What number do we call when there’s an emergency? That would be 911.
Who chose this as an emergency number? None other than President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Commission on Law Enforcement in 1967.
What could have prompted this choice? A series of shocking political assassinations had plagued the nation: President John F. Kennedy (1963); Medgar Evers (1963); The Birmingham Church bombing (1963); James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner (1964); Viola Liuzzo (1965).
Maybe that number was chosen because it didn’t conflict with any other area code?
At first, it was only adopted state by state. Eventually, by 1999, Congress formally designated it as the national emergency number in the United States.
9/11/01 was certainly an emergency—a wake-up call.
But i was also clearly an Islamic jihadist attack on the Judeo-Christian West, on infidels and on Muslim dissidents and women. Many among us were not yet born; still others were too young to know how different this was from “before.”
Tragically, the significance of 9/11 has been denied, forgotten and minimized. Many of our elected officials—and their anti-American and anti-Zionist supporters, even or especially in New York City—have acted as if the murder of nearly 3,000 civilians and rescue workers was justified.
9/11/01 was not the first jihadist attack on U.S. soil. A previous attempt took place in 1993, when terrorists detonated a truck bomb in the underground parking garage beneath the North Tower. Six people were killed and 1,000 others wounded.
That attack was planned by a group of terrorists, most notably Ramzi Yousef. Omar Abdel-Rahman, the “Blind Sheikh,” was the mastermind, but one of his supporters, Siraj Wahhaj, an imam in Brooklyn, N.Y., and leader of the Muslim Alliance in North America, was one of many unindicted co-conspirators. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has posted photos together with Wahhaj, always smiling broadly.
Although we have been under attack for a while, most Americans have not really prepared for war. Even after 9/11, we continue to invite radical Muslims to teach and study at our universities and command posts in our media; we elect anti-American and anti-Israeli Muslims to public office. We have adjusted to women in hijabs, niqabs and even burqas, and compare Muslim-on-Muslim honor killings to Western domestic violence.
If Westerners refuse to do so, it’s considered “Islamophobic.” In other words, the Muslim Brotherhood has succeeded in persuading Westerners that criticizing any of this is “racist.”
Neat trick that. But Islam is not a race. It is a religious and political ideology.
Is there any significance that this year 9/11 falls on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, when we are commanded to consider our sins, apologize to others whom we may have harmed or hurt, try to come closer to God, choose light over darkness, choose good over evil, and try to be more compassionate to others? I am not at all sure.
What I am sure about is what I remember about that terrible day. On 9/11/01, at about 11 a.m., I walked over to my computer and typed the sentence: “Now, we are all Israelis.”
I sat transfixed on the couch in my living room and knew that when I rose, the world would have changed enormously—that there would be no going back. I would never again feel safe from terrorist bombings, stabbings, car-rammings, beheadings or from lone “sudden jihad” attackers in U.S. cities or, for that matter, anywhere in the world.
Afterwards, the billionaire Osama bin Laden (who had been exiled both from Saudi Arabia and from Sudan, but who later found shelter in Afghanistan and in Pakistan) called the assault on America “blessed attacks” against the “infidel ... the new Christian-Jewish crusade.”
He explained that the Twin Towers had fallen because of American support for the State of Israel.
Always, it begins with the Jews.
War and a new kind of antisemitism and anti-Zionism had been declared. Bin Laden’s religiously obsessed and misogynistic pilots had torn a hole clear through history.
