Beyond ‘Never Forget’: The Ideological Enemy We Refuse To Name
This story raises questions about governance, accountability, and American values.
Twenty-five years on, we can picture the day like it happened this morning: the blue sky, the ash, the jumpers, the stunned silence that followed. We still say “Never forget,” and we mean it. But the older you get, the more you notice how a country can remember an event and still dodge the hard parts of it.
New Republican Times Editorial Board
Twenty-five years after September 11, Americans will again remember the smoke over Lower Manhattan, the collapsing towers, and the passengers who fought back aboard Flight 93. We will honor the dead and repeat the vow: Never forget.
But remembrance is not the same as understanding. We have remembered 9/11 as a terrorist atrocity, but we
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New Republican Times Editorial Board
Twenty-five years on, we can picture the day like it happened this morning: the blue sky, the ash, the jumpers, the stunned silence that followed. We still say “Never forget,” and we mean it. But the older you get, the more you notice how a country can remember an event and still dodge the hard parts of it. Remembrance without clarity turns into a ritual. It’s comforting. It’s also a little cowardly.
The piece is right to press on the question we’ve tiptoed around since the first candlelight vigil: who, exactly, was our enemy? “Terrorism” is a tactic, not a belief system. “Extremism” is a word that hides more than it explains. And “workplace violence,” that old bureaucratic dodge, still makes people angry for a reason. The men who killed nearly 3,000 Americans did it in the name of an ideology that has a real history, real texts, real preachers, real funding networks, and real political goals. If we can’t name it, we can’t fight it. We end up policing our vocabulary instead of policing threats.
We’ve watched this play out in policy for two decades. Leaders will talk tough on “terror,” then scramble to reassure everyone that nothing they say could possibly offend anyone, anywhere, ever. Meanwhile, our immigration and vetting debates get treated like moral defects, not national security questions. Our intelligence agencies get whiplash: hunt the bad guys, but don’t say what motivates them. That kind of double-talk doesn’t protect peaceful Muslims. It protects the radicals by giving them cover and giving Americans confusion.
There’s a grown-up way through this, and it’s not ugly. You can be precise about the ideology that drove 9/11 and still be fair to millions of Americans who share a faith and love this country. You can honor the heroes of Flight 93 and also ask why our institutions got so squeamish about plain language. America doesn’t need a new slogan for 9/11. It needs a straighter sentence..
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.