Those terrorists who overstayed their visas include:
- Hani Hasan Hanjour from Saudi Arabia
- Nawaf al-Hamzi from Saudi Arabia
- Mohamed Atta from Egypt
- Satam al-Suqami from Saudi Arabia
- Waleed al-Shehri from Saudi Arabia
- Marwan al-Shehhi from the United Arab Emirates
- Ahmed al-Ghamdi from Saudi Arabia
Images of 9/11: A Visual Remembrance
Remembering 9/11 in a Woke Year
What do the heroes of September 11 mean in a year of hating police officers?
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
The 19th anniversary of 9/11 has been the nation’s darkest in this dreaded cycle.
The Black Lives Matter riots that attacked the statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Christopher Columbus, and Abraham Lincoln, did not spare 9/11 memorials.
The statue of a police officer was beheaded and toppled in Plymouth, MA at a 9/11 memorial honoring those who had died in the attacks. But the 2,000 pound steel beam from the World Trade Center proved beyond the ability of the vandals to topple.
When Black Lives Matter racists defaced statues and memorials in the Boston Common, including the ‘Glory’ regiment, they didn’t spare the 9/11 memorial in the Public Garden.
A 9/11 memorial honoring five fallen firefighters was defaced and the American flagpole was cut down in Washingtonville, NY,.There was also vandalism at the Decatur, IL memorial site, and a red, white and blue rearing horse 9/11 memorial in Rochester, NY was smeared with red paint.
Beyond the radical attacks on the monuments of September 11 were the attacks on its heroes.
The NYPD has suffered its worst days since 9/11 with over 400 officers injured in the BLM riots. Police and firefighters went from the heroes of a nation to being smeared as soulless monsters.
“I could see no difference between the officer who killed and the police who died, or the firefighters who died,” Ta-Nehisi Coates, an intellectual godfather of Black Lives Matter, wrote, “They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were the menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.”
“Between the World and Me”, the hateful tract in which Coates dehumanized the police officers and firefighters who had died trying to save people of all races and creeds, became a bestseller, was a Pulitzer finalist, and has repeatedly shown up on corporate anti-racism reading lists.
All of this makes commemorating September 11 into an awkward task that Democrats avoid.
The 9/11 Memorial & Museum tried to cancel the Tribute in Light, whose beams that fill the night sky are used to light the space of the fallen towers of the World Trade Center, and the reading of the names of the fallen dead by 9/11 family members. It took an outpouring of anger from family members and alternative events by Tunnel2Towers to get the museum to reverse course.
While the leadership of the mismanaged museum blamed the pandemic for their decision, local Democrats had long viewed the ceremonies as intolerant and out of touch with their agenda.
Last year, Nicholas Haros Jr., the son of a 9/11 victim, had blasted Rep. Ilhan Omar's minimization of the attack on America at the reading of the names, while wearing a t-shirt decorated with her comments minimizing the Islamic atrocity, “I was attacked, your relatives and friends were attacked, our constitutional freedoms were attacked and our nation’s founding on Judeo-Christian principles were attacked. That’s what some people did."
Meanwhile, the Tribute in Light had been decried as a symbol of “extreme nationalism”.
There had always been a deep discomfort with the patriotism of September 11 and with its heroes and victims, the former were mostly working class white men from the bridge and tunnel crowd, and the latter were mostly white middle class men and women, many from outside the city and state, who were also insufficiently diverse and representative of the “New America”.
Even early on there had been efforts to replace the firefighters raising the flag at Ground Zero with a more diverse group in an official memorial. In the long years after the men of the NYPD and the FDNY had raised up the courage of a nation, both organizations, like the military, have been gutted by political correctness, and have turned into shadows of their former selves.
The FDNY has a diversity monitor who has cost the organization $23 million, and a top diversity official who was sued for excluding one of the firefighters who raised the flag at Ground Zero from a color guard ceremony.
Nicholas Garaufis, a Clinton judge, and Mayor Bill de Blasio imposed their vision of diversity on the FDNY to ensure that "the racial, ethnic and gender demographics of the department’s firefighters reflect that of the city’s population as a whole" along with the "full integration of a mixed-gender workforce."
But the heroism of the FDNY and NYPD on September 11 came from the fact that its men did not reflect a random sampling of the city’s population. They were extraordinary men, heroes who went where no one else would dare, climbing 100 stories in the hope of saving someone.
If Islamic terrorists were to fly planes into the Freedom Tower today, there would be fewer members of the FDNY’s mixed-gender and fully diverse workforce who would climb 100 stories with 60 pounds of gear on their backs while a skyscraper was tottering and burning on all sides.
On 9/11, firefighters around the country will commemorate their heroism by climbing 110 stories.
That’s the traditional kind of heroism. It’s out of step with the millennial ethos of performative hysteria spread virally across social media which turns victimhood into celebrity. The men who lived and died on that day were not victims and they were not trying to get famous. They did their duty. But to many the concept of duty has become as alien as frock coats and top hats.
19 years after 9/11, men and women born after the attack will be able to vote.
The politics of the present are being formed by radicals who, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 11 years old at the time, were children on September 11. The meaning of the day is as incomprehensible to them and as distant as Pearl Harbor.
The Obama administration had tried to shift the meaning of September 11 away from heroism to volunteerism. Its idea of commemorating the attack on America was cleaning up parks. As time goes by, there will be no need to actively suppress the commemorations, they’ll be irrelevant.
If we let it happen.
History is made up not only of dry facts, but emotional connections. The stories that define us are the ones that matter because they endow life with meaning. For millions of Americans, the death of an ex-con who had robbed a pregnant woman at gunpoint gave their lives meaning. That’s why so much of the country is burning and so many of its memorials have fallen.
The Islamic terrorists who attacked us on September 11 had beliefs that gave their lives meaning. So did the SS soldiers who marched through Poland or their NKVD counterparts.
It is not the mere presence of evil that creates a crisis, but the absence of meaningful opposition to it. And meaningful opposition comes from a deep moral passion without which life is empty.
The 19 hijackers lied to the passengers that if they didn’t resist, they would be allowed to live.
Mohammed Atta told Flight 11 passengers, “Nobody move. Everything will be okay. If you try to make any moves, you’ll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet.”
It worked three times. And then when Americans realized what was at stake, it stopped working.
Atta and his band of Jihadist butchers understood that what normal Americans wanted was to be comfortable and safe. They wanted to recline back in their seats, plug in their headphones, and wait out the interminable passage of time they would spend flying in a tin can in the sky.
“Take prisoners and kill them. As Allah said: 'No prophet should have prisoners until he has soaked the land with blood,’” Atta told his men.
"Just stay quiet, and you’ll be okay," he lied to the infidel hostages.
The leftist radicals, who have been in league with Islamic terrorists, defending them in court, propagandizing for their “civil rights” in the press, and funding their networks, now call themselves, “woke”. Another September 11 anniversary reminds us that we need to wake up.
In our streets, the radicals chant, “Death to America”, they burn flags, desecrate churches and synagogues, and topple the statues of the nation’s founders. And their media allies and Democrat apparatchiks tell us to go along with it and we’ll be okay. The rioters and stabbers just want to issue their demands and make their point. If we stay quiet, they’ll leave us alone.
The 19th anniversary is another warning from the bloody echoes of history that they won’t.
When the Jihadis and BLMers chant, “Death to America”, believe that they mean it!
The enemies of our nation are also the foes of our history. They don’t just want to topple Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and every historical figure who wasn’t up to date with contemporary woke views on, in the words of a D.C. commission calling for the removal of the Washington Monument and Jefferson Memorial, “age, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity”. No, they want to be rid of the courage and heroism of our entire history because they know that the power of Americans to resist their brutality and hate comes from our history.
That includes September 11.
On a cool fall day, millions of Americans woke out of a hazy dream of the end of history and remembered that we were a nation, not a borderless global order, that we needed heroes, not diversity, that history wasn’t over, that we still had enemies, and that what mattered was not the color of your skin or your politically correct virtue signaling, but whether you would rush the cockpit or sit in your seat hoping that despite everything you knew, they wouldn’t kill you.
On the 19th anniversary of that cool fall day, we are passing through fire and havoc, flying over ruined cities and fallen rubble because too many of us had fallen asleep until the guttural voice came on again reading its hateful demands. And many of our fellow passengers kneeled while the anthem played, they disgraced their country, and the memory of our fallen dead.
Many others woke up. We know where the plane headed toward the right side of history flies. And we don’t intend to let it follow that familiar arc toward social justice and mass murder.
An anniversary only matters as much as it brings meaning and purpose into our lives.
No amount of wishing or willing can raise the dead of September 11 out of their ashen graves. All we can do this anniversary, and every one before it and since, is to keep resisting the terrorists, domestic and international, to stay awake and ready in the long flight of history.
We must remember our heroes and honor their valor because we may need to imitate it.
Today's 19th Anniversary of 9/11
Biden and Harris blithely ignore the findings - and warnings - of the 9/11 Commission.
Today, even as we remember the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, America finds itself under attack by anarchists and Radical Leftists and violent criminals who have been released under the guise of “bail reform” and to protect criminals from COVID-19 while they commit murders, rapes, robberies and other violent crimes.
Certainly there is no shortage of news reports about acts of extreme violence carried out across the United States primarily in cities run by Leftist Radicals literally following the old dictum of news reporting, “If it bleeds, it leads.”
However, the threat of terrorism continues but has been all but ignored by the media and by our politicians.
Consider that New York’s disgusting mayor, de Blasio attempted to block the reading of the names of the victims of the terror attacks of 9/11 and the lighting of the twin spotlights, a practice that has been ongoing since September 11, 2001, purportedly out of concerns of the COVID-19 virus, a concern that he ignored during massive violent demonstrations in NYC, the city that was the most heavily impacted by those attacks.
On August 14, 2020 The Miami Herald reported, ‘This is a disgrace.’ Outrage after 9/11 light show canceled over COVID-19 concerns.
Additionally, for the first time, Americans who were born after the attacks of 9/11 will be voting. Furthermore, many of our schools are failing to teach their students about the attacks of 9/11 or the ongoing threat of terrorism posed by radical Islamists. Indeed, who could ever forget the outrageous description of the 9/11 terror attacks by Rep. Ilhan Omar when she said that on that day, “Some people did something"? On September 11, 2019 Fox News reported on this: "Ilhan Omar slammed on 9/11 anniversary by victim's son after 'some people did something' quote."
Furthermore, “Sanctuary” policies implemented by radical political “leaders” act in opposition to the findings of the 9/11 Commission and undermine national security and public safety for our entire nation.
The official report, 9/11 and Terrorist Travel, included this paragraph:
Thus, abuse of the immigration system and a lack of interior immigration enforcement were unwittingly working together to support terrorist activity. It would remain largely unknown, since no agency of the United States government analyzed terrorist travel patterns until after 9/11. This lack of attention meant that critical opportunities to disrupt terrorist travel and, therefore, deadly terrorist operations were missed.
In the upcoming Presidential debates all of the candidates for the Presidency and the Vice Presidency should be asked, “Have you read The 9/11 Commission Report and the companion report, 9/11 and Terrorist Travel?”
However, I doubt that this vital question will be asked of those who aspire to be our next Commander-in Chief.
Clearly Presidential candidate Joe Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris have not learned the lessons that the terror attacks of 9/11 should have taught us. They have proposed to gut immigration law enforcement and provide providing lawful status to unknown millions of illegal aliens.
There would be absolutely no way to interview these individuals who entered the U.S. surreptitiously. There would be no way to conduct field investigations to determine the truthfulness of the information that they would provide in their applications for legalization.
This ignores that the 9/11 Commission identified immigration fraud as the key method of entry and embedding used by terrorists determined to launch deadly attacks in the United States. This was the focus of my article, "Immigration Fraud: Lies That Kill."
These two excerpts from the afore-noted report 9/11 and Terrorist Travel addressed the nexus between terrorism and immigration fraud:
Page 46 and 47 of this report noted:
Once terrorists had entered the United States, their next challenge was to find a way to remain here. Their primary method was immigration fraud. For example, Yousef and Ajaj concocted bogus political asylum stories when they arrived in the United States. Mahmoud Abouhalima, involved in both the World Trade Center and landmarks plots, received temporary residence under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers (SAW) program, after falsely claiming that he picked beans in Florida.
This paragraph is found on page 98:
Terrorists in the 1990s, as well as the September 11 hijackers, needed to find a way to stay in or embed themselves in the United States if their operational plans were to come to fruition. As already discussed, this could be accomplished legally by marrying an American citizen, achieving temporary worker status, or applying for asylum after entering. In many cases, the act of filing for an immigration benefit sufficed to permit the alien to remain in the country until the petition was adjudicated. Terrorists were free to conduct surveillance, coordinate operations, obtain and receive funding, go to school and learn English, make contacts in the United States, acquire necessary materials, and execute an attack.
I have testified before numerous hearings conducted by various House and Senate committees and subcommittees on various aspects of the immigration crisis, most often about that nexus between immigration and terrorism, public safety and national security.
Back on May 5, 2005 the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims conducted a hearing on the topic, New ''Dual Missions'' Of The Immigration Enforcement Agencies. I testified at that hearing.
What was particularly striking about this hearing was that the Chairman of that subcommittee, John Hostettler, a Republican, challenged the way that the George W. Bush administration created the Department of Homeland Security in violation of the enabling legislation, the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (HSA). He noted the following in his prepared testimony: "Failure to adhere to the statutory framework established by HSA has produced immigration enforcement incoherence that undermines the immigration enforcement mission central to DHS, and undermines the security of our Nation's borders and citizens."
His testimony also noted:
The 9/11 terrorists all came to the United States without weapons or contraband—Added customs enforcement would not have stopped 9/11 from happening. What might have foiled al Qaeda's plan was additional immigration focus, vetting and enforcement. And so what is needed is recognition that, one, immigration is a very important national security issue that cannot take a back seat to customs or agriculture. Two, immigration is a very complex issue, and immigration enforcement agencies need experts in immigration enforcement. And three, the leadership of our immigration agencies should be shielded from political pressures to act in a way which could compromise the Nation's security.
Hostettler’s courageous criticism of the Bush administration demonstrates that until the election of President Trump, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans really wanted to address the multiple failures of the Immigration system as I wrote in an earlier article, "Sanctuary Country - Immigration failures by design."
Biden’s plan to create a massive amnesty program for what he claims would be 11 million illegal aliens but would actually involve a multiple of that already huge number.
Immigration fraud would permeate such a massive amnesty program where the hapless adjudication officers could not keep up with the onslaught of applications.
Earlier this year I addressed the magnitude of such a massive immigration amnesty program in my article, "Comprehensive Immigration Reform Should be Renamed the “Overwhelm America Act" in which I noted that a number of universities have estimated that there are at least 25 million illegal aliens in the United States. I would suggest that even that number is much smaller than the true number of such aliens.
The major fact being ignored by everyone, however is that if those aliens were to be granted legal status, they would automatically have the absolute right to immediately petition to have all of their spouses and minor children to be admitted into the United States as lawful immigrants.
Imagine if, on average all of these legalized aliens have 3 or 4 minor children back home. The number is likely to be even higher. All of them would have an absolute right to join their newly legalized parents in the United States.
Thus we would really be looking at an influx of unknown tens of millions of additional alien children who would be enrolled in our schools and, in a short period of time, would join the labor pool. The economics of this, coupled with the impact on housing, critical infrastructure, hospitals, and other such factors would cause America to implode. We could be looking at the legal immigration of one hundred million such immigrants -- literally overnight -- who would overwhelm our schools, critical infrastructure and do irreparable harm to Americans.
Every person in America has an environmental footprint. Those who immigrate to America not only need a place to sleep but food, water, electricity, transportation, healthcare and other necessities.
For all of the breast-beating by the Left about “sustainability,” the Biden plan would dump tens of millions of lawful immigrant workers into our labor pool, displacing American workers and suppressing wages.
So much for Biden’s “promise” that if elected he would help American workers get better-paying jobs!
Biden’s “promises” are actually threats aimed at the lives and livelihoods of Americans during a particular treacherous and difficult era.
Facts are indeed stubborn things!
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