Motus Mentis

Here we are: a quarter of a century has gone by since 9/11. On the tenth anniversary of the attack, back in 2011, I had this to say:

On that black day ten years ago, Nina and I stood on the roof of our Brooklyn home and watched the towers burn, and fall. Our daughter, now in her twenties, was in school at Stuyvesant High, just a couple of blocks from the doomed buildings; we didn’t know until that evening whether she was alive or dead. Our city was shattered, stricken, numb with grief and horror. I lost no family members or close friends, but everybody — everybody — knew someone who had. The awful shock jolted me, as it did so many others, from a comfortable complacence about the security of Western civilization to acute concern, and led me to a decade-long study of Islam, and of the history of the ancient conflict of which this was just the latest engagement…

… Where do we go from here? Obviously we are still confronted by an implacable foe, the same relentless enemy the Christian world has grappled with since the seventh century.

What have we learned? Nothing at all, apparently. The influx of Islam into the West not only didn’t stop, but accelerated after the towers fell, and New York City — Ground Zero! — now has a Muslim mayor who advocates “globalizing the intifada”. More than 100 new mosques have opened in New York, and the Muslim population of the city’s metropolitan area has swelled to 1.5 million.

September 11th, 2026, is, yes, a grim anniversary, but for me the real sorrow is not just about that awful day, but about everything that came after, the prospect of what lies ahead, and the intractable immensity of our stupidity.