Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, a commentary published by The Daily Wire argues that America is losing sight of the most basic facts about that day — who carried out the attacks, and why. The piece, titled “The 9/11 Lesson America Can’t Afford To Forget,” contends that a deliberate effort is underway to obscure the identity and motives of the attackers, and it reserves particular criticism for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and for The New York Times.
The article opens with the claim that “not every human being on Earth is oriented toward freedom the way Westerners believe in it,” and frames the anniversary as a moment to confront what it calls a quarter-century of appeasement. According to the commentary, the West has imported millions of immigrants from Muslim countries, “a huge swath of whom do not support Western values,” and has continued to excuse Islamic radicalism. It also asserts that many Americans — “nearly the entire Left along with the horseshoe Right” — now share an anti-American worldview that holds the United States and the West chiefly responsible for global suffering, and that Islamic terrorism is merely blowback.
A Generational Memory Gap
The piece acknowledges a simple demographic reality: anyone under about 30 has no personal memory of 9/11. For younger generations, the commentary says, this anniversary is their first real encounter with history of that magnitude. It asks what ought to be remembered on the 25th anniversary, answering that the pain Americans suffered — and still suffer — should be remembered, but that vagueness about the day’s perpetrators is not enough. The commentary accuses politicians of treating 9/11 as “a mystery wrapped in an enigma,” a bad thing that happened with no identifiable cause or ideology behind it.
Central to that criticism is Mayor Mamdani. The article describes him as a man who once rapped in solidarity with the Holy Land Five — people convicted of providing material support for terrorism through the Holy Land Foundation — and says he has “nothing but sympathy for a wide variety of Islamic radicals.” It quotes a Mamdani statement commemorating 9/11, in which the mayor recalled New Yorkers lining up to donate blood, opening their homes, and carrying colleagues down hundreds of stairs before turning back to help others. Mamdani called it a sacred obligation to care for one another and to build “a city worthy of their courage.”
The commentary’s response is blunt: “Everything that Mamdani is saying here would be equally applicable if the towers had simply collapsed on their own.” It argues that a viewer with no prior knowledge of the attacks — a young person or, as the piece puts it, an alien who landed on Earth today — would have no idea who did what to whom. The article also notes that many 9/11 victims’ families do not want the mayor attending their events, and it criticizes a New York Times headline that framed Mamdani as keeping “focus on 9/11 victims” while “facing Islamophobia.”
The Times and the Framing of the Anniversary
The commentary takes aim at what it describes as the top headlines on The New York Times homepage on the anniversary: one about a nation gathering to remember and mourn, one saying President Trump “personifies a nation moving on,” and one stating that “Islamophobia shaped a generation of Muslim New Yorkers.” The article calls this framing “worse than useless” and “counterproductive,” describing it as a betrayal of the American people, the victims’ families, and those who fought in the aftermath. Its core argument is that reliving the evil of 9/11 is necessary precisely because forgetting it means forgetting the nature of enemies who, in its telling, are still out there and still hold the same beliefs.
The piece then recounts the day’s events in detail. It states that 2,977 Americans were murdered, with two hijacked planes flown into the World Trade Center. American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower at 8:46 a.m., with 87 passengers and crew aboard, all killed instantly; every stairwell route above the 91st floor was severed.
It describes tapes of people inside the towers calling family members to say they loved them because they knew they would not come home, and firefighters rushing into the buildings — hundreds of whom were killed. United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower at 9:03 a.m., killing all 60 passengers and crew instantly. Debris rained down on people in the streets; at least 37 people, and probably well over 50, jumped to their deaths from the North Tower, the commentary says, because they were trapped in the heat.
American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m., killing all 59 passengers and crew and 125 military and civilian personnel inside. The South Tower collapsed at 9:59 a.m., with somewhere between 600 and 1,000 people dying inside, including 343 New York City Fire Department firefighters and 71 law enforcement officers. The North Tower fell at 10:28 a.m., killing about 1,600 people; everyone above the impact zone died. And aboard United Airlines Flight 93, passengers breached the cockpit and counterattacked the hijackers, forcing the plane down — all 40 passengers and crew died. The commentary highlights passenger Todd Beamer’s words, “Are you guys ready? Let’s roll,” which became a battle cry for Americans.
The Commission Report and the Failure of Imagination
The commentary defends the 9/11 Commission’s July 2004 report as “incredibly thorough,” noting that it reviewed some 2.5 million pages of documents and interviewed 1,200 individuals, dismissing conspiracy theories that the report was rigged as “nonsense.” The report, it says, summarized institutional breakdowns and intelligence failures before the attacks.
The chief failure, according to the piece, was a failure of imagination: people simply did not think Islamic terrorists could carry off an operation of that size. Terrorism was not treated as a paramount national security concern before 9/11; counterterrorism was handled as a law enforcement matter rather than a foreign policy and intelligence issue. The FBI was more reactive than proactive, the CIA had been weakened, and a “Chinese firewall” separated the two agencies, preventing information sharing. The FAA’s no-fly watch list contained just 12 people, and none of the hijackers were on it.
The article notes that Al-Qaeda carried out the attacks and had a strategy in the lead-up. In 1998, Osama bin Laden declared it a religious duty for Muslims to kill Americans anywhere in the world, military and civilian alike, and Al-Qaeda built a network of state sanctuaries during the 1990s in Sudan and in Afghanistan under the Taliban. The piece insists there is no mystery about bin Laden’s motives — a claim it asserts plainly, framing the anniversary not as a moment for vague mourning but as a call to confront an enemy it says remains unchanged.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-9-11-lesson-america-cant-afford-to-forget