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Home – Islamic Extremism News – Victor Davis Hanson: 25 Years After 9/11—Has America Forgotten?

Victor Davis Hanson: 25 Years After 9/11—Has America Forgotten?

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the latest edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Sami Winc:  It’s the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and I know that we’ve been watching New York and [New York Mayor] Mamdani, and there are a lot of people who are not happy Mamdani might come to ceremonies commemorating those who died on 9/11.  

I was wondering if you could give us a commemoration on 9/11 itself, and then, address the controversy going on in New York. 

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, we hadn’t done anything to them. In fact, you could make the argument under the Clinton administration—this is 25 years ago, so 2001—we were still in the shadow of eight years of Bill Clinton, and they had bombed our embassies, for example, and they had done other stuff all over the world, and we hadn’t done much. So they were emboldened and thought… 

They really did believe one of two things, and probably both: that we would not reply and try to go after them in Afghanistan, which we drove them out, and then we destroyed the Taliban for 15 years. And we would remove one of the great sponsors of terrorism, Saddam Hussein, and they didn’t believe that would happen. And more importantly, they thought, that people would rally to their cause in the Arab world, and that didn’t happen either. 

So their plans failed. Everybody said… I went back today and looked at what people were saying 25 years ago, and they all said that a second attack of that magnitude, it was not a question of if, but only when, and that did not happen. And that was because, for all the criticism of George W. Bush, he did clamp down on global terrorism.  

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And for all the problems with Homeland Security and all of the bureaucratic stuff, we did not—We had a lot of terrorism incidents, but not anything of that magnitude. 

It did change our lives. You can’t go to an airport and think, even remember, what it was like 25 years prior to this. It changed everything. 

The only lament that I have, and I think a lot of our listeners share it, if you had said after 9/11, 25 years from now, you will have a socialist instead of Rudy Giuliani or someone like him in New York.  

Instead of all those fire guys risking their lives, NYPD, you’re going to have a guy who hates them. And he’s going to be a Muslim radical, and he’s going to represent the new socialist Democratic Party and Islamicist. And he’s going to announce he will confiscate private property of landlords he doesn’t like. 

And on the commemoration day 25 years from now, he will be mayor, and he will hand a pen that he signed the proclamation of observance for 9/11 25 years earlier. And by the way, he was in Uganda as a settler colonialist with the 1% Indian community that was running 65% of the wealth in his Victoria state. 

So he comes over here, and he will hand the pen as a gift to Mr. Ramzi Kassem, who’s standing to his left. And Mr. Kassem will have been the attorney for one of the hijackers that helped kill 3,000 people.  

And in addition to that, he will—in addition to that, he will hand the pen not to Mr. Kassem, but take the iconic head, the commissioner of the NYPD, and almost as a little servant, who was the only Jewish member of his inner cabinet that he inherited, the commissioner, Ms. Tisch, who is a very capable servant. She’s of the utmost professionality. She’s wonderful, and she’s in a beleaguered sense because this guy ran on the NYPD kills people, and it’s out of control, and it should be defunded. 

So then she has to hand this pen to somebody who’s an anti-Semite and tried to get, to qualify this horrible day on 9/11 by defending one of the hijackers and his family. So that, that’s where we are now. Nobody would have imagined that, but that’s where we are. 

And we’re up to a midterms, and if you had said, as we watch those brave people trying to determine whether they should be burned alive........

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