Twenty-five years ago, nearly 3,000 innocents were murdered in the deadliest single terrorist attack in human history. We mourn those we lost in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, and we pray for the loved ones they left behind who continue to feel that loss every day of their lives.
Like every American over a certain age, I remember exactly where I was on 9/11. After my wife called to tell me to turn on the news, I watched the horrors of that day unfold on television, and I knew that the country I loved – and the world – had changed forever.
People talk about the unity we felt after the attack, and it’s true: Americans were united in heartbreak for the victims and their families, and in horror that such evil could be perpetrated against our countrymen. I certainly shared that feeling – but I also felt profound anger. In the years that followed, conventional liberal opinion held that this was somehow not an appropriate reaction – but that anger was righteous, it was true, and it was clarifying. It did not, as some would charge, lead us to lash out indiscriminately; but it did force us to confront realities we had closed our eyes to, and to take on the scourge of global terrorism.
The world is a very different place today, but in one sense it is the same as it ever was. Evil still roams the earth in many forms. I saw it up close as CIA Director and Secretary of State. And Islamist terrorists not only remain committed to the destruction of Western civilization, but are emboldened by the atrocities of October 7 to wage a genocidal war against the state of Israel and the Jewish people.
There’s no question that, on an operational level, we’re in a much better position than we were on September 10, 2001. The legal barriers preventing intelligence sharing between the FBI and CIA have been torn down, surveillance laws have been updated, and we successfully prevented another large-scale terrorist attack from recurring – an achievement that is taken for granted, but which many would have considered fanciful in the aftermath of 9/11.
But in a very important respect, our country is in a more dangerous place than it was 25 years ago, as moral equivalence and the outright embrace of terrorism and political violence have become normalized by one of our two major political parties.
The divide between the Left and Right at the turn of the last century was real, and the partisan battles were brutal, but Americans across the political spectrum were horrified by 9/11 and shared a deep love for this country. But today, the Left is being taken over by unapologetically anti-American radicals who have said that America either deserved, or was at least responsible for, 9/11; who spend their energy excusing or even celebrating terrorism; and who want to tear down the values and institutions that make this country great.
This moral rot is an extension of the longstanding takeover of so many of our institutions by anti-American, amoral radicals – perhaps most critically, our public schools and universities. Consider a recent report in the New York Post on a curriculum developed by the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education entitled “Teaching Beyond September 11th.” The document neglects to mention the jihadist motivations of the 9/11 attacks, and focuses instead on the alleged evils of America’s reaction to this unprecedented atrocity. Unsurprisingly, this malevolent nonsense is recommended to public schools by education departments in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and Oregon.
We cannot afford to flinch from our responsibility to face and defeat the evils that threaten our way of life, or to indulge in moral equivalence: Not in 2001, and not today. Scripture tells us, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.” Let us never forget that lesson, and let us remain steadfast in fighting for what is right and just in the face of those who seek to tear our country down.
