In the previous post, I made reference to “the grindingly slow collapse of America’s quest for righteous retribution into a black sinkhole of futility and cynical manipulation.” Said collapse was in fact the direct result of the serial treachery and betrayal of the US government, unspeakable crimes whose revolting consummation was puked forth—for all the world to gaze upon in horror and disgust—in the disastrous, humiliating, and deadly Biden Bugout. Robert Spencer reveals an aspect that somehow manages to call forth several distinct emotional responses which are rarely seen hanging out in the same neighborhood: rage; stunned incredulity; hopelessness and despair; and finally, paralyzing enervation.

On Friday, September 10, 2021, the Philadelphia chapter of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is presenting a panel discussion entitled “Remember Pearl Harbor to Never Forget 9/11: Teaching Japanese American and Muslim American Histories.” There in a nutshell is much of what has gone wrong in our nation’s response to the 9/11 jihad attacks, and why we are so drastically on the wrong path now.

The CAIR panel is as noteworthy for what it is not about than for what it is about. It is not about the victims of 9/11, the lives lost, the lives destroyed, the magnitude of human suffering that was inflicted. It is most certainly not about the ongoing global jihad: a useful panel could be held on groups that still exist around the world that hold to the same belief system, ideology and goals that the 9/11 plotters and hijackers held, and which are an ongoing threat to Americans and to all free people. Hamas-linked CAIR is never going to hold such a panel, and neither is anyone else.

Instead, CAIR, predictably enough, focuses on the people who hold the same beliefs as the jihad attackers of 9/11 and have, CAIR claims, been victimized and discriminated against in the United States as a result. Statistically speaking, such claims are wildly exaggerated. FBI hate crime statistics show that anti-Semitic hate crimes are far more common than attacks on Muslims, which actually dropped 42% in the last year. No hate crime is justified, but the idea that Muslims are living in fear of MAGA-hat-wearing redneck vigilantes in America is Leftist fantasy.

Nonetheless, that is not just the focus of this unsavory Hamas-linked group, but of the establishment media as well. The Los Angeles Times on Friday published a lengthy weeper entitled “Muslim youth in America: A generation shadowed by the aftermath of 9/11,” all about how some people say rude things to innocent Muslims just because some people did something way back two decades ago. The article begins: “On a rainy day during her sophomore year of high school, as Aissata Ba studied in the library, a photo popped into her phone. It showed a beheading by Islamic State militants, along with a caption in red letters: ‘Go back to your country.’” In the big bad, “Islamophobic” USA, the perpetrator of this horror got off scot-free: “Ba reported the incident. Administrators never tracked down the person who sent it.”

The Times explained how Muslims are the true victims of the 9/11 attacks: “Asked when they thought such incidents became common, the Ba family didn’t hesitate. ‘It started with 9/11,’ said Ba’s mom, Zeinebou, who immigrated to Chicago in 1999. That day in 2001 caused a chain of tragedies — for the nearly 3,000 people who perished during the attacks in New York, at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania; for the young men and women who died serving their country in the wars that followed; and for Muslims, and those perceived as Muslim, who became targets of hate.”

It would be much easier to sympathize with all this if not for the fact that since 9/11, CAIR and its allied groups, with eager help from the establishment media, have insisted that any honest investigation of the motivating ideology behind the attacks, and jihad terror in general, constituted “hate.” Then there are the numerous fake anti-Muslim hate crimes, fabricated apparently in order to buttress the claim that Muslims are uniquely harassed and victimized in the United States. The facts don’t bear out this claim.

…The fact that both the LA Times and AP had to lead with stories of people saying rude things to Muslims unwittingly reveals that they didn’t have anything worse to head up their stories: no stories of Muslims being attacked, of mosques being burnt down, of laws targeting Muslims in the United States and denying them basic rights. Nor should there be such stories. But the fact that there aren’t any gives the lie to the entire establishment narrative.

Meanwhile, opponents of jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women have genuinely experienced the marginalization that Obeidallah claims to have suffered. They have been defamed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, targeted by the social media giants’ Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, and shunned by the establishment media.

In all this I haven’t even mentioned the misbegotten misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the U.S. government’s adamantine determination to ignore and deny the ideological wellsprings of the global jihad. But it all works together: the lesson most Americans will be told on Saturday is that twenty years ago, some “extremists,” akin to the January 6 “insurrectionists,” hijacked the peaceful religion of Islam, and since then Muslims have been victimized. The moral of the story? We must end all remaining counterterror measures directed at stopping jihadis. They’re “Islamophobic,” and the real problem is “white supremacists,” anyway. What could possibly go wrong? Go back to sleep.

The intentional, nefariously political shifting of all guilt from the actual perpetrators of jihadist atrocities onto the wholly-innocent victims of it might just be the most profoundly brazen crime of them all. Worse yet, it was initiated by—and successfully brought off with the active assistance of—none other than our own goddamned government. Among numerous other once-trusted but now corrupt, faithless, and wholly-subverted American institutions.

Take a bow, assholes.

On 9/11, the world was shown, in one horrific, indelible image, precisely what Islam is all about. Today, to write the previous sentence is to be guilty of Islamophobia. How did that come to be? It began in the days after 9/11 itself, when George W. Bush – by repeatedly insisting that the cause of the jihadists had nothing to do with Islam – effectively ruled out of bounds any criticism of that religion, or any honest education and open discussion about it. Instead, Bush – who had gotten it into his head that all religions are basically good, and who was manipulated by advisors who wanted to project American power in a part of the world about which they knew very little – used 9/11 as an excuse to rein in Americans’ civil liberties and go nation-building abroad. It was a massive folly, doomed to failure. Why doomed? Because Islam is utterly irreconcilable with American-style freedom and incapable of reform, at least not without a far more aggressive effort than America was willing to commit to. Unlike America, moreover, Islam has a long memory. Muslims recall their forebears’ foiled attempts to conquer the Christian West at Tours in 732 and Vienna in 1683; the attacks of 9/11 were part of a history of such actions that goes back to Islam’s earliest days. Yet few Westerners know about this history or are aware that 9/11 was part of it.

Indeed, how many Westerners know, even now, that the word Islam means submission? For a long time, America was the ultimate symbol of the refusal to submit: in World War II, we took on powerful enemies on two fronts and won; during the Cold War, we protected the Free World from Communist takeover. But the Muslim wars we entered into after 9/11 were different. We were hobbled by leaders who refused to name the enemy – and by a corrosive victim culture, born in the academy but rapidly spreading into the mainstream, that divided Americans into oppressed and oppressor classes. It was Muslims who had attacked us on 9/11, and had done so in accordance with their prophet’s directives; but even as our armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan labored to overcome social ills in those countries that were the direct result of Islam’s baleful centuries-long influence, our elites began painting Islam as beautiful and peaceful while casting Muslims in the role of America’s ultimate victims.

So little did Americans understand about Islam as of 2008 that they elected as their president a man who was the son and stepson of Muslims and who’d spent much of his childhood in the Muslim nation of Indonesia, where he’d been registered at schools as a Muslim, taken Koran classes, worn Muslim garb, and attended mosque. In a 2007 interview with Nicholas Kristof, he described the Muslim call to prayer as “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.” (Kristof observed enthusiastically that “a president is less likely to stereotype Muslims as fanatics…if he once studied the Koran with them.”) Delivering an address at Al-Azhar University in Cairo shortly after his inauguration, the new president hailed Islam’s purported contributions to human civilization, inventing an entire alternate history that replaced primitive violence with advanced learning and scientific discovery. If Bush had whitewashed Islam, Obama exalted it, shifting the Overton window even further away from candor about Islamic fundamentals in the direction of sheer fantasy – and deference.

In the years following 9/11, class divisions in the U.S. intensified. And one mark of the difference between the elites and the deplorables was that the former tended to parrot the pretty lies about Islam while the latter didn’t. During this period, the planet’s ultimate elite newspaper, the New York Times, perfected a subgenre of article that has won it the highest of accolades: the shameless Muslim puff piece. In 2007, Andrea Elliott was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for what the Pulitzer website describes as “her intimate, richly textured portrait of an immigrant imam striving to find his way and serve his faithful in America.” The website’s language is indicative of the supremely mendacious way in which our betters routinely frame the subject of Islam.

These are people who rarely write about a member of the Christian clergy unless he’s been caught with his hand in the collection plate or under some altar boy’s cassock. But when they’re profiling an imam, they invariably represent him as a deeply holy man, a virtuous soul “striving” to “serve his faithful.” In order to make such a profile work on the desired warm-and-fuzzy level, to be sure, they need to elide certain uncomfortable details about what that imam actually preaches. Hence the harsh reality of sharia – Islamic law – needs to be kept from the reader; indeed, legitimate expressions of concern about sharia by well-informed members of the public need to be dismissed as the ravings of ignorant bigots. (Dias, for example, quotes a Muslim activist who characterizes various states’ anti-sharia legislation as the product of “hysteria” and compares them to campaigns to ban the teaching of that other gift to mankind, critical race theory.)

By force of arms, we repelled the Taliban and ISIS and al-Qaeda, but we then failed in the absurd drive to turn those countries into simulacra of the free society that America had once been but was quickly evolving away from. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush said that the terrorists had lost, because the attacks had brought Americans together. Would Bush say now that the terrorists lost? Twenty years on, under the disgraceful Biden, America feels like a damaged and diminished nation – its power weakened, its alliances shaken, its once-unshakable core beliefs largely shattered, not least by the suicidal compulsion to speak well of Islam (as well as of our enemies in China and of the savage gang members who flood across our Southern border, and whom Nancy Pelosi defended with as much passion – “we’re all God’s children,” she gushed about MS-14 – as Hillary Clinton brought to bear in insulting the “deplorables” of middle America). To many Americans, especially the young, the patriotism that inspired Keith’s song now sounds quaint, if not outright offensive; in the view those who hold the future of America in their hands, saluting the flag and singing the national anthem are for “white supremacists.” The America that al-Qaeda struck at on 9/11 is no more; and 9/11 itself, and our tragically misguided response to it, are a very big part of the reason why. Islam plays a long game.

President Biden’s indifference to the parents of the thirteen American armed-forces members killed in Afghanistan spoke volumes. All too many of our elites now view GIs who’ve been wounded or killed fighting Muslims as an embarrassment – as relics of a benighted era when we resisted Islam instead of bowing to it. All those firefighters racing up the stairs of the Twin Towers on 9/11? Todd Beamer shouting “Let’s roll!” as he and some of his fellow passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 rushed the cockpit to foil the Al-Qaeda thugs? In the eyes of many of our most bien pensant types today, these are wince-inducing images – now worn into corny, cloying clichés – that no civilized individual would dredge up any longer except out of sheer Islamophobia. The other day, when Secretary of State Antony Blinken and CENTCOM commander Kenneth McKinsey actually praised the Taliban for its cooperativeness, it seemed clear that the mantra of “America bad, Islam good” had triumphed utterly over the values that the overwhelming majority of Americans of both parties once shared. So it is that, after the fall of Kabul, many of us who, not so long ago, considered America almost immune to the ideological plagues of Europe and elsewhere find ourselves nothing less than shell-shocked, haunted by Ronald Reagan’s cautionary words about freedom never being more than a generation away from extinction.

Let’s see now, what was it that Benjamin Franklin once said concerning “…losing both, and deserving neither…”? Something along those lines, I believe it was.

Looking around the ol’ blogosphere, I’m seeing so many excellent, angry 9/11 anniversary rants that I do believe I’m going to have to renege on last night’s vow to just leave it alone after this post. In fact, there’s such a plenitude of must-reads today that, even with my earlier-than-usual start, I very much doubt I’ll be able to get around to all of ’em. We shall see what we shall see.

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