by Bruce Bawer, Front Page Mag:
“Only days after 9/11, Norwegian author Gert Nygårdshaug sneered at the idea that there might soon be an attack on ‘Oslo or Rome or Copenhagen.’ He was far from alone in his mockery. Then came Madrid, London, Bali, Beslan, Mumbai….The Western European elite played down, even denied, any connection among these events. Yet year by year the truth has become increasingly clear: though the U.S. was the target on 9/11, the front line of the war with Islamism is Europe.”
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If we’d had a president who had dared to speak the truth about our enemies and about the ideology (which is to say theology) that motivates them, and had done so eloquently and stirringly and repeatedly, à la Churchill…it might have made a huge difference….But perhaps not. Perhaps the poison of multiculturalism — the fear of acknowledging that our enemies were, in fact, our enemies — was simply too potent….The tragic fact of the matter is that ten years after 9/11, we are more ignorant, and more vulnerable, than ever.”
- Bruce Bawer, “9/11 and the Pastness of the Past,” September 11, 2011
“9/11 was a day of heroes and of villains, of stark contrasts between good and evil. Yet how quickly the politicians, journalists, and others in positions of power managed to make a muddle of it all. Instead of witnessing a democratization of the Middle East, we experienced a steady Islamization of the West. Instead of seeing freedom bloom in the Islamic world, we saw a rise in Western censorship and self-censorship on the subject of Islam.”
- Bruce Bawer, “9/11: Twelve Years Later,” September 10, 2013
“His enemies call him a fascist. On the contrary, he’s the first U.S. president since 9⁄11 who genuinely seems to grasp that Islam is fascism.”
- Bruce Bawer, “Remembering 9/11 in the Age of Trump,” September 11, 2018
“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.”
- Bruce Bawer, “Celebrating Our Enemies, Twenty Years after 9/11,” September 10, 2021
“America has been transformed very quickly into a country that’s so dramatically different from the one we lived in on September 10, 2001, that the twenty-first anniversary of that atrocity can feel almost irrelevant to our present concerns and calamities. But let’s remember that it was on 9/11 that the shock was delivered to our system that, responded to in precisely the wrong way, saw us wade deeper and deeper into the current muck of doubt, deception, and division.”
- Bruce Bawer, “That Day, Yet Again,” September 10, 2022
Sometimes it feels as if it happened just the day before yesterday, and other times it seems lost in the mists of time.
Time is like that.
At first there was intense shock. Then a sharply focused anger, a flourishing of patriotism, and a potent resolve. And then, over the years, increasing confusion, division, self-doubt.
No, we shouldn’t have allowed a thirst for revenge, and a desire to remind the monsters of the world who was boss, to turn into an exercise in nation-building in the graveyard of empires and in one of the few Middle Eastern states without a theocratic government. Some of us, who had some knowledge of Islam, sensed that we were headed down the road to disaster. But we were, after all, relative newcomers to the study of that faith, and we were naive enough to think that people with fancy White House titles, people who turned up on all the Sunday morning shows, smooth and glib, and who always seemed to have all the answers, might know better than we did.
There are many ways of looking at 9/11. Every year when the anniversary comes around, 9/11 looks somewhat difference, because the moment we’re looking back from is different. You can’t step into the same river twice.
