There was a time when “Never Forget” truly meant something in mainstream circles.
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Twenty-five years after September 11, in some corners of America and Western Europe, it has become worth asking exactly what we were supposed to remember. The obvious answer was the nearly 3,000 people who were murdered by Islamist terrorists in a brazen attack on the American way of life. But there has been another critical lesson buried in the rubble: Western civilization will not survive if it becomes so afraid of offending people that it stops defending the principles that made it worth defending in the first place.
That question has become increasingly uncomfortable as Islam, Islamic political movements, and competing ideas about religious law have gained influence in Western Europe and the United States.
This is not an argument against Muslims, most of whom are ordinary people living their lives, raising families and pursuing the same things everyone else wants. It is an argument about what happens when Western liberals, in their eagerness to embrace multiculturalism, stop distinguishing between religious tolerance and political surrender.
Britain offers a useful warning. Sharia law does not constitute a parallel national legal system in Britain, and the British government has made clear that sharia councils have no official status in the country’s justice system. But these councils do operate within Muslim communities, particularly regarding family and religious matters.
A 2018 government review found evidence that some councils had practices that disadvantaged women, including problems involving divorce and other family matters. The review specifically concluded that some women’s rights and freedoms had been infringed.
That distinction matters. Giving a religious community the freedom to practice its faith is one thing. A woman feeling that she must navigate a religious authority to obtain a divorce, or believing that her civil rights are somehow subordinate to a religious code, is something else entirely. Now consider that Sharia zones are well-established and growing in America.
The West’s answer to that problem should be obvious: civil law remains supreme, individual rights remain individual rights, and nobody gets a lesser set of protections because of the community into which they were born.
Yet increasingly, the opposite instinct seems to be taking hold. Liberal politicians and activists seem to love to bend over backward to accommodate cultural practices they would condemn as oppressive if they came from any source other than Islam.
I grew up in Paterson, New Jersey, a city that gives me a particularly personal perspective on this transformation. Paterson has one of the largest Muslim communities in the United States, and in 2020 the city amended its noise ordinance to allow mosques to broadcast the Muslim call to prayer, or adhan, over loudspeakers between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., for up to five minutes.
Reasonable people can disagree about noise ordinances and religious expression. That is precisely why these questions should be discussed honestly rather than treated as forbidden territory.
Paterson also has an especially dark connection to the history of Islamist terrorism in America. In the months before September 11, several of the hijackers lived in the city, and reporting at the time indicated that as many as 11 of the 19 hijackers spent time at one Paterson address.
That history does not make Paterson’s Muslim residents responsible for the crimes of terrorists. It does, however, make the city’s experience a reminder that integration, assimilation, and national security are not subjects that should be dismissed as bigotry simply because they are uncomfortable.
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And then there is Michigan. Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate campaign presents a fascinating case study in the political coalition now emerging on the American left. El-Sayed is openly progressive, supports Medicare for All and has attracted support from prominent socialists. Yet he has also been careful to distance himself from the Democratic Socialists of America, telling The Wall Street Journal, “I’m not technically or practically DSA.” The Journal has nevertheless described his politics as firmly left-leaning, while noting his support for policies associated with the progressive movement.
This is where the concept of “taqiyya” enters the conversation as a potentially dangerous tool in the Islamification of the West. Taqiyya is a real Islamic concept concerning the concealment of one’s faith or larger worldview to hide one’s religious identity when facing persecution or to mislead a non-Muslim population in an effort to potentially gain advantages against “infidels.”
It is not a blanket Islamic commandment to lie to political opponents, but the political phenomenon the word evokes is still worth examining. We can see the current relevance of the term in the strategic presentation of one set of beliefs to one audience while emphasizing a softer version to another, as El-Sayed talks to different segments of his potential constituency.
El-Sayed can say he isn’t a socialist while advocating a collection of policies that are plainly associated with modern American socialism on the campaign trail. But Fox News recently highlighted audio in which El-Sayed acknowledged that his Medicare for All proposal would increase taxes. So, in plain terms, he knows he is lying to us.
You can dismiss that simply as politics. I mean, politicians repackage ideas all the time. But voters should be allowed to ask whether the packaging accurately describes what is inside the box.
And that is the larger problem. Western liberals have become remarkably aggressive when identifying Christian nationalism and conservative traditionalism as the so-called patriarchy and labeling them “dangerous,” while becoming remarkably forgiving of extreme and uncivilized Third World behaviors when they appear inside a minority community they regard as politically useful.
That double standard is potentially deadly. A free society does not promise every culture that it can bring all of its internal rules into public life without scrutiny. It promises individuals the freedom to practice their religion while remaining equal under one civil law.
There is a profound difference between saying, “You are free to worship Allah,” and saying, “Your community’s religious norms should determine the rights of women, children, or dissenters.” The first is religious liberty. The second raises questions about whether liberalism is being asked to surrender the very principles that sustain it.
The same applies to free speech. Western societies cannot simultaneously declare that offensive speech is protected and then create informal systems in which certain religious sensibilities receive special protection from criticism. Once politicians learn that outrage, intimidation, or accusations of bigotry can silence criticism, everyone eventually pays the price.
That is why the political evolution represented by figures like El-Sayed deserves serious scrutiny, not because he is Muslim, but because his candidacy sits at the intersection of several powerful movements: progressive economics, identity politics, religious identity, and a growing willingness among parts of the Western left to accommodate illiberal ideas when they come wrapped in the language of minority rights.
America should remember what happened on September 11 without turning that memory into suspicion of every Muslim neighbor. But remembering also means refusing to become so terrified of appearing intolerant that we lose the ability to distinguish tolerance from capitulation.
The West does not need to choose between religious freedom and cultural self-preservation. It needs to understand that the first depends upon the second. A civilization that cannot defend its own laws, its own women, its own free speech, and its own cultural confidence will eventually discover that multiculturalism without a common civic standard is not diversity. It is disintegration.
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