Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
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.
somehistory says
I have a pretty much regular schedule for getting things done, so I frequently look at the clock. Often, I look when the hands are on 9 and eleven after the hour. I can’t help but think of that awful day every time I see those numbers. And every time I see in the news something about a nine one one operator or someone calling that emergency service.
Most people are too busy with mundane things to notice that mozlums are increasing in numbers in our population and that everywhere they are already, they are committing terror.
Infidel says
The real problem arose from people seeing and thinking that this was an Afghanistan and Iraq issue, rather than an islam issue. And since 9/11 didn’t get people to see it, I don’t see what can!
PMK says
The first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993, should have stirred many people. But ‘only’ six people died and the towers still stood. The goal of that bombing was to knock one tower into the other at midday and kill tens of thousands of people. Bill Clinton treated it as a criminal issue instead of the act of war that it was. After reading about the people who built that bomb (one was a Kuwaiti chemist or engineer working in an American firm), we should have realized there was no point in ever defending Kuwait or Saudi Arabia or any other Muslim nation. In the years between the First Gulf War and 9/11, globalization went full throttle. It was ‘the end of history’ and no one wanted to see the threats that remained. Not even the attacks on US embassies in Africa and on the USS Cole could make America’s (and Europe’s) leaders admit the truth.
Of course we’re awake but our leaders have a vested interest in defending globalization and the new world order, rather than the freedom of the American people. They seek to break down international barriers and make us citizens of the world. Anyone who can make it to our southern border can walk right in. Political correctness means we can’t ‘judge’ all Muslims by the actions of their co-religionists.
I fear the time for people to wake up has passed. The next attack on the US will be blamed on the ‘enemies of democracy’, aka American conservatives who value our heritage and freedom.
somehistory says
They condemn even the “judging” of islam…as they do no other *belief* system. We are not supposed to criticize the belief, which means we can’t tell the Truth about it.
If islam can’t be judged, blamed or criticized, mozlums can act on their belief without fear of punishment. they intend to take over and the “leaders” want the rest of us blind to that fact. And if we already see, we must not be allowed to speak it.
Yes, the next attack will be blamed on biden’s …and bo’s…enemies, not the mozlums who perpetrate it.
recall the guy who crashed his plane some years ago, and the *news* said he was a “Christian” *right* leaning, domestic? In fact, he was on the same side as the rest of the “left.”
James Lincoln says
somehistory says,
“If islam can’t be judged, blamed or criticized, mozlums can act on their belief without fear of punishment.”
Yes.
And may I submit that this is also true of antifa / BLM’s “mostly peaceful” protests..
somehistory says
Yes, James, those groups also are set up as not touchable by the Truth.
gravenimage says
Good point, PMK. I had read about this, but just considered it “crazy terrorists”–I didn’t assume it had much to do with what most Muslims thought or with Islam itself, and I didn’t think that the WTC would be targeted again. Embarrassing to admit now.
gravenimage says
9/13
………………………………..
Fine piece by Daniel Greenfield. I was concerned that after the 20th anniversary of 9/11 that there would be almost no coverage this year, and sadly that is indeed the case.
9/11 was a big wake-up call for me, and I hoped it would be for everyone in the West–and at first I thought it would be. First I searched for as much information on Islam as I could find, but much of it seemed to be a whitewash–so I read the Qur’an and discovered the Hadith and Sira. Even though I knew nothing about the chronological sequence of the Qur’an, nor about abrogation, I was still shocked by how violent the text was, especially towards unbelievers. I knew a bit about Islamic history, but also learned more, as well as what contemporary Islamic clerics have to say. In 2006 I discovered Jihad Watch.
But sadly I also saw that all too many wanted to forget as quickly as possible, and many even went out of their way to whitewash Islam–and that this included many people I had respected. I was appalled and disgusted.
Many have gone from honest ignorance–nothing to be proud of, but easily fixable–to *willful ignorance*, which is not. And it keeps getting worse.
Today more Muslims are flooding into the West, and saying anything critical about the horrors of Islam is less and less “politically correct”. Suicidal madness, but very near the norm now.
James Lincoln says
gravenimage says,
“First I searched for as much information on Islam as I could find, but much of it seemed to be a whitewash…”
I had the same experience.
Then I discovered Jihad Watch, which changed everything.
John ..Smith says
I had a similar experience to the both of you in the way I had to search for it. For along time I had this feeling that there was something not quite right with islam, so I started looking at videos on Youtube. If I remember rightly I believe the first video I watched was called Fitna and the same evening I found Bill Warner’s channel, at the end of that evening my eyes had been opened and I was awake.
It’s a pity though that people still have to find the truth about islam in this way. Those that lead us should be more aware, and do something to get this important information out to the people. Otherwise islam will continue to engulf us all.
PMK says
My introduction to Islam after 9/11 was Ibn Warraq’s book, Why I Am Not a Muslim.: It was published in 1995 but I found it in a bookstore. It was comprehensive and easy to read. Jihad Watch came later.
somehistory says
I read a book on religion back in the 80’s and it had a chapter on islam. It did not tell the “whole” truth, left out the ugliness, the violence, the hate.
then, I began to meet, work with, work for, “serve” as in they were client/customers, see for medical issues, live next to, see n action, mozlums.
then, I began a study of anti-terrorism at a university and found out the *whys* of their terrorism. During the time I needed to write a paper on the subject, I found this site and from one of Mr. Spencer’s books, I learned a heck of a lot more than I ever wanted to know.
So, first I *experienced” islam firsthand without being mozlum, and then I learned the basics of why they are what and who they are.
the subject is taboo and when someone tries to inform, they are shot down as being bigoted, racist, and phobic. Otherwise, more people could be made aware of how evil, how gruesome, how demonic, islam is and the intent mozlums have toward the rest of us.
somehistory says
I believe, John, that “those that lead us,” are using islam to quell the rest of us. To some extent, they *know* islam, and believe they can control mozlums. Like the old woman in “Lake Placid” used the alligators.
And due to that, they don’t want the public to know anything about islam or mozlums and their intent.
John ..Smith says
Could well be Somehistory, but I also believe that those that do know are just to frightened to say anything. Unfortunately there are far to few politicians out there that have the same courage as Geert Wilder.
somehistory says
I agree, John. Very few have the courage of Mr. Wilder.