalism.
The latest exhibit comes from Canada’s state-funded Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. An internal memo from Basem Boshra, senior director of journalistic standards and public trust, instructed staff: “Do not refer to the Sept. 11 attacks as terrorist attacks.” The preferred phrasing reduced mass murder to “hijackings” that “led to passenger jet crashes.”
CBC later hid behind a longstanding policy of using “terrorist” only with attribution—the same dodge it has used for Hamas and Hezbollah. The message is unmistakable: naming the act as terrorism is treated as an editorial risk. The attackers’ own declared war on the “infidel” is not.
That same inversion has now reached American classrooms. In California, the North Monterey County Unified School District approved a required ethnic studies course that walks students through critical race theory, “whiteness,” the Wheel of Power/Privilege, settler colonialism, and “Islamophobia.”
In a unit on “Othering and Belonging,” the curriculum claims that “9/11 made the already existing prejudices against Arab and Muslim Americans more obvious and shameless.” It then cites Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to America” as evidence that the United States was “intentionally targeting Muslim communities.” Jihad is defined as an Arabic word meaning “striving or struggling, especially with a praiseworthy aim.”
The lesson turns the victims of a coordinated suicide-massacre into the moral problem and treats the architect of that massacre as a source of historical insight. This isn’t education. It’s ideological laundering.
Meanwhile, the man who called himself the operational mastermind of the plot, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, still waits for trial. A military judge recently set a date of June 2028—more than a quarter-century after the attacks and two decades after Mohammed’s capture. The case has crawled through legal wrangling over CIA interrogations, collapsed plea deals, and pretrial fights over evidence.
Mohammed and three co-defendants face war-crimes charges for the murder of 2,977 people on a single morning. The slowness of justice doesn’t erase the facts of the crime. It does, however, give revisionists time to rewrite the story while the accused sit in Guantanamo.
Honesty requires saying what the attackers themselves said. The Islam practiced by the men who flew the planes, and by the networks that trained them, is not merely a private faith in the Western sense. It is a comprehensive theocratic system claiming authority over law, politics, family, war, and the status of nonbelievers. The Quran and the recorded practice of its founder do not place unbelievers on equal footing within a neutral civic order. They cast them as people to be converted, subordinated, fought, or slaughtered.
Jihad, for the devout Islamist, isn’t merely an inner struggle. History and the attackers’ own words reveal it as a mandate of conquest, one that can sanctify martyrdom and mass murder. The 9/11 hijackers didn’t board those aircraft in a moment of private spiritual confusion. They trained, planned, coordinated, and accepted that they would slaughter thousands of civilians—office workers, firefighters. Police officers, EMS personnel, airline passengers, and Pentagon staff—because they believed they were waging war against the infidel in the name of Allah. They did it anyway.
That wasn’t “resistance.”
It wasn’t “blowback” that somehow excuses the act.
It was Islamist terrorism.
The free West has spent years apologizing for its own justified outrage. Every time a government broadcaster refuses to say “terrorist,” every time a school district hands students Bin Laden’s manifesto as “proof” that America was the real aggressor, the message to the next generation is the same: your anger is the problem, not the ideology that produced the attacks.
That posture is a gift to the totalitarian strain within political Islam. A dogma that, by its own texts and historical record, seeks supremacy over unbelievers won’t be disarmed by sensitivity training.
Pushback begins with language. The attacks of September 11, 2001, were acts of Islamist terrorism. Period. Dot. Not a “tragedy.” Not “hijackings that led to crashes.” Not a catalyst that merely exposed preexisting American prejudice. Nineteen men, acting on a doctrine of holy war, murdered nearly 3,000 people and intended to murder more.
Institutions that can’t say that plainly, without hedging, have already chosen a side. They have chosen the comfort of euphemism over the memory of the dead.
Memory is not hatred. It is the bare minimum owed to the people who jumped from burning towers rather than burning to an agonizing death inside them.
Anything less is cowardly surrender.
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