Twenty-three years ago, Americans woke up to the shocking reality that radical Islamic terrorism was a very real, and very dangerous threat.
In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attack, the United States vowed to make the world safe from those forces. For years, it kept that vow, killing Osama Bin Laden and other terrorist masterminds, diminishing Al Qaeda, and waging two wars in the Middle East to decimate terrorist networks.
But now, 23 years after the worst-ever attack on the United States, terrorism is on the rise.
In Afghanistan, President Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal, which led to the death of 13 American service members, gave the Taliban power and $7 billion worth of U.S. military equipment. In Iraq and Syria, Iranian-backed militia groups continue a barrage of attacks on U.S. military bases, often injuring personnel.
Worse than the resurgence of Islamic terrorism is Americans’ reaction.
At protests across the country, “United We Stand” has been replaced by anti-American chants. Pledges to “Never Forget” have themselves been forgotten by Americans, many of whom have turned 9/11 into a meme, as pointed out by a 21-year-old college student who said she “genuinely forgot that not everyone thinks it’s funny now,” in an X post that was favorited more than 10,000 times. Others have found much to agree with in Bin Laden’s infamous 2002 “Letter to America.”
A recent poll found that almost one-third of Gen-Zers think Bin Laden’s views were a “force for good,” reported The Jerusalem Post.
Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that members of this same generation sympathize with Hamas terrorists who raped, massacred, and kidnapped over a thousand Israelis on October 7th, 2023. They wear Hamas headbands and wave terrorist flags at protests, and harass Jewish students from the illegal encampments they’ve constructed on college campuses.
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Hamas, which killed 43 Americans, still holds seven captive. Hamas originally took eight American hostages, but last month executed Hersh Goldberg Polin by shooting him in the back of the head at close range.
It’s unclear precisely what’s driving this rise in terrorist sympathy. But perhaps one answer can be found in the actions of Democrats and their media allies.
Biden has virtually halted former President Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure campaign” to destroy Iran’s ability to support destabilizing terrorism in the region and instead has helped Tehran pad its coffers, allowing the regime to have access to $6 billion in a prisoner swap.
The Biden-Harris administration’s lax border policies have allowed 250 individuals on the terror watch list to enter the country, a congressional report found. Under “Border Czar” Kamala Harris, the administration released 99 of them.
Harris, who boasted that she was the “last person in the room” when Biden made his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, did not attend a memorial service for the 13 servicemen killed in Afghanistan, and then attempted to use Trump’s attendance as a political attack.
At Tuesday night’s debate, moderators asked Harris if she stood by Biden’s withdrawal decision, but did not press her when she not-so-subtly dodged the question.
In Biden and Harris’s wake, the Taliban has grown stronger than ever and has implemented draconian policies against women including banning them from speaking or showing their faces in public.
Today, Biden and Harris, along with Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, are together at the 9/11 memorial. That is, perhaps, a good sign. But the fact remains that Americans’ attitudes towards Islamic terrorism would have shocked anyone who remembers how they felt on September 12th, 2001.
As the nation reflects on the 23 years since 9/11, we must ask ourselves: How will the U.S. stand against terror in the future as the younger generation’s fading memory emboldens America’s enemies?
