In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the official narrative became that the terrorists just hated America for its “freedom and values.” In other words, America was just minding its own business, with Americans enjoying their “freedom and values,” when the terrorists decided to strike on 9/11 because they just couldn’t control their hatred for such “freedom and values.”
There were a few of us at the time declaring what a crock all this was, much to the anger and chagrin of those who were quickly falling for the official narrative. As I pointed out in my recent article “Why They Hate Us,” the U.S. government’s decade-long killing spree in Iraq, which killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, was one of the big factors that gave rise to the deep anti-U.S. anger and rage within the Middle East.
But there was another phenomenon that took place after the 9/11 attacks. That phenomenon was the conviction that the attacks were carried out by Muslims, supposedly as part of a century’s old quest to establish a worldwide caliphate, including the United States (after the discovery of America in 1492).
Thus, the idea was that the 9/11 attacks weren’t just carried out by some general group of terrorists who hated America for its “freedom and values.” Instead, the idea was that these were Muslims who were the tip of the spear in a supposed centuries-old war between Islam and Christianity.
Today, some 20 years later, it is easy to forget about that phenomenon. But I can never forget it because here at FFF we were being inundated with emails attacking us for supposedly siding with the Muslims in their supposed war against Christianity and, in particular, American Christians.
It is difficult to describe the overarching fear of Islam and Muslims during that time. One of the principal concerns that was being expressed was that as soon as the Muslims prevailed in their war against the United States, they were going to establish a system of Sharia law all across the United States.
In other words, no more Constitution. No more Congress. No more federal judiciary. No more president. Instead, America’s way of life was all going to be replaced by Sharia law, imposed and enforced on the American people by devout Muslim clerics.
There was also a deep fear that with their victory over the West, the Muslims were going to take over America’s socialist system of public schools, where Muslim teachers and administrators would indoctrinate America’s children with Islamic principles. Everyone was going to be forced to be a Muslim.
I sometimes wonder how all those people who succumbed to that anti-Islamic and anti-Muslim nonsense feel today about how they reacted in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. I certainly do not ever read any expressions of regret or remorse in the mainstream press. I get the feeling that the people who fell for this nonsense would simply prefer not to think about it and to just put it all behind us.
Of course, all this anti-Islam, anti-Muslim hysteria, along with the hatred for America’s “freedom and values,” was encouraged or supported by those who wanted to ensure that America did not focus on the deadly and destructive interventionist antics that were the root cause of the deep anger and hatred that foreigners had for the United States. By distracting people with the caliphate nonsense, the Sharia-law nonsense, and the “freedom-and-values” nonsense, U.S. officials could continue with their interventionist antics, especially with their deadly and destructive invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, which, needless to say, gave rise to the continued threat of terrorist retaliation, which then was used to justify ever-increasing budgets and power of the national-security establishment.
The post-9/11 Islamic-caliphate nonsense and Sharia-law hysteria, of course, brings to mind the old Cold War racket, when the fear was that the Reds were coming to get us as part of a decades-old supposed communist conspiracy to take over the world that was supposedly based in Moscow, Russia — yes, the same Russia that today, we are told, is going to sweep across Ukraine, take over Eastern and Western Europe and England, and then cross the Atlantic and conquer and occupy the United States, Canada, Mexico, Central America, and South America.
Of course, the jury is still out with respect to all this nonsense on whether Americans will be living under Sharia law or Russian law … or possibly even Red law if communist China gets here first.