9/11: The day that changed America—or did it?

We were able to put an end to Bin Laden, but the ideology that inspired him lived on in Al-Qaeda and also in dozens of other Islamic terror groups spread out all over the world.

Members of the New York Police and Fire Department hold a flag for the national anthem at the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York City Sept. 11, 2021. (CNS photo, Chip Somodevilla, Pool via Reuters)

The media often describes 9/11 as the day that changed America. In one sense that’s true. America was changed in many ways. We went to war in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. Many young American soldiers were killed and a great many lost arms, or legs, or eyesight. On the home front, we learned to leave early for the airport, wait in long lines, and take off belts and shoes so as not to confuse the scanning machines.

There were many other significant changes that followed on the 9/11 attacks. But, as regards the most basic question, nothing changed at all. We had just suffered a sneak attack comparable in many ways to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Unlike Pearl Harbor, however, the primary target this time was not military, but civilian. Moreover, it was not in a faraway island, but much closer to home–in the two most iconic cities in America. Yet, despite the magnitude of the 9/11 attack, one crucial question was left unanswered.

What’s the most basic question to ask when your country has just been attacked? Well, everyone knows the answer to that. It’s “Who did it?” The next question is: “What was his motive?”

The first question was easy enough. The attack was carried out by al-Qaeda—an Islamist terrorist group led by a devout Muslim named Osama bin Laden. What was their motive? This was the question that stumped all the experts. Their best answer was that the terrorists were motivated by “violent extremism.” In other words, they were motivated by terrorism itself. It was an exceedingly strange explanation.

The terrorists, on the other hand, claimed that they were acting in the name of Allah to revenge insults against Islam. But why listen to them? At most, the experts conceded that the terrorists were motivated by an “extremist ideology.” But what that ideology was, was never spelled out. It seemed to have something to do with Islam, but the experts insisted it had nothing to do with Islam. According to President Bush and his advisors, Islam was a religion of peace and the vast majority of Muslims were moderate. Therefore, the terrorists must be a tiny, unrepresentative minority.

Since most Americans knew next to nothing about Islam, they shrugged and accepted the official narrative. There was never really much discussion about what motivated the terrorists, and—amazingly—there hasn’t been much discussion about it in the twenty years since.

Although 9/11 changed many things, that dubious narrative never changed. The vast majority of Americans acquiesced in the deception, and the foreign policy of four successive administrations was based on it. The initial war aim was to get bin Laden, rather than to get a grasp on the ideology that motivated him.

As it turned out, we were able to put an end to Bin Laden, but the ideology that inspired him lived on in Al-Qaeda and also in dozens of other Islamic terror groups spread out all over the world. And “all over the world” included multiple jihad attacks in Europe, Canada, Africa, and Australia, and occasional ones in America.

The fact that all these attacks were justified by the attackers in more or less the same terms that Bin Laden had used, and the fact that Allah’s name was regularly invoked during the attacks suggests that the terrorists were all motivated by the same unifying ideology.

Allah, they said, had commanded that the whole world submit to Islam, and they were merely following his orders. One might expect that the “vast majority” of moderate Muslims would have been able to set them straight on the matter. But when you listen to the moderates, you find that they seldom refer to the Koran or other Islamic sources, rather they tend to appeal to Western principles of peace, justice and equality as though these principles are shared by Islam.

By contrast, terrorist leaders are able to cite numerous passages from Islamic sources in support of their interpretation of Islam. One reason they are so successful in recruiting Muslims to their cause is that what they say is backed up by the Koran, the hadith, the law books, and the violent history of Islam.

For twenty years now, Western leaders have been handicapped by their assumption that Islam means peace and equality for all. What prevents them from making the necessary examination of Islamic sources and Islamic history to see if that assumption is valid?

The answer is that Westerners have an ideology of their own—one that prevents them from thinking objectively about many topics. Not too long ago that ideology was called “political correctness,” or “PC” for short. Nowadays, it is called “wokeness.”

Political correctness was a blend of relativism, multiculturalism, and therapeutic sensitivity to the feelings of others. PC claimed that all religions and cultures were essentially equal, and to say otherwise would offend the sensitivity of many. To suggest that 1.3 billion people adhered to a violent and discriminatory faith was therefore out of the question. Thus, the experts concluded that the ideology of the jihadist must be a complete perversion of the real thing. The PC people claimed that the jihadists were not following Islam, rather they were betraying it.

No evidence was offered for this other than anecdotal observations (“I know a Muslim family, and they’re very kind and friendly”). But in a PC society, feelings trump facts. So, a few feel-good stories outweighed a slew of data—such as the Pew global surveys which found that a surprising number of Muslims worldwide had no trouble with laws requiring stoning for adulterers, amputation for thieves, and the execution of apostates.

So, the doubtful notion that Islam is a religion of peace that was “hijacked” by a handful of radicals became, in the weeks after 9/11, the standard explanation of what had happened.

And that simplistic explanation of 9/11 has never changed. For example, consider this recent headline: “University of Florida students say teachers should ‘focus on America’s faults’ and ‘avoid placing blame’ for 9/11.” A meticulously planned sneak attack that left almost 3,000 innocent people crushed or burned to death? And no one should be blamed? This is the self-esteem approach to education that has dominated schools for decades. “Avoid placing blame” doesn’t mean that we can never determine who is to blame for 9/11; it means no one should ever be made to feel bad. And the avoid-blame policy is by no means a recent development. Those who paid attention to educators’ response to 9/11 know that the “no one is to blame” attitude was being pushed on students almost from the beginning.

9/11 was inaccurately diagnosed as an aberration—something that had nothing to do with the culture and religion of Islam. As a result, the “war on terror” was never really won. Indeed, judging by the debacle in Afghanistan and other recent developments, the terrorists now have the advantage. Our focus on defeating terrorist groups and killing their leaders without also defeating the ideology that inspired them, meant that there would always be a fresh supply of recruits to the jihad movement.

We didn’t make that mistake in fighting the Nazis or Imperial Japan. Nobody worried about hurting the feelings of Germans or Japanese by attacking the ideologies that had overtaken their nations. So how could our nation have so thoroughly deceived itself after 9/11? Why did we conclude that the problem we faced was only a handful of extremists with aberrant ideas, rather than a global religion whose beliefs and practices were widely shared?

The answer is that political correctness (aka “wokeism) is conducive to lying—not just lying to others, but lying to oneself. We’ve seen numerous cases in recent years of open lying by the media in the face of obvious facts. Bruce Jenner the former Olympic gold medalist, declared at a certain point in his life that he was a woman, and the media—both liberal and conservative—has been referring to him as “her” ever since. Likewise, the Wikipedia entry for Rachel Levine, the Assistant U.S. Secretary for Health, tells us that “she is a professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at the Penn State College of Medicine.” Yet Levine was born “Richard” and didn’t “transition” until 2011. “She” is a biological male.

As Bruce Bawer observes in a recent FrontPage piece, “without any real society-wide debate whatsoever, almost everybody in the American mainstream media agreed to buy into the notion that a person belongs to whichever sex he or she professes to belong to…”

Likewise, without any real society-wide debate, the media along with other social authorities agreed to buy into the lie that 9/11 had nothing to do with Islam.

The transgender lie has and will continue to have damaging effects on our society, but the 9/11 lie is an even more dangerous lie since it leads us to believe that the threat to our society is much more limited than it really is. We tell ourselves that as long as there is no large-scale attack against the homeland by rogue terrorist groups, then there is little to worry about.

Indeed, George W. Bush, the man who did more than any other to promulgate the original 9/11 lie, just reiterated it, and managed to add a new deceptive twist to the lie. In his speech at the Shanksville, Pennsylvania 9/11 Memorial this past Saturday, the former president repeated the myth that generic “violent extremists” were to blame for 9/11, and then equated these “violent extremists abroad” with “violent extremists at home”—an obvious reference to the January 6 incursion into the Capitol Building.

In doing so, he managed to deflect our attention even further away from Islam. In fact, at one point in his speech, when he commented on the admirable response of America to the attacks, he said “we saw American’s embrace people of the Muslim faith.” He seemed to be saying, in effect, “we know this had nothing to do with your faith.” But a large part of the trouble we are in today is due to the fact that twenty years ago, George Bush embraced the lies about Islam that were being fed to him by leaders of Muslim Brotherhood organizations. As Bush solemnly intoned in one of his early post-9/11 talks, after he had been briefed by the Brotherhood, “Islam means peace.”

But what’s the harm in telling a “noble lie” for the sake of a greater good? Aren’t some things better left unsaid? Why take the risk of alienating moderate Muslims (who, we are told, are the vast majority) by pointing out Islam’s violent streak? Or, as some have put the matter, “Do you want to go to war with 1.3 billion Muslims?”

The answer to that is twofold: no, I don’t want to go to war with 1.3 billion Muslims, but I would like to know more about a religion whose followers feel compelled to go to war whenever its peaceful nature is questioned.

By the way, 1.3 billion is the figure that was generally cited circa 2001. Nowadays it’s 1.7 billion—which is another reason why you might want to get the facts straight about this fast-spreading faith.

Granted, not everyone who says Islam is a religion of peace really believes what he says. Like the many who go along with the ruse that boys can become girls, one pretends that Islam means “peace” because it’s the expedient thing to say.

The major problem comes when you have people in charge who really believe it. When George Bush uttered the “Islam is peace” mantra 20 years ago, it looked very much like he was trying to convince himself. But to all appearances, Joe Biden is a true believer. On this year’s anniversary of 9/11, the White House released a pre-recorded video of Biden describing Muslim-Americans as “true and faithful followers of a peaceful religion.”

The thing is, if you really believe that, then it won’t matter how many hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees you admit into the U.S., or how carefully they are vetted. And if the Council on American-Islamic Relations recommends Muhammad X. Akbar for Secretary of Defense, you’ll deem it “Islamophobic” not to give him the nod. And if the Pentagon is forming a group to purge extremists from the military, you’ll be sure that at least a third of the purgers are Islamic activists (Oops! That’s already happened).

The debacle in Afghanistan was caused in no little part by the Biden administration’s ignorance of Islam. That ignorance led the administration to underestimate the power of the Taliban and to overestimate the resolve of the “moderates.” Many fear that we are now at an increased risk for another 9/11. But that increased risk should not be allowed to cause us to lose sight of another larger risk.

Now that the terminally naïve Biden administration is in charge of the country, the risk of internal subversion by cultural jihadists is much greater. One can imagine the heated discussions now going on in Islamist circles: the more level-headed cultural jihadist-types trying their best to convince their hot-headed brethren that another 9/11 is unnecessary and possibly counter-productive because it might wake up the Americans. Better to let them dream on about the “religion of peace.”


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About William Kilpatrick 81 Articles
William Kilpatrick is the author of several books on religion and culture including Christianity, Islam, and Atheism: The Struggle for the Soul of the West (Ignatius Press) and What Catholics Need to Know About Islam (Sophia Institute Press). For more on his work and writings, visit his Turning Point Project website.

19 Comments

  1. The political scientist Chalmers Johnson viewed the 9-11 attacks as a “blowback.” Defined as retaliatory consequences by peoples and movements in response to the American government’s military, political and economic interventions of terror and intimidation in foreign countries mostly hidden from American citizens, it was coined and first anticipated by the CIA back in the 1950’s. With this lens of understanding (a hermeneutic) Johnson pointed to Osama Bin Laden’s and the Al-Qaeda’s stated reasons for the attacks on the shrines and symbols of the American triangle of military, political and economic ssuperpower as follows, the U.S.A. has: militarily occupied Saudi Arabia, Islam’s holy land; starved hundreds of thousands of Iraqis through death-dealing economic sanctions; and the longtime reflexive backing of Israel at the expense of stateless Palestinians. Now deceased, Johnson in his analysis can still teach us today that terrorist individuals and groups like Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda may pass away but as long as the U.S. foreign policy continue to be mainly driven by the war industry and ironically kill peoples for and in the name of democracy, freedom and human rights abroad, this cycle of violence will never end. We will continue to get “blowbacks.”

    • Political Scientist like this are a dime a dozen. They chant this nonsense to retain their status in the hyper anti American academic community in which they thrive.

  2. Andrew B, you well explain why I don’t trust political scientists. Too many hold a stiff “America bad” view. America hadn’t been in Saudi until the House of Saud requested them. Saddam had seized Kuwait; they had legitimate fears of being next. Then too, Saddam COULD have changed his approach after Desert Storm, especially to his own people. Instead, well, we saw what happened. I don’t doubt many in the Mid-East view the US as Prof Johnson indicated. I DO doubt that we must change our approach to suit. If anything, we learned that appeasement didn’t work any better than any time before.
    I occasionally dread what may come. As the article suggests, we seem determined to refuse to see Islam as potentially violent. When we do, ..we all too often have someone insistent how Christians have been as bad or worse; the Spanish Inquisition will often be dusted off in all it’s atrocity. I recall how a fellow parishioner once commented upon the need for another crusade against Islam. When I inquired about who would command–previous military training occasionally kicks in–I learned we’d find someone appropriate. ..Given we didn’t even have a workable political objective in mind, I’d dread the end result being as messy as those before.
    Guess we’ll see what happens in time. I strongly recommend giving some Rosary beads a workout.

    • I invite you to read Chalmers Johnson’s trilogy of books on 9-11 and it’s aftermath: 1) Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire; 2) The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic; and 3) Memesis; The Last Days of the American Republic.

    • Chalmers Johnson was not your hate America guy. He was a true patriot and real cold warrior having served in the US Navy and worked for the CIA even as he was an academic highly known for integrity. He was honest and compassionate who felt the need to tell the truth about what the US government has done not only to peoples abroad but most importantly to us the citizens. His numerous books, especially the Blowback trilogy, are now often on the required reading lists for personnel of the CIA and the State Department and of the cadets of the military academies. You can also view the many YouTube videos of his talks and lectures.

  3. The GW Bush line makes me think of a senior Church leader who advocates strongly for peace, just on the one condition that we all accept a questionable view of how things really are.

  4. Excellent article! Thank you for this!
    I just wish I would hear more of these truths being expressed by our Catholic faithful lay people, priests and Bishops. According to my experience it would be hard to find a priest or a Bishop who is:

    1) well informed
    2) who doesn’t hide behind woke ideas of Islam.
    Actually they know very little of the true Islam which Kilpatrick has written so often about.
    They just don’t seem to care.
    Thousands of arson attacks on churches in Europe and elsewhere, atrocious murders of Christians, a genocide of Christians in Nigeria…
    Pakistan, Afghanistan etc. etc. Enormous violence being committed in Western Europe where gang rapes ( 100 percent of the criminals are Muslis from particular Afghanistan Somalia and other Muslim countries)is becoming an every day thing. Murders every week. And where are our shepherds the Bishops and priests in all I’d this?
    Ear deafening silence! Try to politely and respectfully engage them about the enormous high rise in grave criminality, and they will not even give you a reply, as if they consider themselves standing above the terrible sufferings inflicted on victims of gang rapes and murders. Could the mistaken view of not engaging in politics be more perversely expressed?
    Worse; when the highest officials among the clergy applause unlimited immigration. But not of Christians of course.
    This may sound unfair and yes; there are exceptions. But they are few.

  5. This is incorrect. It wasn’t al-Qaeda. https://www.ae911truth.org/.

    If I was more courageous, I would name the group responsible. However, I believe that the maxim which is typically falsely attributed to Voltaire (The person who actually is supposed to have come up with it is largely correct.) holds a great deal of truth here, “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” This isn’t invariably true, but any evil person will do his best to suppress ANY – even constructive – criticism.

  6. “Wokeism” has no criterion for determining that there’s any such thing as a false religion, that (per JH Newman) religious error is in itself of an immoral nature, and that its maintainers, unless involuntarily such, are guilty in maintaining it.

    Biblical law – whether in its Noahide or Jewish application, does have a criterion. When measured by it, Islam is judged to be incompatible with the First Commandment and that Muslims are evildoers who deserve to be put to death for violating that Commandment.

  7. Kilpatrick pointedly catalogues the multi faceted dilemma of Islam. Reaching a crescendo of utter stupidity in America’s purge of patriots now anti democratic fascists and making peace with the Religion of Peace. Or, is this stupidity, on the surface a form of irrational madness really a clever game plan. Or even a stupid game plan that ironically works, that is, the secular socialist agenda of self destruction so as to facilitate Marx’s pipe dream of utopia. What is forebodingly more apt to happen is Islamists drawing their knives cutting throats refusing to convert. Who am I to say it, but Kilpatrick I hope has a plan because simply cataloging all the ills doesn’t help avoid the seeming inevitable. World polity is more in the direction of collective moral and with it cultural as well as real suicide at the hands of willing terrorists. Our Church is soft selling the matter Pope Francis all for Islamic migration into the failing heart of Christianity here and abroad. So then, we have the doctor’s diagnosis, anticipated prognosis. What’s the cure? Whether Kilpatrick has any viable answer since expectation of sudden reversal of a worldwide trend is as real as the expectation of Islam’s conversion to Catholicism, nor do I have an answer. Except that of a perhaps naive Catholic Christian who believes in hope, and with prayer and sacrifice conversion of Islam. Fatima [named after the Muslim princess convert] and Our Lady’s last and significant appearances there may be a sign. Hope seems our best hope.

  8. I think the “blowback” analysis by Andrew B in his first comment, as an understanding of the basic reasons why 9/11 happened, is correct.
    Americans seem to be blind to this, as also is the Kilpatrick article. That article, while correctly analysing some aspects of Islam which made it easy for extremists to “justify” the 9/11 and other attacks, gives no real explanation for that attack and for other Islamic terrorist attacks in recent decades.
    While it is legitimate to look at the nature of Islam for explanations, Americans should also take the plank out of their own eyes in the search for truth. Those who have given their lives or who have had their lives taken from them deserve as much.

    • I think there is substance to the “blowback” theory and I certainly believe that America has not always been a pristine, shining white knight in foreign affairs.

      But there is also the fact that Islamic terrorists, over the past quarter century or so, have attacked and killed people in countries including Francis, Spain, Israel, England, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Egypt, Russia, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Sweden, etc., etc., etc.

    • Many political scientists fail to understand out times because they believe the underlying ideology of “social science.”

      With Islam the post-Christian West is confronted with a phenomenon (Aha!Not the right word’; how about existential threat?) quite different from even Japanese Fascism. With Japan, we were dealing with an aberrant blend of imported westernization (the Meiji Restoration of 1868) and yet the continuing Bushido “code of the warrior.” A version of recent modernity. With Islam we are dealing with pre-modernity: an impervious 7th-century, cult-leader mentality completely outside of any modern Western influence (except for oil revenue used to fund Wahabbi madrassas around the world).

      Social “science” and political “science” look for truncated scientific causes-and-effects, as in any natural system (e.g., Chalmers Johnson’ “blowback” theory). There is some truth to this attention to history, but with Islam the actual asymmetry also goes back two centuries before even Charlemagne.

      And this at a time when history is being displaced by wokeism, when tumblebug politicians pride themselves in “making the hard decisions,” when cultural leaders wallow in cultural self-hatred (called almost “pathological” by emeritus pope Benedict), when the human substance itself is being graffitied-over by gender theory, when ambivalent Church leadership dabbles toward a dismantled churchy Synodality (rather than, perhaps, a perennial synodal Church) such that divided (?) “continental” aggregates run the risk of mimicking highly sectarian Islam whose self-understanding is that of a “congregational theocracy.” Religious “pluralism,” anyone?

      And, on the anesthetizing notion that, say, only ten percent of Muslims are immoderately sympathetic toward terrorism, this still pencils out at 170 million from around the globe, a population half that of the entire United States. Open borders, anyone?

  9. Well much changed in America as the surveillance state became culturally normalised. NSA goal is total population control, same as Communist technocrats goal. All TPTB had to do was scare some people, do it again with COVIDianism cult, and Blair vax passports are permanent feature of society (Mark of the Beast). Meanwhile we have a pope supporting the vax more than the Eucharist who will not prevent open schism in Germany but kisses the koran, but WHO AM I TO JUDGE? If I were pope Germany would be under interdict today and Russia would be consecrated to the Immaculate Heart tomorrow, the Tridentine Mass would be back PERPETUALLY and the Communist Chinese deal would be toasted crisper than my breakfast cereal.

    I have NO DESIRE nor duty to learn more about the “religion of peace” which considers itself the greatest think since sliced bread. Western governments can take a playbook from the Commies and set up their concentration camps for the unvaxxed, presumably, the mohammadeans will comply like the rest of the evangelicals and novus ordo folk.

  10. A few thoughts based on a couple of comments by others:

    Islam has falsely claimed “blowback” as part of their rationale for many of their ongoing barbaric atrocities committed against many people for some 1400 years, and, sadly, many gullible people pretending to be wise accept this bogus justification at least in part.

    Observer 70 writes: “Americans seem to be blind to this, as also is the Kilpatrick article. That article, while correctly analysing some aspects of Islam which made it easy for extremists to ‘justify’ the 9/11 and other attacks, gives no real explanation for that attack and for other Islamic terrorist attacks in recent decades.”

    Wrong! Kilpatrick is spot on here (I have criticized him in the past for maintaining part of the false moderate-extremist dichotomy that he has been moving away from recently, and now appears to have finally let go, Deus Gratis.), and so the only people who are blind continue to refer to Jihadists as “extremists” when in point of fact they are simply the most fervent believing and practicing Muslims.

    All Muslim terrorist attacks are ultimately motivated by the commands of the one called or known as Muhammad who claimed to have received Angelic revelations and to speak for Allah. Based on this belief in Muhammad and his teachings, all Islam pursues a World-Wide Domination under a Caliphate as it is bound to do without exception regardless of what specific minor practices some groups emphasize more than others. The end goal is to make the entire world Muslim and/or subdued by Islam that will control every State/seat of power under Sharia Law. This is not blowback for this or that Western failing or alleged failing in dealing with Muslims; it is the requirement of all Muslims to work toward achieving, and terrorists simply have more zeal in their most faithful approach to pursuing the commands of their prophet. They are indeed the ideal Muslims motivated by a sound understanding of Islam and its never-ending requirements to commit violence and take all other measures in pursuit of making Islam dominant throughout the world.

    If the plank is ever removed from American eyes, they will see Islam as the premier religion of evil and violence that it is, and any kind of moral equivalence efforts that highlight some of the flaws of Americans and others is just a lame attempt to claim that Islam has some justification for its ongoing barbarity that includes the horrific abuse of women and flat out murder in furtherance of Islam.
    ___

    Fr. Morello laments having no more than hope in this battle, but standing up for the Truth as he does in so many ways is also part of the solution to combatting Islam and working toward its demise. As Islam is perhaps the greatest heresy confronting the Church, then the tools for fighting heresy with charity should be used with great fervor and increased frequency to make it very clear to all audiences what Islam truly is, why it is essentially the sworn enemy of all other religions, and why it should be completely rejected as the offense against God that it is. Then of course leave the rest to God, and also add the hope that the Truth which sets people free will soon enlighten the people duped by a false prophet and those who follow in his barbaric footsteps.

  11. Political correctness, relativism, multiculturalism, wokeness, therapeutic sensitivity to the feelings of others (there’s a mouthful!!), yada yada yada, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

    Permit me to add one more – stupidity.

    OMT – who are these “‘experts’ to whom the author frequently refers, and what are their qualifications that merit this title?

    • William Kilpatrick never shies away from his responsibility to share with the world (or his handful of readers) his islam fetish, in pages and pages of droning text.

  12. This was an excellent article. I lost my husband in the 9/11 attacks. He was a man who simply went to work to support his family that day. I believe that Islam is a noxious and dangerous philosophy and it’s very unfortunate that political correctness in the US has over-ridden any iota of common sense in how it is viewed. Islam has been attacking civilians all over the world for years ( the Easter Sunday suicide bomber attack on a Catholic church in Sri Lanka a few years ago is a recent example. The unnecessary death of more than 100 Afghani civilians and 13 American soldiers during a departure from Afghanistan is another ). Political correctness insists that ALL civilizations are equal. That ALL people are “just like us”, etc. That is a LIE. The Germans and Japanese during WWII excelled in levels of horrible unprovoked violence which seemed at that time to be a deeply rooted part of their philosophy. The death march to Bataan. The concentration camps. These people were NOTHING like us. Ditto, Islamic culture, as has been pointed out, metes out “justice” with amputations, honor killings, abuse of women, and suppression of other religious beliefs. They are also NOTHING like us. The issue with Germany and Japan was solved with nuclear bombs and carpet bombing of several German cities until their surrender was made necessary.Death is sometimes the only answer to evil. German leadership was mostly hung following war crimes trials. Americans must conquer the impulse to believe that backward or evil civilizations can be coaxed from the dark side to be “just like us”. They usually cannot. Real wars are fought to the death . Period. Winner take all.It is not our job to defeat a country then rebuild it’s roads, schools, infrastructure and remake it’s civil society. The American impulse to “help” even when it is not our problem, is our achilles heel. In spite of how our recent departure from Afghanistan looked, we were not defeated. Our leadership simply caved,to whining and political correctness, which is a different thing entirely.Most Americans felt it was time to leave. But leaving can be accomplished without being absolutely inept, to the degree of looking complicit with the enemy. Our soldiers and equipment are the world’s finest. When we finally have a President from a different party, our military will be able to reassert itself under a leadership which has intelligence enough to use it properly. For now, we have a feckless leadership which is unwilling or unable to make decisions which will protect its own citizens. The southern border is wide open, a result of fears of looking politically incorrect in the treatment of Latinos. The departure from Afghanistan gives the erroneous impression our soldiers are unwilling to fight, thanks to a spineless leadership. Too many of our generals, such as General Milley, are so deeply engaged in political correctness ( like “white rage” and a fantasy-based non-existent Trump plan to remain in power) that they appear to have forgotten the basic military requirements of their job. And their obligation of loyalty. This current situation creates the perfect storm of opportunity for another 9/11. That is, unless our people see the danger, smarten up , and express that in an appropriate vote at the NEXT opportunity. To send a message that THEY are supposed to matter to our leadership more than foreigners who are not our citizens. Keep in mind another 9/11 style event CAN happen again. If our leadership continues down the politically correct road, making decision which fly in the face of reality, more than a few of you will be a 9/11 style terrorism victim like me. I promise you, it’s a club you don’t want to join.

  13. The Jews gave us the Bible, both New and Old Testaments. The prophets of Israel gave mankind hope through a unified message with increasing revelation.

    The prophet of Islam presented a different message from what God gave the believer in the Bible. The Koran, is a sorry mix of contradiction and confusion. It does not bear scrutiny, nor does it present an unbroken line of truth. Muslims are confused because the Koran gives little light, while promoting darkness and virtually no hope either.

    A Muslim scholar is invited to the discussion table to present the case for Islam.

    Matthew 24:11 And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray.

    Matthew 7:15 “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.

    2 Peter 2:2-3 And many will follow their sensuality, and because of them the way of truth will be blasphemed. And in their greed they will exploit you with false words. Their condemnation from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep.

    Blessings of peace that are only attainable through Jesus Christ.

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