On September 11, 2001, nineteen men acting in the name of Islam murdered nearly 3,000 people on American soil. We were told the attackers had hijacked a peaceful religion. A quarter-century later, the body count says otherwise.
Since 2001 there have been more than 65,000 Islamist terrorist attacks in some 70 countries. That is not a rumor from the internet. It is the scale of the record.
The world’s four other major religions—Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, and Buddhism—account for about 2 percent of religiously motivated terrorist attacks. Muslims account for the other 98 percent.
This is what September 11th should force us to remember. The world does not have a generic terrorist problem. The world has a Muslim problem. The problem is Islamic Ideology!
The geography of the slaughter is not a mystery. The heaviest attack counts are in Afghanistan (17,075), Somalia (10,768), Iraq (8,209), Nigeria (3,950), and Syria (3,421). The deadliest organizations are just as concentrated. The Taliban are blamed for 71,965 deaths; Islamic State and its branches for 69,641; Boko Haram for 26,081; Al-Shabaab for 21,784; Al-Qaeda for 14,856. Those five groups account for 82 percent of the deaths. The average attack kills about 3.7 people.
That is not “extremists who happen to be Muslim.” That is the operational record of movements that cite Islamic texts, Islamic law, and Islamic victory as their purpose. Islam is not compatible with Western civilization.
The same years that produced that violence produced a parallel fact at home. Muslim entry into the United States did not shrink after 9/11. It grew.
The Muslim population in America is up 145 percent since the attacks. More than 5.5 million Muslims now live in the United States. 59 percent of adult Muslims here are foreign-born. From Afghanistan the immigrant population is up by 202,000; from Pakistan, 201,000; from Iran, 119,000; from Yemen, 66,000; from Syria, 65,000.
Any effort to impose pragmatic screening on visitors and immigrants is immediately branded “racist” or “Islamophobic.” That is a convenient dodge—for activists who want to remake this country in the image of a seventh-century tyranny, and for politicians who want Muslim organizational support at election time.
A nation that will not name the ideology that keeps producing the attacks will keep importing the risk. Grief without memory is theater. Memory without policy is surrender.
September 11th was not an accident of American foreign policy, and it was not a one-day exception. It was a warning written in fire. The warning was about a political religion that divides the world into believers and everyone else, and that has spent the last twenty-five years proving it still means it. Honor the dead by telling the truth: the threat has a name, the numbers have a pattern, and a civilization that refuses to defend its borders and its law will not remain a civilization for long.
