09/09/2026
***OPINION***
Never Forget — And Stop Pretending the Ideology That Hit Us Is Harmless
As September 11 comes around again, America does what it has done for a quarter century: we say the names, we look at the skyline that is missing two towers, and we tell our kids that 19 men turned airliners into weapons because they believed murdering civilians would please God.
That was not “extremism” in the abstract. It was Islamist terrorism. Al-Qaeda said so. The hijackers said so. The fatwas said so. For decades the same current — political Islam, jihad as a program, Sharia as a replacement for the Constitution — has piled bodies from New York to Bali, Madrid, London, Paris, Pulse, San Bernardino, and Fort Hood. You can hate that sentence. You cannot erase the record.
Charlie Kirk said the quiet part out loud: “Islam is not compatible with western civilization.” He was shot to death on a Utah campus on September 10, 2025, doing the thing he always did — arguing in public. A year later, with 9/11 week on the calendar again, that line is not a vibe. It is a civilizational question.
Here is the part polite America will not say.
Western order rests on a few non-negotiables: equal citizenship under written law, freedom of speech and conscience, one legal system for everyone, the right to leave a faith, the right of women to live as citizens rather than wards, and the idea that the state does not flog, stone, or behead people for apostasy, blasphemy, or “honor.” Classical Sharia, as enforced where Islamists run the courts, collides with all of that. Hudud punishments. Rules that make a woman’s testimony and inheritance unequal. Legal polygamy. Death for leaving Islam in multiple jurisdictions. Death or prison for homosexuality in country after country that writes those penalties into law. That is not a Fox chyron. That is the statute books.
You can have Muslim neighbors who work, raise kids, and want no part of that. Millions do. Pretending the political project does not exist because your coworker is decent is how nations sleepwalk.
The American Left’s posture is the tell. Activists who would torch a campus over a pronoun will “stand with” a religious-legal system that, in its hard form, would hang them. That is not solidarity. That is su***de with a pride flag on it. A movement that cannot admit Sharia and the Bill of Rights cannot occupy the same public square is not being kind. It is being useful to people who mean what they preach.
Kirk’s other warning was about the fusion: identity politics plus open borders plus a refusal to name the ideology. You do not have to invent a conspiracy. You only have to watch Europe’s no-go arguments, grooming scandals, blasphemy riots, and politicians who lecture natives about “phobia” while Jews flee cities. Import a critical mass of people formed by a political religion that rejects the host country’s first principles, refuse assimilation, and you will not get a melting pot. You will get parallel law.
America is not required to hate Muslims. America is required to prefer its own inheritance: family, faith freely chosen, work, property, the right to get rich without apologizing to a committee. Those are not “hate.” They are the operating system. A creed that treats the Constitution as a temporary obstacle, capitalism as theft, and the West as a target is not a guest. It is a rival.
“They don’t all hate us.” Fine. Then the ones who do should be named, prosecuted, and kept from writing the rules. The ones who want Sharia courts, blasphemy norms, and demographic conquest should be told no — in law, in immigration, in schools. That is not un-American. That is how a free country stays free.
We are a nation whose founding documents assume a Creator and a moral order most of the Founders learned in a Christian civilization. Acting like it does not mean a theocracy. It means we stop being the only party in the fight that is not allowed to love our own side.
On 9/11 we remember the dead. We should also remember the idea that killed them. Ideas have consequences. This one already wrote its consequence in steel and fire. If we will not defend the civilization that rose out of that wreckage, we will not keep it.
Never forget. Never kneel. And never outsource the argument to people who think the problem is that Charlie Kirk said it out loud. He said the hard part out loud. Yet, we cower in the fear.
We have been to Muslim countries. We have seen radical Islamists in person. The opinion we have is our own, but we know that it is shared my millions who don't have the voice to say it.
