The Forgotten Lessons and the Fight Over What Really Happened

This is a survey of personal recollections by some of those journalists who lived through it and an analysis of the deliberately distorted views of that event being taught on college campuses today to young Americans, as the nation marks the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, which brought down the Twin Towers, damaged the Pentagon, and changed the course of American foreign policy over the past quarter century.

Twenty-five years ago, 2,753 people were murdered at Ground Zero in New York City, 184 more were killed at the Pentagon, and 59 passengers and crew members died aboard Flight 77 during the September 11, 2001 attacks. A wave of anniversary essays and news coverage — published by the City Journal, the New York Post, the California Post, and the Wall Street Journal — paints a complex picture of the hard-won lessons learned starting on that day that changed many of the basic assumptions about the nature of national security challenges that this country still faces.

Those articles claim that while the national security of the American homeland was meaningfully strengthened by the many institutional and government policy changes which emerged from subsequent reviews of that painful experience, the passage of 25 years has now obscured many of the key lessons that were learned at that time.

These same authors also lament the fact that the necessary hardening of the national attitude, which first saw clearly on that day the magnitude of the threat from the more radical versions of Islam to this country’s security and to the traditional American democratic way of life, has largely been allowed to lapse.

Since the onset of the Covid pandemic six years ago, this disturbing trend has gained widespread acceptance in the more liberal portions of American society and is dominating today’s social media culture. This dangerous change in the attitude of most of today’s American youth about the true nature of their country is largely due to exaggerated fears repeatedly expressed by the liberal mainstream media about Islamophobia, as well as the allegedly evil motives and mindset of the still powerful remnants of the old white male leadership establishment, automatically including all Jewish and non-Jewish supporters of Israel.

Antisemitic Social Media Puts Jews And Israel Supporters At Risk

Today there is a fast-rising new generation of left-wing socialist Democrats, including the Islamic-socialist young mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, as well as popular right-wing Israel conspiracy theory disseminators like Tucker Carlson, and the notoriously antisemitic left-wing social media influencer who is closely associated with Abu El-Sayed, Michigan’s Islamic Democrat senatorial candidate, Hasan Piker. In their eyes, all Jews, whether they actively support Israel or not, are seen as guilty of all kinds of imaginary crimes without the need to submit any proof. Also prejudged as inherently guilty of white racism by socialist leftist candidates is anyone who still sees global Islamic terrorism as a threat to Western-style democracy, or who seeks to hold Islamic terrorists responsible for their many crimes against humanity, including their callous and deliberate use of fellow Muslim civilians in war zones like Gaza and southern Lebanon as human shields.

They are being publicly and routinely condemned in the liberal-mainstream media for promoting colonialism in the form of Zionism and for racism due to their rejection of those who preach and practice immoral standards of conduct and opposition to an individual’s right to practice their religion if they conflict with today’s distorted “woke” standards of liberal conduct.

According to today’s woke liberal standards, all members of any of American society’s “oppressed” minority groups must be protected from being held responsible for their criminal activities. These include violent criminals, homeless drug addicts living in tent cities on the streets of Democrat-governed major cities, supporters and active members of Islamic terrorist groups, many of them Iranian-sponsored and dedicated to attacking America and its allies around the world, as well as all opponents of our government’s institutions dedicated to enforcing law and order on our streets and along our borders,

Twisted Liberal Dei Priorities Being Imposed On U.S. Society

In addition, the twisted priorities of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) culture have been systematically imposed upon most American businesses, schools, and government institutions under the control of liberal Democrats. They have substituted demands for equality of outcomes, including massive financial reparations for wrongs that may have been committed centuries ago, higher priorities for admission to the best schools, as well as offers of the best jobs, as substitutes for the traditional goals of the leaders of the original American Civil Rights movement. They were satisfied with equal opportunities for advancement for their followers rather than guarantees of success, and rewards earned based on individual merit and hard effort rather than membership in an arbitrarily selected preferred group based solely upon race, gender, age, religion (including atheism), liberal political affiliation, or socioeconomic background.

Meanwhile, because of the concerted efforts of liberal apologists for Islamic terrorism, who are also steeped in antisemitism, American history, including the well-documented events of the 9/11 terrorist attack, as well as the larger meaning of that day, is now being actively rewritten. In this country’s K-12 and college classrooms, city halls, and university history and social studies departments, the narrative now softens the responsibility of the Islamic terrorists and their leaders who planned and carried out those attacks, and redirects the blame for their violence and utter disregard for the value of the human lives lost that day toward the United States. Blame is also placed, despite the lack of any credible evidence to support their accusations, on Israel in particular and all Jews around the world, regardless of whether or not they were even aware of the attack when it was taking place.

The 9/11 Lessons That The U.S. Government Has Overlooked Again

The City Journal’s senior editor, Steven Malanga, who is also a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, opened his 9/11 retrospective essay by arguing that during Joe Biden’s presidency, this country repeated, but on a much larger scale, the same basic national security failure to guard this country’s borders from infiltration by foreign enemies that paved the way for the 9/11 attack itself.

He points out that Osama bin Laden’s 2001 hijackers succeeded where the 1993 World Trade Center bombers had failed, and that the intervening eight years were marked by a series of half-hearted legislative gestures, including nominally tougher anti-terrorism laws and additional law-enforcement funding, that were never effectively implemented.

Internal turf battles and jurisdictional disputes between the CIA and the FBI kept the two agencies from sharing available pieces of intelligence that, if properly analyzed and interpreted, could have led to the arrest of the 9/11 hijackers while they were living in this country in plain sight, and preparing themselves with the basic skills they needed to hijack a commercial jet airliner and use it as a flying bomb to destroy or badly damage some of this country’s most iconic public buildings.

In his City Journal essay, Malaga recalls how other clear warning signs revealing the seriousness of the Islamic terrorist threat to American national security were either overlooked entirely or grossly misinterpreted. The incidents include the October 12, 2000 suicide bombing attack on the U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyer, the USS Cole, by two of bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorists in a small boat during a routine refueling stop at Yemen’s port at Aden. The massive blast from several hundred pounds of C4 military-grade plastic explosive tore a 40-by-60-foot gash in the warship’s hull, killed 17 Navy sailors aboard the ship, wounded at least 37 other crew members, and nearly caused the seriously wounded warship to sink in the harbor.

Another deadly warning sign that went largely unheeded of the threat from al Qaeda occurred two years earlier, on August 7, 1998. Suicide bombers parked a truck loaded with high explosives in a parking lot behind the U.S. embassy complex in Nairobi, Kenya, after guards at the front gate to the embassy refused to allow the truck to enter the compound. The massive blast heavily damaged the embassy as well as several other nearby buildings in downtown Nairobi. It killed about 218 people, including a dozen American citizens on staff at the embassy and dozens of local embassy staff members. A total of 4,000 to 5,000 people in downtown Nairobi were also injured by that blast. Meanwhile, a nearly simultaneous al Qaeda-engineered bomb blast at the U.S. embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in East Africa killed 11 more people and wounded another 85.

Bin Laden Was In Bill Clinton’s Crosshairs, But He Let Him Get Away

Nevertheless, the Bill Clinton White House decided not to seek revenge for the dual U.S. embassy bombings or to eliminate the threat of more such terrorist attacks by launching air strikes, based upon reliable U.S. intelligence on at least two different occasions about bin Laden’s location in Afghanistan. President Clinton later cited concerns about potential casualties from such an air strike among nearby Afghan civilians, and the possibility that a failed U.S. military attack on bin Laden would embarrass the United States or lead to diplomatic repercussions from other Muslim states in the United Nations.

In his essay, Malanga also recalls how the lax Clinton-era “customer service” visa policy enabled the 19 9/11 hijackers, all natives of Saudi Arabia, to obtain visas without having to submit to an in-person interview with a U.S. embassy official. That allowed all 19 of them to enter the United States, starting as early as January 2000, and to remain in the country while preparing themselves to carry out the attack 21 months later.

Malanga points out that during the four years that Biden-administration’s open border policy with Mexico was in effect, it repeated that mistake on a much larger scale by admitting roughly 3 million undocumented migrants to enter the country without a security vetting, while going through the motions of seeking asylum or other methods to qualify as legitimate refugees. In addition, the Biden administration simply ignored several million more unauthorized border crossings, which reportedly included attempts by known suspected terrorists to enter the U.S. following Hamas’ October 7, 2023 mass terrorist attack on Israel. Malanga also notes the Biden administration’s suspension of DNA-testing requirements for immigrants under a 2005 congressional law that was intended to help identify dangerous individuals who were in federal custody.

Bruce Hoffman, a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and an expert in counterterrorism and national security, wrote an essay for the City Journal that examines the counter-terrorism initiatives that resulted from the federal government’s 9/11 Commission study of the attack, which led to the significant reforms to America’s intelligence agencies designed to help prevent another mass-casualty attack on U.S. soil.

Post 9/11 Security Reforms Mostly Worked To Prevent New Attacks

With the lone exception of one foreign-terrorist-directed shooting attack, carried out in 2019 at the U.S. Navy’s main air station at Pensacola, Florida, which killed three American sailors and wounded eight others, there have been no other successful foreign terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. But Hoffman also argues that the broader international “war on terror” that was launched by the George W. Bush administration to defeat the radical Islamic ideology that produced the 9/11 attack failed to complete its mission. That initial attempt to kill bin Laden and wipe out his cell of al-Qaeda terrorists while he and his followers were still hiding in Afghanistan failed to prevent them from crossing the border into Pakistan, where they continued to operate freely, apparently with the knowledge and at least tacit approval from senior Pakistani government and military leaders. American intelligence agencies tracked him down and identified him as living at a “safe house” compound in the city of Abbottabad, where he was killed on May 2, 2011, during a secretly launched attack carried out by U.S. Navy SEALS that was personally approved by President Barack Obama.

Meanwhile, Hoffman notes, bin Laden’s original al-Qaeda organization splintered into several separate regional franchises, including an active branch in Yemen that became known as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). A U.S.-born Islamic cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, moved to Yemen in 2004, where he became AQAP’s most effective English-speaking recruiter. He was also partially responsible for the failed 2009 attempt by a terrorist member of AQAP to blow up an American jetliner with a bomb hidden in his underwear while it was landing at Detroit’s airport.

Al-Awaki was considered to be so dangerous to American national security that on September 30, 2011, he became the first American citizen to be killed on purpose by a U.S. military drone strike in Yemen, without a trial, in accordance with a personal order issued by President Obama.

Meanwhile, after the bloody Syrian civil war against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad spun out of control in late 2011, ISIS, another offshoot of al-Qaeda, was able to establish a caliphate (a radical Islamic religious government) across 40,000 square miles of Syrian and Iraqi territory before its defeat by a coalition led by the U.S. military that was initiated in 2014 under President Obama, and successfully concluded in 2019 when a major American military offensive conquered the last significant piece of Syrian territory that had been under ISIS control.

However, to this day, Hoffman reminds us that several other offshoots from the original al-Qaeda terrorist group are still functioning, including branches that are active within Muslim population centers as far from the Middle East as the Philippines and Indonesia. As a result, numerous Sunni-based Islamic terrorist groups, separate from the Iranian-supported Shiite terrorist network, still pose a significant threat to the democratic governments of those countries, and are part of a loose international Islamic terrorist network that extends into Western Europe as well as several countries in the Middle East, and also includes the scattered remnants of ISIS.

Additional 9/11 commemorative essays by City Journal editor Brian C. Anderson and former CIA analyst Martin Gurri each offer firsthand recollections of the attack on that day itself, describing the shift from a sense of peacetime security to what Gurri calls a decades-long “struggle to the death” between the liberal democratic ideology of Western Civilization and radical political Islam.

The War Against Iran Is The Culmination Of The U.S. War On Terror

That long and historic conflict, Gurri argues, is only now approaching resolution amid the major recent setbacks to Iran and its main terrorist allies, Hezbollah, and Hamas in retaliation for the heinous Hamas October 7, 2023 terror attack on Israel. That attack fundamentally changed the ground rules that have governed the Israeli-Arab conflict dating back to Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.

In his essay, Gurri also argues that some of the American domestic security measures that were imposed after the 9/11 attack, including highly intrusive airport screenings and expanded surveillance of American citizens by intelligence agencies under the authority of the Patriot Act, have gone too far. He suggests that it is time to recalibrate some of those measures in the name of greater respect for individual freedoms without breaching the minimum level of vigilance necessary to keep the American homeland secure.

A New York Post article reviewing Jeffrey Robinson’s new book, Ash and Honor, documents the little-known threat to Air Force One, which was carrying President George W. Bush during the chaotic hours immediately following the initial attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. President Bush was addressing the students at an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida, when he received the first word about the terrorist attacks using four hijacked jet airliners. The two Secret Service agents who were leading Bush’s protective detail that day decided immediately that the safest place for him, while more information on the attacks was being gathered, was in the air somewhere above American territory in Air Force One, ideally accompanied by an American jet fighter escort, just in case there was another element to the terrorist attack that was directly intended to take out the president.

The 9/11 Threat Against Air Force One That Was Just Revealed

However, the threat level against Air Force One increased again at 10:22 a.m., less than two hours after the North Tower (1 World Trade Center) at Ground Zero was the first to be hit by hijacked American Airlines Flight 11. The emergency bunker-bomb shelter five stories beneath the White House received a threat invoking the classified code name “Angel,” for Air Force One. That raised new fears that an unidentified sleeper terrorist agent who had somehow gotten aboard the president’s own plane had compromised its location while in the air, making it vulnerable to a possible midair attack.

The Secret Service agents aboard Air Force One responded immediately by locking down the aircraft, confiscating all phones on board that could be used to orchestrate such an attack, and diverting the plane to land at the nearest secure ground location at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. Only then would they allow the president to return to the White House, from which he wanted to broadcast an address to the American people to reassure them that the terrorist attack was over and that he and the rest of the federal government were safe and in full control of the situation.

The Roots Ideology Of Apologies For Islamic Terrorism

Another City Journal essay, written by Hudson Institute Middle East research fellow Zineb Riboua, contends that the main ideological fault line today does not run between Islam and the West, but within Islamic diaspora communities in the West itself.

She contends that today’s radical Islamic theology has been fused with postcolonial and “Third World” academic theories originally promulgated by Columbia University professor of literature Edward Said. His most famous book, Orientalism, published in 1978, is the origin of the widespread current belief that Western civilization has long cultivated a prejudiced attitude against Arabs and Islamists as inferior people living in the Middle East, justifying their systematic exploitation by American and European colonial and imperial powers. For similar reasons, Said’s current-day Islamic followers also reject the mass return of the Jewish people, who were forcibly displaced by the rise of antisemitic persecution in the countries where they had been living, and were left with no other choice than to find refuge in their biblical homeland in Israel.

Another Mamdani Outrage In Support Of 9/11 Islamic Terrorists

A New York Post story covered a related controversy over a ceremony at New York City Hall, where Mayor Zohran Mamdani signed a 9/11 remembrance order and then handed the ceremonial signing pen to Ramzi Kassem, a lawyer who has previously defended an al-Qaeda-linked defendant who had family ties to one of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers, and whom Mamdani has appointed to serve as New York City’s chief legal counsel. Mamdani’s critics also fault him for maneuvering the city’s highly respected Jewish police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, who is a holdover appointee from former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration, into a compromising position in which she was forced to hand the signing pen to Kassem, a defender of the same Islamic terrorists that the 9/11 remembrance order that the mayor had just signed condemns. Several Republican City Council members and a retired NYPD detective were also quoted in the New York Post’s coverage of the signing ceremony. They called Kassem’s presence and participation in the event disrespectful to the memory of the victims of the 9/11 attack and their family members. The family members also rejected a later attempt by the mayor’s office to justify Kassem’s presence at the ceremony because his office had drafted the text of the 9/11 remembrance orders that Mayor Mamdani signed on September 4.

Another New York Post article examined how the events associated with the 9/11 attack 25 years ago are being taught to public school students across the country. The story points out that there are only two states in the country, Arizona and Florida, where the story of the 9/11 attack is required to be included in standard school curricula.

Woke Educators Deliberately Distort The History Of The 9/11 Attack

The same article also exposed the fact that a school lesson package containing a pro-terrorist version of the 9/11 attack was developed at and is currently being widely distributed by the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. The package, which is titled “Teaching Beyond September 11th,” only devotes a single paragraph to describe the basic facts about the nature of the 9/11 attack to students who were born many years after the attack took place and who therefore have no personal memories of the event. Among its many other failings, the 9/11 lesson package never directly refers to the 19 al-Qaeda hijackers as terrorists. It also largely ignores the heroic efforts by hundreds of New York City police and firefighters who risked their lives in an attempt to rescue as many of the attack victims in the Twin Towers as possible that day. Many of the same first responders continued to risk their lives in the dangerous efforts during the following eight months to recover the bodies of the victims from the highly toxic environment around Ground Zero.

The pro-terrorist school curriculum devotes a chapter to what it characterizes as “Islamophobia and the Oval Office” of President George W. Bush. Another chapter is devoted to accusing the many Americans who blamed the massive loss of life in the attack on the radical Islamic theology of bin Laden and the al-Qaeda movement of spreading “Right-Wing Extremism.”

The curriculum ignores the many New Yorkers and millions of other Americans who were traumatized and badly frightened by the 9/11 attack, which exposed the serious weaknesses in America’s homeland security that made the attack possible. The curriculum also condemns as unjustified the understandable increase in post-9/11 surveillance by the NYPD and other law enforcement agencies of the large Muslim communities in the Greater New York City metropolitan area.

Despite the many fundamental flaws and inaccuracies throughout the pro-terrorist curriculum’s 9/11 narrative, the New York Post article reports that “Teaching Beyond September 11th” has been recommended, as is, for use in public schools by the state education departments of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and Oregon.

The New York Post article also reported that a national teachers’ union and various other state-sponsored educational programs have endorsed similar educational lesson plans that use a pro-terrorist-skewed version of the  9/11 attack to highlight American culpability for an unjustified rise in the level of “Islamophobia” and an unfair anti-Muslim backlash. This narrative is what many liberals today use to try to justify the repeated Islamic terrorist attacks on American targets and other Western-style democracies in Europe and around the world.

Why Parents Must Explain The October 7 Attack To Their Children

An op-ed piece written for the California Post by Shirin Yadegar from a parent’s perspective yearns for the return of the moral clarity and sense of patriotic pride that almost all Americans felt during the days that immediately followed the 9/11 attack. Yadegar then drew a sharp contrast to the much more equivocal public reaction to Hamas’ equally heinous October 7, 2023 attack, which killed 1,200 Israeli citizens, consisting mostly of defenseless civilians, including women and children. She urges today’s parents to make sure their children understand the true nature of that attack as well, rather than from the distorted pro-terrorist and antisemitic narrative that is being disseminated about the events of October 7 by many social media sources, as well as school curricula designed to brainwash young students with woke ideological narratives rather than the simple historical facts.

Ground Zero’s Rebuilt Lower Manhattan Skyline And Neighborhood

Balancing the dark memories of the tragedy and the many lives lost 25 years ago at Ground Zero, a Wall Street Journal report describes the radical transformation and revival of the area of Lower Manhattan surrounding Ground Zero as it exists today.

Today it is a thriving neighborhood which mixes a variety of successful business activities with comfortable and often luxurious new housing developments attracting many successful and upwardly mobile young families. The neighborhood’s mostly upscale residential population has roughly tripled since before 9/11.

More than $20 billion has been invested in the completely rebuilt World Trade Center complex, and the area has diversified from the financial-services hub supporting Wall Street that it was in 2001, into a mixed residential and corporate headquarters area that is home today to industry-leading American companies like Spotify and American Express.

A large number of conversions, from business office buildings to residential apartments, supported by generous federal financial incentives following the 9/11 attack, have turned dozens of vacant commercial buildings into attractive new housing units which are now home to the area’s sharply increased residential population. There are also many new service, food, and entertainment businesses that meet the needs of the expanded local population that simply didn’t exist there before 2001.

But according to the Wall Street Journal article, the rebuilding opportunities around Ground Zero have not yet been exhausted. Roughly 22% of the downtown Manhattan office space that was abandoned immediately after the 9/11 attack still sits vacant and available for redevelopment. That includes the site of the former 39-story-tall Deutsche Bank building, across the street from Ground Zero. It was badly damaged during the 9/11 attack and was completely torn down in 2011. Today the site is part of the Liberty Park complex which overlooks the National September 11 Memorial at Ground Zero, which has become one of New York City’s most popular tourist attractions.

More 9/11 Victims Are Still Coming Forward

Even as sharply polarized ideological arguments continue over the causes of the 9/11 attack and its relevance to the Islamic terrorist threat still facing Western civilization today, the number of people whose health was badly damaged on 9/11 or during the following months of cleanup and recovery keeps growing.

Tens of thousands of additional victims of the 9/11 attack survived that day, only to contract one of many potentially fatal diseases due to their exposure to the toxic dust in the environment around Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan during cleanup following the attack. Some of them are just now, 25 years later, being diagnosed with serious medical conditions that threaten their health or which will shorten their remaining life expectancies.

The New York Post reports that 9,677 first responders and survivors have now died from illnesses linked to the toxic dust and smoke at Ground Zero. That is more than triple the number of people killed during the day the four hijacked airliner attacks actually took place. The toll of cancer victims currently includes 5,892 deaths due to exposure to carcinogenic substances at the 9/11 site, and an additional 57,000 documented 9/11-linked cancer cases currently being treated.

Individuals who were exposed to the Ground Zero site 25 years ago, before the cleanup was completed still face dramatically elevated risk factors for developing thyroid cancer, melanoma, prostate cancer, as well as normally rare cases of breast cancer among post-9/11 exposed men.

Pataki And Giuliani Are Among The Delayed 9/11 Victims

Former New York State Republican governor George Pataki has disclosed that he was recently diagnosed with a respiratory lung condition known as restrictive airway disease that doctors now tell him he contracted during his frequent post-9/11 attack appearances at Ground Zero. However, Pataki is not feeling sorry for himself.

“You know, 25 years later, I feel great. I have this minor residual impact from that time. But compared to so many others, I consider myself very lucky,” Pataki told a New York Post reporter. “The people who were with me at Ground Zero over and over for months after those attacks,” Pataki continued, “Many of them have serious illnesses, far more serious than anything I might be experiencing.”

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose often inspirational post-attack appearances at Ground Zero are still widely regarded as his finest hours, has also reportedly been diagnosed with the same lung disease after a recent hospitalization.

In a subsequent interview with the conservative Newsmax cable channel, Giuliani complained that “Having lost [close] friends [at Ground Zero that day] and being very close to many of the families, it offends me that [New York City Mayor Mamdani] is coming [to the annual memorial celebration on the upcoming 25th anniversary of the attack].”

Giuliani also recalled in a bitter tirade against the current mayor that the 9/11 terrorists attacked the United States “in the name of the Muslim religion” and “weren’t hiding it like Mamdani is trying to hide it.”

Former Governor Pataki has also expressed his opposition to Mamdani’s planned in-person attendance at the 9/11 commemoration ceremony at Ground Zero, where former U.S. presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, as well as some other former New York City mayors are also expected to be present.

The White House has announced that it will be represented at the Ground Zero ceremony by Vice President JD Vance, while President Trump is expected to appear at a similar ceremony to be held the same day at the Pentagon, which was also attacked on 9/11 by a suicide terrorist flying a different hijacked airliner that morning.

Mamdani Defying Requests From Families To Stay Away On 9/11

Meanwhile, an online petition which has been circulated by family members who lost loved ones during the 9/11 attack and which asks Mayor Mamdani not to be present at the Ground Zero ceremony out of respect for their loss, reached its goal of attracting more than 100,000 signatures three days before the event took place.

Mayor Mamdani insisted that despite their objections, he will be present at the ceremony, and wants the focus of the event to be “on the families whose loved ones were stolen from them 25 years ago in the horrific act of terror of September 11, and. . . on the first responders who did everything they could.”