Forgetting the war doesn’t leave it behind.
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.
Tony Naim says
To eliminate Sharia’s security threat, American foreign policy towards Islamic states must focus on 3 goals:
1- abolish polygamy
2- abolish the code of Dhimmitude from Sharia . It is a system of religious apartheid
3-abolish the dogma of abrogation , for it permits the use of violence to spread islam
Walter Sieruk says
The Twin World trade Center Towers took many years to construct much planning, dedication skill talent, effort to create to those two grand masterpieces of architecture and art.
Nevertheless those dangerous deadly destructive jihadists of al Qaeda the jihad against America completely destroyed them both on September 11, 2001 , all within a few hours by those scheming Muslim villains of the Islamic terrorist network.
The ancient Roman philosopher and statesman, Lucius Annaeus Seneca had written wisdom which may be applied that day of 9/11 . For Seneca had written, “Things emerge by slow degrees and then rush to destruction.”
Walter Sieruk says
That jihad watch article ends with the statement” 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. ”
Therefore, don’t let them fool you, the many apologists for Islam is will endeavor to set up a smokescreen to hide the reality of the truth about the violence and deadly essence of Islam by making the bogus claim that the al Qaeda operatives mass murderer on 9/11 were not real Muslims and that they were breaking the laws of the Qu ‘ran by their violence and deadly actions.” The apologists for Islam will further make the totally false claim that “Those terrorists on 9/11 were only criminals who hijacked the peaceful religion of Islam for Politics.”
Those outrageously false claims are weak attempt of damage control for the image of Islam to the West. For the “holy book” of Islam the Qu ‘ran. For the Qu ‘ran instruct in Sura 9:111. Muslims who are engaging the jihad that “The believer’s fight in Allah’s Cause, they slay and are slain ,they kill and are killed “ That’s just what happened on September 11, 2001 the jihadists of al Qaeda “killed and were killed” in those 9/11 jihad attacks against both humankind and America. The Quran also teaches in Sura 9:123 to that jihad –minded Muslims behavior towards non-Muslims “let them find harshness in you…” Those Islamic attacks on 9/11 were indeed very “harsh.” As Sura 2:191 instructs “kill the disbeliever wherever you find them.” That’s a very strange kind of “peaceful religion” if there ever was one.
Just to site one more out on many from the Qu ‘ran about the instruction of deadly violence is Sura 47:4. Which instructs “Whenever you encounter unbelievers strike off their heads until you make a great slaughter among them …” The terrible harsh reality is that using jet planes as missiles as those jihadist/ Muslims did of September 11, sure made a greater “slaughter among them” than sword can.
The American people to the actual deadly nature of Islam before it’s too late.
Rarely says
That the memory of 9/11 and other earth shattering events become less meaningful over time (very naturally in order not to go crazy) it is precisely for that reason that they must be taught in our schools.
Ask the average 20 year old just two questions to illustrate the need. Those questions are:
1) When was WWll?
2) Who were we fighting against?
Be sure to be sitting down. The most destructive war in human history ended just 78 years ago and our kids know absolutely nothing about it. Chances are many will answer – “You mean there were two of them?”.
Like WWl, 9/11 should have been a wakeup call.
“Lest we forget” should not just be a rallying cry for those who were directly effected but for western civilization as a whole. I won’t hold my breath.
James Lincoln says
Rarely says,
“The most destructive war in human history ended just 78 years ago and our kids know absolutely nothing about it.”
And to think that I feel bad for not knowing all of the WWII finer details…
Rarely says
JL
I suspect that you know when it was, who our enemies were and who our allies were. You probably even know who started it. However, I may be wrong. I was wrong once before — I thought I was mistaken but I was wrong.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
I was listening to Michael Slater today, and he noted that this year’s 9/11 was the first anniversary where 9/11 felt like a distant memory. He noted how distinguishing features of 2001, such as the fashions, the fonts of choice on storefronts, the equipment journalists were using (we hadn’t gotten to iPhones & Androids as yet), the grainy videos (digital cameras were still a novelty) et al made it all look like it was really long ago
In fact, 9/11 was the biggest setback for American democracy. On one hand, the uniparty rushed to insist to all of us that islam was a good & peaceful religion, w/o bothering to check on either its texts or its history. On the other hand, they introduced a whole set of new routines that people had to go through in airports, where profiling was considered racist. I noticed this glaringly this year while traveling b/w India and the US. In Indian airports, during the security check, I didn’t have to remove my shoes or anything, just had to remove all electronics from bags & put them in a tray. In the US, the shoes had to be removed
I wonder if we will ever get a government unafraid to call out islam, instead of American (non-muslim) citizens?
tgusa says
Bin Laden probably spent a couple million dollars executing the 9-11 attack. The real damage came in the years afterward. The Patriot Act enabled the government to weaponize its vast resources against its own people and ushered in the warrant-less surveillance state. The crippling legacy of debt as a result of the failed Iraq and Afghanistan wars. And today we have open borders with terror sup[porting “migrants” coming in to the country. If you examine where we are today you begin to wonder, does the deep creep state want another 9-11? Do they think that will unite the country or are they just hoping for more power to corrupt what America once stood for? The people running the country post 9-11 could easily be called the anti-founding fathers, the anti-George Washington’s. And think about it, were any held to account for the failures pre 9-11? No, those forces of failure were empowered even more. Carry on in your useless shit show the deep creep state said!
If the 9-11 hijackers were alive today who would they vote for, President Trump or the deep creep state uni party lackeys (ie: da Bushes, Clinton, Obama, Biden)? The whole thing makes me thoroughly disgusted. We cannot label those a-holes insurgents because they are supposedly Americans but we can label them enemy combatants.
I feel for the victims of 9-11 and beyond, both the dead and the living, but I want to spit in the faces of the deep state creeps that are today parading around memorializing 9-11. That is an insult of the highest order.
somehistory says
If one had a family member murdered on that awful day, having been directly affected, that one has not forgotten, has not ‘moved on,’ has not become complacent to the dangers mozlums present.
There are those who likely would have already forgotten what happened if only others who refuse to forget would allow them to pass the day without a second …or even first. thought…regarding the terror, the death, the loss of family, …caused by mozlums following the demonic demands of a long-dead…if he existed….mass-murdering raper of children, lying son of satan the devil, putrid, feculent filth.
It’s more important to those ones which pronouns are used, which video to watch and comment on about some unimportant happening than to be aware that mozlums are out to do to the rest of us what their cohorts did to thousands on that day 22 years ago.
i elmi, alias i omar summed up the feelings of many with her awful comment about ‘some people’ having done ‘something.’
mozlums haven’t forgotten. They may be planning to do “something” again on another important-to-them date that will make the last one pale by comparisan.
Walter Sieruk says
Regarding those monstrous and murderous jihadist attacks which occured on September 11,2001 and the many long term evils and problems the are still transpiring even to this current year of 2023 and, no doubt, in further years .
This is a tragic reminder of the old Irish proverb , which is “The effects of an evil act are long felt.
Tanya Notkoff says
Bravo on this very depressing but true op/ed. “But Islam does not forget.” Haunting. Daunting.
I have not only Not forgotten, as a Jew, I”m more awake than ever! Since that horrific 9/11, our country and other Western countries have gone out of their way to usher in traditional Islam (to the chagrin of “reformists”)–now, even in the US, we have Sharia Law, Call to Prayer, and pardoning of Islamic barbarism! We’ve applied the First Amendment to something Thomas Jefferson clearly did not recognize as “Religion,” since he catalogued his copy of the Qur’an under “Mythology,” and we know Jews, like me are being targeted, in spite of orgs (including ADL) lying about the perps–we Jews are always the canaries!
True, our elected officials are still not taking seriously the treat that is not on the horizon but is in our daily lives. Having reported what should have been regarded as very dangerous behavior (I was refused medical care and medicine by my assigned doctor!), I discovered that I was to be ignored, or in one instance, I as the victim was written about in the opposite manner, and the writer who lied about the situation was Jewish! Yes, we’re doomed. God help us!!