Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, an American Thinker commentary by Eileen F. Toplansky asks what the annual memorial services are worth if, in her telling, the country is quietly permitting Sharia to take hold. Her answer is blunt: the rituals of remembrance are meaningless unless Americans actively repel what she describes as the jihadist goal.
The piece, published September 16, 2026, opens by disputing the sincerity of the refrain that America will never forget. Remembering the murders, Toplansky writes, is not the same as remembering the objective behind them — and she argues that the objective is being pursued by other means.
An interrogation cell, a strategy, and a warning ignored
Central to her argument is an account of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 plot, who she says told interrogator Dr. James Mitchell that a second mass-casualty attack was unnecessary. Instead, the plan would exploit American civil liberties, openness, and a willingness to honor other cultures — described in her retelling as gifts from Allah. Immigration and outbreeding, she writes, were the practical route to imposing Sharia.
Toplansky says Mitchell brought this warning to politicians in 2004 and that it was ignored, a claim she does not elaborate on but uses as a hinge for the rest of the essay. The failure, in her framing, was not a failure of intelligence but of will.
The ‘two-front strategy’
She draws on reporting from the RAIR Foundation to describe what she calls an Islamic two-front strategy — an internal society that insulates Muslims from cradle to grave under Sharia-compliant food, dress, banking, schooling, healthcare, courts, and burials, and an external society that penetrates Western institutions to propagate Islam and seize power. The external prong, she writes, deploys what RAIR calls ‘radicals with a smile’ — polished organizations, charismatic leaders, and sympathetic legislators who wrap their agenda in the language of inclusion, diversity, and tolerance.
Toplansky ties this to a 1982 Muslim Brotherhood document, ‘Toward a Global Strategy for Islamic Policy,’ also known as ‘The Project,’ which she says was entered into the congressional record at a February 10, 2026 hearing titled ‘Sharia-Free America: Why Political Islam & Sharia Law Are Incompatible with the U.S. Constitution.’
From there the commentary turns to electoral politics, asserting that Muslims have fielded more than 600 candidates at local, state, and federal levels, that the number of Muslims in the House will likely triple after November’s election, and that Abdul el-Sayed may become the first Muslim senator. It also claims that female genital mutilation, honor violence, and polygamy represent incremental Sharia in Muslim enclaves in Michigan. None of these figures or allegations are sourced in the piece beyond the assertion itself.
She points to Mayor Mamdani handing a pen to Ramzi Kassem, described as a defender of an al-Qaeda terrorist, and asks whether outrage at such scenes will translate into a demand for a meaningful end to what she calls the Islamic desire to defeat America. She also invokes what she terms a Red-Green alliance of Islam and communism and asks when Americans will draw a line and root out both movements.
The ‘Mosque Buster’ and the IMAM Act
Against that backdrop the piece highlights organizing efforts it frames as pushback. It cites Amy Mek’s reporting on British lawyer Gavin Boby, known as the ‘Mosque Buster,’ who argues that mosque construction drives Islamic conquest through staged Islamization, warns that projects like Epic City in Texas signal a broader civilizational threat, and calls on communities to organize, fund, and fight back legally before the West is lost.
Boby’s central claim, as quoted in the commentary, is that a mosque is not merely a place of worship but a territorial claim, and that once one is built the message is clear: this is our area now. He describes a pattern beginning with a mosque and ending in the displacement of non-Muslims through intimidation, economic pressure, and social pressure.
The piece also promotes legislation from Congressman Chip Roy (R-TX), co-chair of the Sharia Free America Caucus, who introduced the Inhibiting Militant Adversarial Mullahs (IMAM) Act. The bill would amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to deny nonimmigrant religious worker visas to foreign imams, shaykhs, muftis, ayatollahs, and other Islamic religious leaders who promote Sharia law, political Islam, anti-American hatred, or ideologies hostile to the Constitution and Western civilization.
According to the excerpted argument in the commentary, adversarial clerics have for years exploited visa loopholes to enter the country under the guise of religious ministry and then spread teachings that contradict American values of liberty, equality, and individual rights, fostering extremism and parallel societies. Europe’s experience with imported radical preachers — no-go zones, honor violence, and rising terrorism — is presented as a warning, with the conclusion that America must act before those patterns become entrenched.
Toplansky also notes that ACT for America is calling on every state legislature to establish its own Sharia-Free Caucus, framing the ask as uncontroversial because, in her words, Sharia is anti-constitutional, anti-woman, and anti-American. She mentions Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville drawing the ire of CAIR for raising the issue.
Geller’s verdict, and a closing warning
Pamela Geller is cited for her account of how Americans fought back against plans for a 16-story mega-mosque at Ground Zero in a building destroyed on 9/11. But Geller’s quoted verdict is pessimistic: the best and most informed voices on the subject — Bat Ye’or, Ibn Warraq, Wafa Sultan, Robert Spencer, and Dr. Andrew Bostom among them — remain demonized, marginalized, and disregarded, and their work is not informing policy or leading institutions. She adds that jihad terrorists are given enormous platforms, are lauded by a sharia-compliant media, and are getting elected to Congress.
The commentary closes on the idea that jihadists never stop seeking total conquest, and that if Americans genuinely mean ‘never forget,’ they must not surrender. She also cites the statistic that 10 percent is the threshold at which knowledge becomes mainstream and accepted by the majority — an argument for facts, truth, and transparency as the path to shifting public opinion.
Whether one shares Toplansky’s premises or finds them alarming, the essay is a useful marker of an argument now circulating in conservative media: that the post-9/11 question is no longer about airports or battlefield, but about immigration policy, visa categories, local mosque construction, and ballot lines — and that the costs of ignoring that argument, in her view, will be paid in full.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/never-forget/