Bill Maher Destroys Revisionist Historians On 9/11 Terrorist Attacks

Bill Maher is not exactly a regular guest at a Republican banquet, which is why it mattered when he used his platform to swat down the 9/11 “revisionist” routine. On “Real Time,” marking the 25th anniversary, he didn’t treat it like a graduate seminar where every truth has to be put in quotes. Nearly 3,000 Americans were murdered by Islamic terrorists. That’s the sentence. Say it straight, or don’t bother talking about it at all.

For years, a certain slice of the culture has tried to sand off the edges of that day. Some do it with coy language, some with conspiratorial insinuations, and some with the smug suggestion that America basically had it coming. Maher’s point, as described, was simple: you can argue about policy, wars, surveillance, and what we learned afterward. Fine. But turning mass murder into a word game is a moral failure, not a “fresh perspective.”

It’s also telling who keeps needing to “reinterpret” 9/11. The people who demand precision in every other part of public life suddenly get vague when the subject is Islamist terror, as if naming the ideology is the same as blaming every Muslim. Adults can hold two thoughts at once. You can reject bigotry and still tell the truth about what happened and why it happened.

We don’t need comedians to do the job of historians. But if Maher is willing to say, on HBO, what too many academics and media types still dance around, we’ll take the honesty. The country can’t defend itself if it can’t even describe the attack. And on this anniversary, clarity beats cleverness.