Lee Smith brings us a seriously gripping account of the frightening progress Pisslam has made apres 9/11, the one I mentioned at the end of the previous post.

Twenty-five years later, the legacy of 9/11 is that there was no 9/11.

Commemorations this week hold that the deadliest attack on the U.S. mainland forever changed the way we live. And that’s true if we mean that for the past 25 years Americans have lived in a collective fugue state from which there seems no exit.

The issue isn’t that nearly a third of the country was born after the attacks or that foreign intelligence services push 9/11 lies into our social media ecosystem. The conspiracy theorists are more shrill a quarter of a century on precisely because our memories of the day, and our reactions to it, have been redirected and erased.

There was never any kind of cover-up; there were no “dancing Israelis” who secretly directed Arab terrorists into the Twin Towers to get American boys to die in the Middle East on behalf of Israel; and there was no controlled demolition of the towers as part of a false flag operation to drive an angry nation to war in the Middle East.

Rather, it was more like the opposite: Elites across the political spectrum blunted the rage of a wounded nation determined to avenge its dead.

By the time of the attacks, New York had been in the crosshairs of Muslim terrorists for decades. The city is the world capital of finance, media, advertising, publishing, and culture, from painting to theater. And much of its success was thanks to the waves of Jewish immigrants that started arriving in the middle of the 19th century. With the United States’ victory in World War II, the human capital that the city had accumulated and augmented for a century turned New York into human history’s new center of gravity.

The serial efforts to bring the city to its knees would require making Western civilization doubt its strength, virtue, and purpose. And how we remember the attacks is proof that these efforts worked.

The whitewash of Sep. 11 was conducted in full view of the public and started almost immediately after the attacks, while aid workers at the World Trade Center were still sorting through the rubble and ashes.

Six days after the Twin Towers collapsed, then President George W. Bush visited the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., where Muslim leaders joined him onstage. Days earlier, the press attacked him when he described the U.S. government’s planned military response as a “crusade.” So he was eager to show he meant no offense to Muslim sensibilities still smarting nearly a millennium after the conclusion of the last Christian campaign for Jerusalem.

“The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam,” said Bush. “That’s not what Islam is all about,” he continued. And even more remarkably, “Islam is peace.”

Bush’s words had no demonstrable effect on Muslim masses across the world, giddily celebrating bin Laden’s raid. But with the president’s maudlin apologia for a crude belief system that inspired the murders and elevated the causes for which the son of Saudi elites had killed Americans, he unveiled the sentimental underpinnings of the approach that in the post-9/11 period has had disastrous consequences for the country.

Critics of the Global War on Terror argue that the administration’s failure to define a real enemy—rather than a term so abstract that world bodies can safely pretend not to know what distinguishes it from lawful dissent—showed the United States had no coherent strategy to keep Americans safe. But that’s not true: The GWOT had an internal logic. The argument was that we could protect Americans at home and U.S. interests abroad only by first securing the political rights of Muslims in the Middle East.

That’s why U.S. forces righteously focused their fire on those groups and regimes, like Saddam Hussein’s, who seemed to be the obstacle to the democratic aspirations of Muslim citizens. Once these people were free to exercise their civil rights and use their votes to improve their societies, the theory went, young Muslim men would no longer feel compelled to channel their frustrations into terrorism that kills Americans and U.S. allies.

In other words, the GWOT was a U.S. government initiative deploying enormous human, military, and other material resources to shape current-day reality after a fantasy crafted by progressive Middle East academics, Muslim apologists, and idealistic neoconservatives working inside the administration, along with spokesmen for the states and terror groups aiming their guns at Americans.

Agreeing on little else, together these ideological cohorts promoted an ideological fantasy: a culturally rich and politically sophisticated Middle East, like the convivencia of medieval Andalusia, where majority-Muslim polities lived in peaceful and tolerant coexistence with their Christian and Jewish neighbors. America’s post-9/11 mission was the war to restore “moderate Islam”—something that had never existed in the first place.

Washington became the global caliphate of moderate Islam, passing out billions of dollars to virtually anyone who flashed their credentials, as journalists, political activists, and even religious authorities swindled credulous policymakers with the promise that, since they had the ear of the Arab street, they would gladly help turn Muslim opinion in favor of America. It was a massive confidence scheme, gilded more lavishly than any before it and any of those likely to follow. Any Muslim who’d enjoyed even a brief flirtation with “extremism” and then saw the light became an instant Beltway celebrity, invited to lecture at the Pentagon or State Department and testify on Capitol Hill.

The problem was obvious to anyone who visited a D.C. think tank during the period: With so many moderate Muslims giving lectures, writing pamphlets, and doing media appearances, who was left in the region itself to steer Islam in a more moderate direction?

Obviously, no one.

From that heady ascent, Smith moves on along to the name ‘em/shame ’em section of this very lengthy but truly remarkable article. For instink:

The essential question made plain by the Rushdie affair was, What were the stewards of Western civilization prepared to do to protect it? Obviously, artists could be silenced by threats of violence—anyone can. But would the men and women elected to govern the societies that created the novel protect them against societies that played no role in the making of the modern world and were rather intent to destroy the spiritual and political principles, such as freedom of speech, undergirding them?

The answer was soon forthcoming.

A month after (Don DeLillo’s treatise on terrorism and Jurassic media) Mao II was published, Ettore Capriolo, the Italian translator of Rushdie’s book, survived an attempt on his life by a knife-wielding assassin; a week later, Rushdie’s Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi was stabbed to death. And then, in 1993, the Norwegian publisher of The Satanic Verses, William Nygaard, was shot three times but survived.

Capriolo’s assailant escaped; Igarashi’s murder remains unsolved; and Norwegian investigators later identified suspects in the Nygaard case, including an Iranian former diplomat and a Lebanese man, but there wasn’t enough evidence for an indictment.

Maybe Khomeini’s agents were lucky to escape three times or, more likely, Tokyo, Rome, and Oslo wanted to avoid the even bigger problems that were likely to ensue had they caught and convicted the assassins. In any case, the Hezbollah-linked attempt on Rushdie’s life in 2022 that left him blind in one eye answered the question once and for all: What were the nations of the West prepared to do to defend it? Nothing.

The global nightmare sparked by the Rushdie affair could have been avoided, said Omar Abdel-Rahman in 1989, “if we had punished Naguib Mahfouz for what he wrote in ‘Children of Gebelaawi,’ then Salman Rushdie never would have dared to write that book.”

Five years later, Mahfouz was stabbed in the neck on a Cairo street by an assailant who said he was inspired to kill the Nobel Prize winner because of Abdel-Rahman’s decree. And it was Abdel-Rahman’s rulings on the permissibility of killing infidels and apostates that made him the leading Islamist religious authority in all Egypt, the so-called spiritual leader of the terror group Gamaa Islamiya.

He also projected power far beyond the Nile. So, when Abdel-Rahman came to America in 1990, he meant to reap what Khomeini had sown.

Egyptian authorities had arrested Abdel-Rahman in 1981 for his part in the assassination of Anwar Sadat for signing a peace accord with Israel. In jail, he met Osama bin Laden’s future lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri, then a senior leader of Islamic Jihad, the terror group that partnered with Abdel-Rahman’s gang to kill Sadat. Abdel-Rahman was acquitted by Egyptian courts twice, but the State Department still put him on the terror watch list. Nonetheless, he was granted a visa in 1990 by consular officials at the U.S. embassy in Khartoum. “They didn’t follow the procedures,” said a State Department spokesperson at the time, who called it a “mistake.”

Wrong, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said back then: “The visa he got was not issued by mistake. It is because of the services he did.” According to Sadat’s successor, “The sheik has been a CIA agent since his days in Afghanistan.” There’s circumstantial evidence to support Mubarak’s claim.

What surprised U.S. officials most about 9/11 was that Muslims around the world so overwhelmingly supported it. Even after Khomeini had permanently altered the nature of international affairs by calling on the global ummah to kill Rushdie, Washington was still shocked to see footage of Muslims—most famously Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and refugee camps in Lebanon—ghoulishly celebrating the butchering of the main source of their income, Americans.

In that light, there was some logic to Bush’s freedom agenda—after all, you couldn’t wage war against more than a billion Muslims, especially when, as the Rushdie affair had shown, some of them among you were likely to make war on you. The problem was that even as the project to democratize the region faltered, the president and his aides pressed on.

The crucial test came with the 2006 Palestinian elections. Officials and outside experts warned that Hamas was certain to win big, but Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ignored them. Hamas swept the polls and soon went to war against Mahmoud Abbas’ U.S.-backed Fatah faction, leaving Hamas in charge of Gaza and Fatah ruling the West Bank. The important point is that given a choice, the Palestinians chose the more radical faction, the terrorists.

Just as they always have, and always will. Onwards.

Even as the freedom agenda crashed, the Bush administration admitted millions of Muslim and Arab immigrants to further advance the soft power component of the GWOT. To wit: America was making war against terrorists and bad regimes, not Muslims. The Republican White House was no more racist against Muslims than it was against Blacks, and as Secretary Rice had made clear, Muslims were in the same position Blacks were during Jim Crow, so to prove Americans were not racist, Muslims were invited to make their homes here.

In fact, what Rice and her boss had done was change the lens through which we Americans understand ourselves. In falsifying our collective history by likening it to something to which it bears no likeness, they changed the standard by which we measure the health of our society. America wasn’t healing itself by importing large portions of at least half a dozen shattered and despotic Middle Eastern societies. Rather, we were putting ourselves, our peace and prosperity, in danger.

The countries from which these immigrants came—Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, the West Bank, Gaza—were torn by civil wars and Islamist insurgencies. Having failed to remake these broken societies in our image, U.S. officials now opened the borders to people shaped by conflicts fought over ideas promoted in some of the worst places on earth.

Bush hardly deserves all the blame for presiding over the post-9/11 influx of Muslim immigrants. Muslim immigration continued under the presidencies of Obama and Biden, and in important categories—including refugee admissions during Obama’s final presidential year—the numbers rose substantially. President Donald Trump sought to stem the tide in his first term with the ban against nationals from several Muslim-majority nations, but he lost repeatedly in court. Singling out Muslim nations was racist, of course.

Even parts of Trump’s own administration opposed him. If we can’t give Iraqis U.S. visas, complained Secretary of Defense James Mattis, how can I convince Iraqi officials to let us stay in their country to kill terrorists?

Here Mattis was on to something, except in reverse. Mass immigration from the Muslim world conflicted with what Bush officials referred to as the fly-trap theory. “Our men and women in uniform are fighting terrorists in Iraq,” said Bush, “so we do not have to face them here at home.”

What does that mean today? Estimates show that there are now approximately 5.5 million Muslims in the United States, with an estimated 2 million to 2.5 million migrating to the United States since 9/11. According to a recent poll, 44% of Muslims in America favor Hamas. Does this mean Americans will be fighting terrorists at home?

Yes. The next mass terror attack is probably going to look like Oct. 7, and New York is a likely venue for it.

T’is beyond debate, I’d say. Any sensible sort up there that hasn’t fled the Big Rotten Apple already ought to be giving it some serious thought right about now.

The piece goes on from there; quite long, yes. But even so, you really don’t want to miss one word of it, I solemnly assure you with hand over heart.