Twenty-five years after 9/11, the ideology that struck us is winning - opinion
by Adam Milstein, The Jerusulem Post, September 11, 2026
On October 12, 2000, radical Islamist suicide bombers attacked the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen, killing 17 American sailors and wounding another 37. The Navy destroyer nearly sank.
A year later, twenty-five years ago, America woke up to a nightmare on our soil: nineteen terrorists, driven by the same radical Islamist ideology, had hijacked four airplanes and murdered nearly 3,000 people and injured another 6,000.
We watched the World Trade Center collapse. We watched the Pentagon burn. We watched innocent passengers fight back on Flight 93. And we watched firefighters, police officers, and ordinary Americans run toward danger while others ran for their lives.
We promised never to forget, and to defend our American freedoms and way of life in memory of those who perished that day. But sadly, over time, our promise to America has evaporated. The evidence is everywhere: in our classrooms, in our city halls, and in the fastest-growing factions of our own politics.
As America marks the 25th anniversary of 9/11, while celebrating 250 years since its founding, those anniversaries compel us to confront a question that is uncomfortable but unavoidable:
What happens when a civilization loses confidence in its own values while its enemies remain completely convinced of theirs?
The threat of radical Islam, foreign and domestic, has not receded. It has spread.
The terrorists of 2000 wanted to murder Americans abroad, and the terrorists of 2001 wanted to destroy American lives and symbols on our homeland. Today's Islamist threat can still take the form of terrorism, but it also operates through propaganda, political influence, ideological networks, and efforts to reshape how Americans normalize, accept, and even cherish radical Islam.
The examples are no longer isolated. In August, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) promoted a back-to-school resource guide that blamed 9/11 on “American support for Israel” and recommended Osama bin Laden's infamous “Letter to America” to students. After deserved backlash, the material was removed.
Imagine a curriculum about Pearl Harbor that treated Japanese propaganda as required reading while suggesting that American policy was fundamentally responsible for the attack.
We would immediately recognize the moral inversion.
And just a few days ago, in a symbolic but troubling act, New York Mayor Mamdani signed a 9/11 memorial order, then handed the ceremonial pen to an attorney who had represented a convicted al-Qaeda operative.
In the 21century, a distorted worldview is infecting America, where the perpetrators become secondary, their ideology becomes an afterthought, and the blame is redirected toward America, Israel, or the West.
New Yorkers, and unfortunately many Americans, not only did NOT “Never Forget” what happened on 9/11; they became willing or unwilling accomplices in the total takeover of New York City and the ongoing effort to take over the United States.
If you “Never Forget,” how can 67% of ALL New Yorkers NOT VOTE against a Radical Islamist when he was running for Mayor of New York??? They were DEFEATED by the Radical Islamist because they were unwilling to fight for American values.
As much as the $25.4 billion we taxpayers have paid out to “Victims of 9/11” has been stolen, so too has much of the billions more that average Americans nationwide have given to “charities” after 25 years of relentless marketing on conservative TV and radio. (Fox News)
The Anti-American Far-Left Radicals who attacked Israel after 10-6, and who are using money from Communist China to promote the total takeover of the Democrat Party by the even more INSANE Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), who are running radical Muslims for U.S. Congress, the U.S. Senate, and local offices, are the accomplices to what started 25 years ago on 9/11.
ALL Americans MUST recognize the REAL threat to our nation and ourselves. WE must name our enemies and defeat them at home and abroad!
Tom Zawistowski
President
We the People Convention
This is the underpinning of an Islamist political ideology that seeks to use democracy to exploit Western freedoms while undermining the civilization that created and protects them.
This extreme ideology increasingly intersects with a radicalized American left that has developed its own deep hostility toward the institutions and traditions of Western civilization. Together, they form the Islamo-Left alliance.
For decades, much of the American left rightly championed liberal democracy, individual rights, freedom of speech, women's equality, and the rule of law. Today, some of its fastest-growing factions, like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which are led by many Islamists such as Linda Sarsour and Zoran Mamdani, increasingly describe those very principles as instruments of oppression.
America is portrayed not as a flawed but fundamentally democratic society capable of reform, but as an inherently oppressive colonial power.
Western civilization is treated not as the tradition that produced modern liberal democracy, but as something to be dismantled.
America's military is portrayed as uniquely evil. Its alliances are treated as illegitimate. Its history is reduced to a catalog of crimes.
And Israel—the only liberal democracy in the Middle East and America's closest democratic ally in the region – is increasingly cast as the ultimate villain.
The problem is moral asymmetry.
When Islamist extremists attack the West, we are told to examine the grievances that supposedly caused them to act.
When Western countries defend themselves, we are told that their very existence is the problem.
When Islamists or their sympathizers are criticized, the discussion immediately shifts to Islamophobia.
This moral relativism is one of the most dangerous weapons available to an extremist movement.
Because if there is no objective distinction between terrorism and self-defense, between murdering civilians and fighting terrorists, between democratic government and authoritarian rule, then there is no moral basis for defending civilization at all. They understand something that many Western elites have forgotten: ideas matter.
Osama bin Laden understood that he was fighting not simply the American military but American pride. His objective was not merely to kill Americans. It was to convince Americans that their civilization was corrupt, illegitimate, and unworthy of defending.
Twenty-five years later, we are helping him make that argument.
When students are encouraged to read bin Laden's writings without a clear understanding of the ideology and hatred behind them, that is not historical inquiry. When terrorist organizations are romanticized as liberation movements, that is not nuance. When Western civilization is treated as illegitimate while authoritarian and Islamist movements are excused as products of circumstance, that is not compassion.
American values and ethics require no apology or defense. They are responsible for immeasurable and unprecedented progress throughout the modern world.
The rights of minorities.
An independent judiciary.
The peaceful transfer of power.
These are universal ideals, but they emerged from the Western liberal tradition and were defended, persistently, by Western democracies.
America deserves no embarrassment for that inheritance.
That is why, in addition to solemnity and remembrance, the 25th anniversary of 9/11 must also be a day of intellectual clarity.
We must teach our children who attacked America on September 11 and why.
We must scrutinize organizations that seek influence over American institutions while promoting narratives that excuse terrorism or demonize American democracy.
We must challenge activist movements that have made hostility toward America and the West fashionable.
And we must reject the idea that every conflict has two equally valid sides, that every perpetrator is necessarily a victim, and that every act of self-defense is morally equivalent to the violence that made it necessary.
Twenty-five years ago, America understood that it was at war with an ideology. We still are.
“Never forget” means more than mourning those who died. It means naming who attacked us, defending what they attacked, and refusing to let their ideology win.
Adam Milstein is an Israeli American strategic venture philanthropist.
