On September 11, 2001, 19 Muslims hijacked four planes and used them to murder 2,977 people. Included in that number are 343 firefighters, 72 law enforcement officers, and nearly 200 military and civilian personnel killed at the Pentagon. Victims could be claimed by more than 90 countries and as many as 10,000 children lost their parents.

As New York burned, thousands of Muslims in the West Bank celebrated the attack with the abandonment of dervishes, shouting “Allahu Akbar” and doling out candy. Much closer to home, Muslims in New Jersey also partook in diabolical festivities.

“Some men were dancing, some held kids on their shoulders,” said retired Jersey City police Captain Peter Gallagher. Though there was more than one celebration, Gallagher cleared 20 to 30 people from one particular rooftop at 6 Tonnele Avenue. “The women were shouting in Arabic and keening in the high-pitched wail of Arabic fashion,” Gallagher told NJ Advance Media.

That we are only now shuttering the office of the Palestine Liberation Organization in our nation’s capital is evidence we value tolerance to our detriment in America.

In 2012, the San Diego, California, chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (a terrorist organization) partnered with San Diego Unified School District to implement a curriculum designed to combat “Islamophobia” in public schools. As part of the plan, teachers were provided a training book called Teaching Against Islamophobia.

Although teachers are strictly forbidden from so much as uttering the name of Christ in classrooms, Teaching Against Islamophobia provides cherry-picked verses from the Koran with which to edify young minds. The book trains public school educators to inform students, among other things:

“The activities of the American Empire have not been the only forces at work creating an Islamist extremism that violently defies the sacred teaching of the religion[;]. American misdeeds have also played an important role in the process;” “The ‘hatred and mistrust of the United States in the Islamic world’ is a consequence of ‘right-wing politics,’ ‘geo-political needs of the American Empire,’ and ‘widespread ignorance among Americans about the U.S. role in the world and in Islamic history;’” and “‘9/11 in part reflected the rage toward the U.S. pulsing through the veins of many Muslims,’ and ‘the indifference displayed by many U.S. policymakers toward the suffering of everyday people around the Islamic world fanned the flames of this anti-American fury.’ [emphasis mine]”

In short, San Diego Unified agreed to allow, without any input from parents, an organization named as an unindicted co-conspirator in a terrorist money laundering scheme to teach students that the blood of September 11 was mainly on the hands of Americans, and least of all on Islam. The program also would have directed resources to assist Muslim students “Learn more about and be proud of [their] faith,” and “Help connect [them] to resources about [their] faith which [they] can share with administrators and teachers.” In the end, it was thwarted only by a massive lawsuit launched by the Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund that forced San Diego Unified to reluctantly put down the Koran. But things have only grown worse.

Ignoring What’s Under Our Noses

“White Americans are the biggest terror threat in the United States,” read the Public Radio International headline in 2015. PRI made this claim by excluding all of the people murdered on September 11, the additional 1,400 who have since died and the 8,000 now suffering from cancer caused by exposure to the rubble. The unimaginative Vox pulled the same stunt in 2017.

But what was the real reason for the September 11 attacks?

We will find that the reason, the only reason, was the same that impelled Nidal Malik Hasan, son of Palestinian immigrants, to murder 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas. The September 11 hijackers also shared a motive with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, both first-generation immigrants, who murdered three people and injured hundreds more. It is the same motive shared by Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez, who murdered five people, including four Marines, in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

It is, moreover, the same reason that Tashfeen Malik and Syed Rizwan Farook—first- and second-generation Pakistani immigrants—murdered 14 people at a Christmas party in San Bernardino, California. And it’s also the same reason Omar Mateen—son of Afghan immigrants—murdered 49 people in Orlando, Florida; and Sayfullo Saipov, a first-generation Uzbek immigrant, murdered eight people along a Manhattan bike path in New York. Let’s not forget Somali refugee Abdul Razak Ali Artan of the Ohio State University attack.

The reason for all of these attacks upon Americans (to say nothing of what’s happening in Europe) is militant Islam. Islam, when understood as the political ideology and not just a benign religion, has been at war with Christian civilization since its inception.

Christians are regularly reminded of crusades, inquisitions, and witch-hunts, so much so that one would think Pope Urban II had ordered the first crusade only yesterday. Muslims, on the other hand, are strictly exempt from any criticism of their past or present, theirs is the whitewashed religion of peace, now and forever.

When Saipov crushed under his wheels the lives of eight Americans, the good Samaritans at NBC News contacted their on-demand progressive Muslim for comment.

“My biggest concern,” Umer Ahmad told NBC reporters, “is that [Saipov’s] readily identified as a Muslim and then that is extrapolated out to my own faith.” Of little to no concern were the dead and dying.

Whether Ahmad and the Islamophiles would judge that Islam, Ahmad’s “own faith,” was truly responsible for yet another jihad on Americans was of little importance to Saipov. The judgements of the American courts, let alone that of Ahmad, were “not important” to Saipov because they were “not Allah’s judgments.”

A National Madness

Islam remains not merely a material threat, but a formal threat to the confidence of Christian civilization. Islam is used by Marxists to denigrate Christendom—and America, like the nations of Europe, is a Christian society. Indeed, Muslims have enjoyed tolerance in Christian societies, like the United States, that Christians have never known in Muslim societies.

“Are you ready? Okay. Let’s roll.” These were the last words of Flight 93 passenger Todd Beamer to Lisa Jefferson, who alongside with Mark Bingham, Tom Burnett, Jeremy Glick, Lou Nacke, Rich Guadagno, Alan Beaven, Honor Elizabeth Wainio, Linda Gronlund, William Cashman, Sandra Bradshaw, and Cee Cee Ross-Lyles attempted to storm the cockpit and take control of the doomed airplane.

Before pushing for the cockpit, Beamer recited the Lord’s Prayer, Psalm 23, and was joined by the others in prayer. It has been said that our Declaration of Independence was designed, at least in part, after that Psalm. Compare to the hijackers, whose final words are seared into the minds of Americans: “Allah is the greatest. Allah is the greatest.” Yet Western politicians insist that jihad has nothing to do with that terrorism or any that has followed it. What madness!

In view of this madness, are we even worthy of heroes like Beamer? Beamer and his companions sacrificed themselves to save others from a fiery death and the nation from even more potential destruction of its institutions, only to have this nation apologize for their murderers and slander Christians in the same breath. “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam,” to quote our former president, speaking out in defense of Islam after the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi.

What Ails the West

It should be said that while the individual Muslim can, as Michael Anton has said, “accept the distinction between civil and religious law,” in orthodox Islam, “the faith itself does not accept that fact,” and is therefore incompatible with Western civilization. Westerners, then, should heed the warnings of Iranian-born Imam Tawhidi, of the “need to make sure that those coming into the west really want to be part of the west.” Nonie Darwish, daughter of Lt. General Mustafa Hafez, the former head of Egyptian Military Intelligence in Gaza and commander of the Fedayeen that killed hundreds of Israeli civilians, would remind Americans that they “are not doing Muslims (especially the reformists) a favor by constantly treating them as children who should be shielded from reality.” If they want to be good Westerners or Americans, they need to understand and accept this reality.

Failure to heed these warnings is symptomatic of the spiritual rot at the core of the West.

“The National September 11 Memorial and Museum are deeply ugly,” writes Wayne Isaac. “Those two gaping pits, a vision of the abyss, mar that tragic earth. Like gashes that never healed, but rather festered into black necrosis, the 9/11 memorial reveals a sickness; a sickness not of the body but of the soul.” Isaac is on target with his diagnosis.

“That ought to give us pause. On this 9/11, therefore, we all should grapple not only with the tragedy but with our response to it,” writes Isaac. “We must confront our sickness of the soul.”

Isaac is correct, but I believe this is a sickness that has plagued the soul of the whole West, not just America.

Will Westerners find the cultural confidence to reaffirm their roots as Christians? The civilization in which Muslims are a minority, yet enjoy tolerance and even protected status, is only so because it is built upon the precepts of Christian tolerance which must never be confused with the suicidal notion of tolerance with which the Marxist-inspired Left has sought to supplant it. September 11 reminds us of what we stand to suffer if that Christian civilization should perish, or if its denizens never rediscover confidence in their culture.

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