Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, Americans will once again observe moments of silence, read the names of the dead, and repeat the vow to never forget. But in a new essay published by The Daily Wire, historian Richard Landes argues that remembrance alone has become a substitute for the harder work of understanding — and resisting — the ideological movement that produced the attacks.
Landes, the founder of Infidel Awareness Month and author of Can ‘The Whole World’ Be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad, does not dispute that the hijackers were terrorists. His argument is that the West has treated September 11 as a criminal atrocity rather than as the visible edge of a political project with ambitions that extend well beyond violence.
The nineteen men who commandeered the planes were not, in his framing, an invading army. They were the “violent edge” of a movement that regards liberal democracy not as an order to join on equal terms but as one to displace. Their instrument was terror, he writes, but the purpose was larger.
The Quiet Half of the Equation
That distinction, Landes argues, is where public discussion usually stops. Jihadist violence is loud and impossible to ignore. But political Islam, he writes, also operates through da’wa — the quieter effort to persuade, organize, and advance an Islamist program inside open societies through law, education, social pressure, and institutional accommodation.
The common thread, in his account, is not method but claim: that a particular reading of Islamic law should be sovereign over civil authority, equal citizenship, and democratic self-government. Violence and quiet influence diverge in tactics, he writes, but converge on the same political proposition — that religious doctrine should outrank equal citizenship and self-rule.
Landes draws a firm line between that doctrine and Muslims as a people. His critique, he states explicitly, is not a claim about the faith’s adherents, nor does it deny the diversity of belief and practice among them. It concerns the political theology of Islamism, not Islam as a religion.
A Quarter-Century of Confusion
The cost of blurring that line, he argues, has been paralysis. For twenty-five years, Western leaders and institutions have often treated any discussion of Islamist doctrine as an accusation against Muslims broadly. Criticize a theology that rejects equality between believer and unbeliever, man and woman, dissenter and authority, and the critic is readily branded a bigot.
That reflex, in Landes’s telling, is a moral and intellectual failure with real victims. Failing to separate a people from an ideology leaves Muslims, reformers, women, religious minorities, secularists, and ex-Muslims without allies in the fight against a doctrine that frequently targets them first.
He points to Muslims who have risked their lives to challenge the doctrine’s claims of religious and political supremacy, arguing that their existence alone disproves the notion that opposition to Islamist political theology is inherently anti-Muslim.
Religious Liberty and Its Limits
The essay is careful to affirm that Muslims deserve the full protection of religious liberty in the West. What that liberty cannot become, Landes writes, is a license for political supremacy, unequal citizenship, or a violence-backed veto over dissent.
He cites the attack on Salman Rushdie and the 2015 murder of the staff of Charlie Hebdo as illustrations of how a claimed religious offense becomes a veto — but only if a free society accepts it as one.
That acceptance, he warns, rarely arrives as a single dramatic surrender. It accumulates: a critic branded beyond the pale, a university hesitating over a speaker invitation, a publisher choosing silence. None of those decisions looks like capitulation in isolation. Together, he writes, they train free societies to pre-censor themselves.
The Loss of Confidence Argument
Landes locates a deeper problem beneath fear itself: what the philosopher Roger Scruton called oikophobia — a reflexive contempt for one’s own inheritance. A culture that sees itself chiefly as history’s oppressor, he argues, may hear warnings about illiberal ideas only as prejudice. It can mistake moral clarity for intolerance and unilateral concession for sophistication.
In universities, newsrooms, and advocacy organizations, he writes, an instinct to scrutinize Western failures has curdled into an inability to scrutinize the claims of those who would dismantle Western liberties.
His conclusion is pointed: a supremacist ideology that cannot tolerate criticism or scrutiny is not strong. It is insecure enough to enforce its claims through intimidation and, at times, murder. The danger worth naming on the anniversary, he writes, is not simply another September 11 — it is a free society that loses the confidence to defend the liberties on which its freedom depends.
Principled Clarity as an Alternative
The essay closes by rejecting both collective suspicion of Muslims and silence about Islamism. Landes calls for “principled clarity” — distinguishing Muslims from an illiberal political doctrine while affirming the rights that doctrine seeks to subordinate. Equal citizenship, freedom of conscience, free speech, and the right to dissent, he writes, must remain the standard for everyone.
That, he suggests, is what it would mean for “never forget” to become “never again” — an anniversary observance that moves past memory into resolve.
The piece appears as part of a broader wave of 9/11 anniversary commentary that has increasingly divided over how directly Western governments and institutions should confront the ideological dimensions of the threat, rather than treating the attacks purely as a law-enforcement and counterterrorism problem.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/beyond-never-forget-the-ideological-challenge-we-refuse-to-name