The generation that has grown up since the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers fell has been blinded by a worldview that won’t let them see why it happened.
A child born on the morning of September 11, 2001, turns 25 this fall. She has lived her entire life inside the world that day: the security lines, the wars, the words we learned to say and the words we were taught to avoid.
But her schooling and her media have deprived her of the simple, honest account of what made it happen: 9/11 was a jihadist assault.
It was jihadism, the central imperative of extremist Islamism, that destroyed those 3,000 lives – and she doesn’t know that basic fact.
“Never forget,” we promised. Forgetting came anyway.
And it came in two forms. The first was ordinary, the fading that time works on every memory. The second was deliberate.
Almost before the fires were out, a school of thought began to rationalize the attack, detaching it from the movement that produced it and attributing it to the alleged sins of its victims.
That narrative, created and promoted by progressives, came to dominate the universities, the mainstream press, and much of publishing.
For a quarter century it has been explaining away the threat even as that same threat has been surging across the globe. There are now at least 19 African nations under jihadist assault.
Nigerian Christian villages endure murderous attacks almost weekly. Alawites, Druze, Christians, and Kurds alike are slaughtered in Syria. Genocide has now returned to Sudan.
Embedded in the mass of immigrants to Europe, jihadists assault Westerners across the continent. The invasion of Spain’s Ceuta is the most startling, recent example.
The method has been perfected: divide the world into oppressors and oppressed, assign every group a permanent place in the dichotomy, and read all events through this lens.
Jihadists, being non-Western, are filed under “oppressed,” so their violence must be a reaction to something we, the Western oppressors, did: colonialism, racism, poverty.
In this framework, the jihadist is entitled to grievances; only Western cultures come with built-in destructive beliefs.
The possibility that jihadism is itself a supremacist ideology, supported by literature, a strategy, and centuries of conquest – is not merely absent from progressive discourse; it is a taboo. Raising the topic risks an accusation of “Islamophobia.”
The cost of this blindness is mostly paid far from American shores, in vicious oppression and torrents of blood.
It is paid by a class of victims that has been made nearly invisible by our politicized human rights establishment: the non-Western victims of jihadism – by Yazidi girls of Sinjar, sold in slave markets; by the thousands of Nigerian Christians who are killed each year for their faith.
It was paid last year by the Alawite families slaughtered along Syria’s coast and by the Druze butchered and besieged in Syria’s south. It is being paid by Kurds and by Iranian women beaten over a strand of hair.
It was paid by tens of thousands of Iranians, slaughtered in just a few days by the Khomeinists who rule over their country. It was paid for by South Sudanese who died in the millions and who were made actual slaves under the banner of jihad.
And it is paid, above all, by Muslims, who make up the majority of jihadism’s victims and in certain places, like in South Yemen, Somaliland, and Afghanistan, form the front line of resistance to it.
Colonialism does not justify terrorism
Notice who these victims are. They are overwhelmingly people of color in the Global South, the very people a so-called “progressive” worldview claims to champion.
A movement that can find a colonizer under every bed has somehow failed, for these 25 years, to see the most openly imperial project of our era: an ideology that declares in its own texts its intention to dominate, forcibly convert, and subjugate.
The survivors keep testifying, but the theory keeps overruling their testimony.
The idea that the oppressor could be dark-skinned or non-Western is too much to bear for those Western whites who have internalized the guilt for their relative success, a guilt that the leftist progressives have laid upon them, heavily and for generations.
And so the human rights establishment has betrayed the very people they were given halos for championing decades ago.
Twenty-five years on, the threat has metastasized. Cells continue to probe Europe, America, and Australia. The movement’s political wing marches patiently through Western institutions, wearing suits and speaking the language of social justice.
Meanwhile, the generation that has been taught to blame our own civilization and ignore or justify jihadist violence may soon become masters of our fate.
To address this challenge, to survive the mounting threat, the free peoples of the West must – for moral and practical reasons – defend the victims of jihad that this grand deception has made invisible.
We have created a new alliance to do just this: the International Freedom Coalition is a confederation of victims and targets of jihadism across four continents.
Christians and Muslims, Yazidis and Jews, Kurds and Copts, Iranians and Nigerians, Afghans, South Yemenis, Darfuris, and South Sudanese. They know what jihadism is because it writes itself on their bodies and their families.
They are uniting under the IFC umbrella to destroy the narrative that blames the West and covers up the crimes against them.
Having launched at a congressional briefing in late July, the IFC will bring the cases of each assaulted people to the public, to Congress, to the UN, and European courts.
We will demand that the US defend our peoples and their rights and point the finger where it belongs – at the global jihad.
This September, when the names are read again at Ground Zero, we owe those who were taken from us, and the American people, an honest account of why 9/11 actually happened.
After 25 years, it is also long past time to rip off the ideological blindfold and recognize the myriad victims of jihad worldwide.
The writers are the president and vice president of the International Freedom Coalition, which unites communities targeted by jihadist violence to advocate for religious freedom and human rights. Media inquiries: press@internationalfreedomcoalition.org