Josh First's Blog

9/11’s meaning then and now

Today is the 18th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, known as “9/11”.

From October 2001 to October 2003, I worked closely with the National Park Service and with the families of the Flight 93 victims on protecting the crash site, two solid hard-working years, so that it could eventually become a national memorial without worries of losing the physical sense of what the surrounding ground looked like the moment the plane flipped upside down and did a nose-dive into Tim Lambert’s spruce grove.

And for those two years no one ever blamed the victims of 9/11. Nor did anyone try to scapegoat anyone else for 9/11. Solemnly we focused hard on protecting the landscape so that future generations would know and remember not only what happened, but why and by whom. Like a battlefield, which most Americans properly see it as.

However, for a lot of Americans today, the ‘why’ and and ‘whom’ parts of 9/11 are now strangely flipped around.

In a recent conference about 9/11, panelists blamed guns, the NRA, whites, Christians, and a lack of open borders for 9/11. No, I am not making this up. Blaming the American victims of 9/11 is the actual state of mind among many liberal leaders today. At the conference, they refused to mention Islam, Muslim terrorists, or hijacked planes. Instead, they used the event to call attention to their favorite failed policy goals, not to heal the wounded nation or to discuss lessons learned about how to avoid a repeat of 9/11.

And let’s be honest: Open borders will lead to not just one more 9/11, but many more acts of mass terror against Americans. You could fairly argue that the coast-to-coast illegal alien crime wave already is a form of terrorism, or that the liberal policy assault on law enforcement and the resulting mass shootings is a form of terrorism. But what is meant here, and what is the worst, are carefully planned and targeted acts of mass murder. Like what happened on 9/11.

Eighteen years ago 9/11 heightened our awareness. It made Americans feel vulnerable. It taught us that our best intentions and most open-minded policies are seen by most people outside of America as signs of weakness, of decadence, of a lack of willpower to survive, and they were then exploited to our disadvantage. Our federal government at the time properly took revenge on the Taliban and al-Qaeda, mostly hiding in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. But then that same government mistakenly tried to implement a repeat of the World War II Marshall Plan, where America re-built the nations we had invaded and occupied. The post-9/11 attempted rebuilding of Iraq and Afghanistan was overly optimistic, because these Muslim countries are not European. They share none of the values or culture of WWII Europe, and they are immune to our culture and values.

And so now, instead of learning lessons from 9/11 and using them to protect America, we have an entire American political party that has inverted 9/11 and turned it into another forum and stage for promoting policies that have zero to do with 9/11 or preventing something similar from happening again.

Today in America, to one political party, the military veterans who fought to protect America by taking the fight to Iraq and Afghanistan are now the threat to America, not orthodox Muslims following the Koran to the letter of the law. And the patriotic friends of those veterans are the threat to America; the religious Christian friends and family of those veterans are the threat to America; and the hunters and target shooting friends of those veterans are also the threat to America.

Everyone but the actual perpetrators of 9/11, and their supporters like US Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, are that political party’s scapegoats for 9/11.

For radical Muslim Ilhan Omar, on 9/11 “Somebody did something.” That’s it, that is her whole take on 9/11, and her political party agrees with her.

And now her political party is coming hard after you and me.

Looks like a whole lot of people missed the lessons-learned part of 9/11. Probably because they don’t care about them. And that right there is the real lesson learned for the rest of us: 9/11 only means something to people who actually care about America staying America.