Tuesday, August 11, 2026

Remember 9/11?

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Kevin McCollough, writing for Town Hall yesterday, said, "In 30 days, this country marks 25 years since 19 men murdered nearly 3,000 of us on a Tuesday morning that started like any other."

"A quarter century. Long enough that some of the people reading this column weren’t alive for it. Long enough that the raw, unified grief of that September has faded into something more like a civic ritual — a moment of silence, a name-reading, a flag at half-staff, and then back to whatever we were doing," he reminded his readers.

We'd better take a serious look at what is happening in our beloved country now. Twenty-five years later.

Be informed, not misled.

McCollough says, "I bring this up not for the ceremony of it, but because of what’s happening in the weeks leading up to it, in real American cities, involving real American politics, and it should be setting off alarm bells louder than it apparently is."

Look at Michigan:

Abdul El-Sayed just won the Democratic Senate nomination after campaigning alongside Hasan Piker, a podcaster whose commentary has made him a lightning rod for accusations of anti-Israel extremism and apologetics for terror groups.

Normally you win a primary and start talking to the voters you’ll need in November. El-Sayed had that opportunity. He went the other direction.

Asked directly about the Piker association on Meet the Press, he shrugged it off: “I’m less concerned now with who I’m campaigning with, a lot more concerned about who I’m campaigning to.” Then he said it again, nearly word for word.

Hugh Hewitt called it the El-Sayed/Piker ticket without the sugarcoating. El-Sayed had every opportunity to distance himself from the controversy surrounding someone in his coalition and chose not to.

Then the Muslim Brotherhood noticed.

Ikhwan Online, the organization’s official news outlet, ran a piece celebrating El-Sayed’s primary win, praising his calls to end unconditional U.S. military aid to Israel and his push to redirect American tax dollars away from what the article called support for “the occupation.” The headline, translated, read “El Sayed defeats the Zionists and runs for Senate.”

That should get our attention.

Not because somebody else gets to define El-Sayed’s beliefs for him. They don’t. But when an Islamist organization looks at an American Senate primary and publicly celebrates the result, Americans are allowed to notice. We’re allowed to ask why. We’re allowed to ask what exactly they’re celebrating.

Especially now.

Look at McKinney, Texas.

I mentioned this yesterday on the radio program.

Red State said this later in the day.

You can't say the residents of McKinney, Texas, didn't make their voices heard as their town council considered the Islamic Association of McKinney's proposed plan to expand to a much larger campus.

Over 150 residents signed up to address the council at a recent meeting – so many of them, in fact, that they overflowed out of the room and into the hallway. The start of the meeting was delayed because it took so long to register that number of residents to speak.

The crowd was amped up, though, and began clapping loudly to get the meeting started because they had a lot to say. And when it did start, the council members got an earful.

Republican Rep. Keith Self (TX-03) kicked things off by getting right to the point: "Child marriage, honor killings, don't tell me it can't happen here." The crowd gave him a standing ovation.

An Iranian Christian who had once lived under Sharia law warned, "I'm a Sharia law survivor from Iran, and I'm here to tell you, this is a dangerous ideology you're allowing in their country!"

Things got heated.

Other angry residents: "They forced their way into countries and forced their religion!"

"It may become a base where young men and women will be taught and trained to overthrow this great nation, a threat for which my forefathers fought with their own blood to build for the liberty of its citizens!"

"The imam of the McKinney Islamic Association, Sheikh Mohammed Ajabali holds leadership roles with the Islamic tribunal of the Dallas area. The Attorney General stated that the group has sought to replace actual courts of law, impose Sharia on disputes among Texas Muslims and falsely represent its decisions as final judgments with the approval of the Texas without the approval of the Texas judicial system."

The consensus seemed to be: "The council members are traitors."

"Democrats, of course, showed up in favor of the mosque expanding from its current site to an expansive one on 5.5 acres; the new site is expected to hold up to 2,000 Muslims at a time."

"McKinney's former Mayor George Fuller was booed and called a "traitor" when he spoke up in favor of the plan. "For those who may not know, the McKinney Islamic Community has been a member of our community for years," he said. "We're talking about families that have served this community." 

This man is profoundly uninformed.

Many of the activists who participated in 9/11 had also " lived in the community" for some time.

The McKinney town council voted unanimously, 7-0, to approve the Islamic Association of McKinney's expansion plan.

In a Sunday interview on CNN, Rep. Nancy Mace addressed the justified concerns of many Americans over the consequences of expanding Muslim influence in the United States. "Our granddaughters will be wearing burkas to school," she said. "As a woman, that's scary to me. It's being forced on women...a 6-year-old girl doesn't get to say whether she wears a hijab or not."

Pointing out that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani campaigned alongside an unindicted co-conspirator of the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, not to mention the unholy alliance forming between Democrat Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and Muslim influencer Hasan "America Deserved 9/11" Piker, Mace raged, "We have Christian foundations! Have you seen Dearborn? The call-to-prayer five times a day, they are trying to push our people and values out!"

McCollough summed up his article with this:

Questions about radical political Islam aren’t illegitimate simply because asking them makes somebody uncomfortable. We learned that distinction the hardest way imaginable.

What frustrates me is watching radical actors gain attention and influence while our civic memory of why any of this matters seems to fade.

Twenty-five years later, the questions aren’t the same ones we were asking in September 2001. They couldn’t be. But we should still pay attention to who candidates surround themselves with. We should notice when extremist organizations celebrate an American election result. And when public officials make decisions, the people they represent are entitled to ask questions about them.

That doesn’t put every Muslim American or every mosque into the same conversation.

September 11 wasn’t committed by neighbors peacefully practicing their faith. It was committed by Islamist terrorists animated by an ideology that Americans subsequently spent enormous amounts of blood and treasure fighting.

Surely we’re still capable of knowing the difference.

And maybe that’s what bothers me most as this anniversary approaches.

Twenty-five years is long enough for memory to become history. Eventually children study it for a test. Adults commemorate it once a year. Politicians mention it in speeches.

Then everybody goes home.

But citizenship can’t be something we practice one morning every September.

Pay attention to the people seeking power. Know who surrounds them. Notice who celebrates their victories and ask why. If something happening at your city council bothers you, show up and say so.

Then remember there’s an election.

Twenty-five years of memory won’t decide one. People in Michigan will make their judgment in November. The people who packed that McKinney council meeting will eventually have their opportunities at the ballot box, too.

September 11 deserves to be remembered for what happened that morning and, above all, for the people we lost.

But remembering isn’t the same thing as paying attention.

That work doesn’t start in 30 days.

It starts now.

Takeaway

Here's why Christians must be informed, not misled:

AI says this: "There is no consensus that Islam as a religion should be feared. While critics and some Western commentators point to extremist violence, political radicalism, or illiberal social laws in certain Muslim-majority nations as reasons for concern, mainstream scholars, theologians, and human rights advocates emphasize that Islam is a diverse global faith practiced peacefully by over a billion people who share core values of charity, family, and devotion."

AI has forgotten to download the Quran. 

And developing news stories on this subject.

Be Informed. Be Discerning. Be Vigilant. Be Engaged. Be Faithful. Be Prayerful.

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