Left on the cutting room floors will be the all-important, basic "why," exactly, al-Qaeda hijackers carried out these attacks. The too-offensive-for-public-discourse "why" part of 9/11 can be readily found in, for instance, the recovered United Airlines Flight 93 cockpit recordings, which reveal one hijacker's motivation at an authentic moment of truth. Nine times over that nosediving flight's final six seconds before it disintegrated with all 40 victims into a Shanksville, Pennsylvania, field, the hijacker repeatedly chanted: "Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar ... !" Allah is great.

Expect schoolteachers, media pundits, and elected leaders speechifying at the New York memorial (think New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani) to pretzel-twist themselves around ever saying aloud that a religious motive rooted in Islamist ideology drove the 9/11 hijackers to that mass murder—and still does. Removing even passing references to Islamism as 9/11's guiding motivation from the coming national discourse short-circuits civic duty to remind Americans that this problem lives on 25 years later as anational security threat.

The nation saw it in the 2026 vehicle-ramming and shooting at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township, Michigan, 2025's truck-ramming attack in New Orleans, the shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington, DC, and the 2024 firearms attack on Chicago's Jewish community, to name just a fractional few in recent times.

We can predict purposeful omission because we saw it five years ago on the 20th anniversary. USA Today, for instance, posted a story with the subhead "Eight influential Muslim Americans discuss how 9/11 and Islamophobia affected life in the U.S. over two decades." CBS News reported a story it titled "Muslim Americans still face hostility 20 years after 9/11." A CNN story  led with the headline: "Too many US Muslim children dread 9/11 every year."

Fortunately, America still has the 567-page bipartisan 9/11 Commission Report, the US government account of how the attacks succeeded, and still unflinchingly tells us why the perpetrators carried them out. To be sure, the 9/11 Commission report has its detractors who have quibbled with its talk about Islam. But the document stands factually unscathed, its gravitas intact.

If there was ever a time to let the 2004 government tome do its job, it is now, when gatekeepers regard essential truths as politically unsuitable for American minds. Here are some of the 9/11 Commission's most pertinent excerpts for teachers, speakers, and writers who will dare to invoke them in the coming weeks:

• " ... Usama Bin Ladin and other Islamist terrorist leaders draw on a long tradition of extreme intolerance within one stream of Islam (a minority tradition), from at least Ibn Taimiyyah, through the founders of Wahhabism, through the Muslim Brotherhood, to Sayyid Qutb. That stream is motivated by religion and does not distinguish politics from religion, thus distorting both. It is not a position with which Americans can bargain or negotiate. With it there is no common ground—not even respect for life—on which to begin a dialogue. It can only be destroyed or utterly isolated."—"What to Do? A Global Strategy, Reflecting on a Generational Challenge, Defining the Threat," Page 362.
• "Bin Ladin also relies heavily on the Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb. A member of the Muslim Brotherhood executed in 1966 on charges of attempting to overthrow the government, Qutb mixed Islamic scholarship with a very superficial acquaintance with Western history and thought... He claimed that the world was beset with barbarism, licentiousness, and unbelief (a condition he called Jahiliyya, the religious term for the period of ignorance prior to the revelations given to the Prophet Mohammed). Qutb argued that humans can choose only between Islam and Jahiliyya ... All Muslims–as he defined them–therefore must take up arms in this fight. Any Muslim who rejects his ideas is just one more nonbeliever worthy of destruction. Bin Ladin shares Qutb's stark view, permitting him and his followers to rationalize even unprovoked mass murder as righteous defense of an embattled faith."—"The Foundation of the New Terrorism, Bin Ladin's World View,"Page 51.

• "Many Americans have wondered, ‘Why do "they" hate us?' Bin Ladin's grievance with the United States may have started in reaction to specific US policies but it quickly became far deeper. Al-Qaeda's answer was that America should abandon the Middle East, convert to Islam, and end the immorality and godlessness of its society and culture."—Page 51.

• "The history, culture, and body of beliefs from which Bin Ladin has shaped and spread his message are largely unknown to many Americans. Seizing on symbols of Islam's past greatness, he promises to restore pride to people who consider themselves the victims of successive foreign masters. He uses cultural and religious allusions to the holy Qur'an and some of its interpreters. His rhetoric selectively draws from multiple sources—Islam, history, and the region's political and economic malaise."—"Bin Ladin's Appeal in the Islamic World,"Page 48.

• "In February 1998 ... Bin Ladin and a fugitive Egyptian physician, Ayman al Zawahiri, ... called for the murder of any American, anywhere on Earth, as the ‘individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it. We do not have to differentiate between military or civilian. As far as we are concerned, they are all targets.'"—"The Foundation of the New Terrorism, A Declaration of War," Page 47.

• "Our enemy is twofold: al-Qaeda, a stateless network of terrorists that struck us on 9/11; and a radical ideological movement in the Islamic world...which has spawned terrorist groups and violence across the globe. The first enemy is weakened ... The second enemy is gathering and will menace Americans and American interests long after Usama Bin Ladin and his cohorts are killed or captured. Thus our strategy must match our means to two ends: dismantling the al-Qaeda network and prevailing in the longer term over the ideology that gives rise to Islamist terrorism"—"The present danger is Islamist terrorism—What to Do? A Global Strategy," Page 363.

• "The small percentage of Muslims who are fully committed to Bin Ladin's version of Islam are impervious to persuasion. Muslims themselves will have to reflect upon such basic issues as the concept of jihad, the position of women, and the place of non-Muslim minorities. The United States can promote moderation but cannot ensure its ascendancy. Only Muslims can do this."—"Engage the Struggle of Ideas," Page 375.

Teachers, parents, elected leaders, and the media do a disservice to the republic by hop-skipping past the religious "why" behind 9/11. In supposedly protecting a new generation of Americans from knowing the why, they will fail to apply the time-tested wisdom that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. Subscribe for free to Breaking Christian News here

Todd Bensman is a senior research fellow for the Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation.

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