Everyone remembers what they were doing that day.
But what they were doing the day before, no one remembers.
The day before, we Europeans were mocking George W. Bush for confusing Slovenia with Slovakia.
The day after, we would all have called ourselves Americans.
Three months later we were already all anti-American.
What were the leaders of the nineteen Muslims who crashed into the Twin Towers doing “the day before”?
They were here, in our European Middle-earth.
A mature, liberal, wealthy, cultured, pacifist and multicultural European democracy discovered in the meantime that it was the most fertile ground for those who wanted to destroy it.
All the emotion packed into newspaper articles and television reports on this latest anniversary now serves only to numb us to the more dramatic truth. The day before and the day after.
How did we get there? And where do we stand today?
At 10:18 p.m. on September 12, 2001, American authorities sent Germany a list of the 19 suspects.
Two of them were residents of Hamburg: Mohammed Atta, who piloted the Boeing 767 into the North Tower at 8:46, and Marwan al-Shehhi, who minutes later crashed a second plane into the South Tower. The third, the Lebanese Ziad Samir Jarrah, who had piloted the third plane headed for Washington but crashed in a Pennsylvania field thanks to the passengers’ brave revolt, also lived in Germany.
The attack killed 2,977 people; the youngest was two years old, the oldest eighty-five. The first victim was Daniel Lewin, an Israeli former special-forces soldier who tried to disarm the terrorists and was slashed to death.
They had dealt a mighty blow to the Great Satan, mightier than even the producers of the most implausible action thrillers could conceive, with five box cutters and the cost of two movie tickets.
A mature, liberal, wealthy, cultured, pacifist and multicultural European democracy discovered in the meantime that it was the most fertile ground for those who wanted to destroy it.
The “soft underbelly” was no longer a journalistic phrase. It had become an anatomical description of Europe.
At the time, no one in Germany talked about Islam or immigration. People thought, with the former Nazi and Nobel Prize for Literature winner Günter Grass, that all the world’s problems were those six million Israeli Jews who refused to leave their historic homeland.
Eckart Werthebach, former president of the Verfassungsschutz (Germany’s domestic intelligence service), said after the attacks: “We were strongly focused on right-wing extremism, so that other forms of extremism did not receive the necessary attention.”
We were so taken with our imaginary fascists that we failed to see.
No one noticed anything. And how could they, right?
Mohammed Atta was a diligent Egyptian student who sat in the front row. He was the son of a Cairo lawyer who arrived in Germany at 24 to study. He already spoke German almost perfectly; he had learned it at the Goethe-Institut in Cairo. An example of “integration.”
The other attacker, Shehhi, came from the Emirates, studied naval architecture, received a military scholarship, wore designer clothes, rented a Mercedes for a weekend outing, spoke German. Ziad arrived in 1996 from Lebanon. He grew up in a Western environment, attended a Christian high school, studied aeronautical engineering in Germany, drank alcohol, had a girlfriend.
Taqiyya in action.
Atta lived at Marienstraße 54, a four-story apartment building in Hamburg.
An investigation by Die Zeit now recounts:
German officials, mindful of the Nazi past, would also say they had been reluctant to target mosques for fear of “accusations of racism and Islamophobia.”
“The deputy president of Hamburg’s Verfassungsschutz later had to admit that at the time none of his staff spoke Arabic.”
“No one spoke Arabic”.
Hamburg - and Germany as a whole - was therefore a risk-free environment for Islamist terrorists. It was full of Arabs, but the intelligence services were asleep.
German officials, mindful of the Nazi past, would also say they had been reluctant to target mosques for fear of “accusations of racism and Islamophobia.”
Hamburg enjoyed the reputation of a tolerant, super-multicultural, open and wealthy port city. Precisely for that reason it was perfect. The terrorists did not have to hide in a cave. They only had to look like what they partly were: foreign students in a democracy that considers suspicion a greater sin than error.
Today, Hamburg authorities today record 1,610 Islamists ready for violence in the city. “The Caliphate is the solution,” they demonstrate in Hamburg’s squares. The police have stated that “invoking the advent of the Caliph is not a crime.”
A few weeks ago Abdul Ballout used a van to kill at Berlin Pride. The bigger story, however, is another. Abdul left Germany in 2025 to join ISIS in Syria. He was arrested in Lebanon and imprisoned for three months before doing a waltz back to Germany, where he was arrested again. He was not imprisoned, but was handed over to an organization called “Violence Prevention Network” to attend a “deradicalization” course that receives substantial federal funding in Germany and is a founding member of the European Commission’s Radicalisation Awareness Network (RAN).
“The day everything changed” thus became “the day everything went back to how it was before,” only even crazier and more suicidal.
The Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud is therefore right when, for this anniversary, he wrote in Le Point about the erased truth:
“The terrorists were no longer those who crashed the planes into the towers; it was America that had erected its towers on the flight path of airliners. They were no longer Islamists on a suicide mission with their verses, but Muslims in grievance mode at the end of a long chain of reactions to America’s planes crashed against the Muslim world. It was no longer a murderous hijacking, but the repair of an injustice.
“To the moral lever of History, twisted to the extreme, was added the erosion of the sociology of justification, the colored-hair wokisms, Fanonism as justification of violence and Third-Worldism, the right to revenge. Then, in a hijacking of the hijackings, came ‘Palestinism’, the theory of total chaos: everything can be destroyed, America deserves every punishment for its pro-Jewish and anti-Muslim positions.
“And the theory of legitimate attacks saw the light again, in a lobotomizing cancellation of time: the war in Gaza in 2025 justified, in the mad synchronicity of this theory, the 9/11 attacks. The 3,000 dead caused by Bin Laden were the collateral effect of the war between Palestinian Arabs and Jews, between Good and Evil. The 9/11 hijackers became members of Hamas, on a mission of liberation and decolonization by air.
“9/11 is now erased, relegated to the rank of a news item. In the current universe of trans-Islamism, a controversial image of a UFO would have more impact and credibility than a video of 9/11. By now, in this quantum time that compresses truth and dispenses with the real as with chronology, 9/11 is a consequence of the war after October 7 and is therefore justified. And if one can believe in God without ever having seen Him, one can no longer believe in 9/11 in the name of the fight against Islamophobia. It is a right to a somersault, an act of faith, an intimate decision, an interpretation or a choice. The full expression of democracy.
“To the moral lever of History, twisted to the extreme, was added the erosion of the sociology of justification, the colored-hair wokisms, Fanonism as justification of violence and Third-Worldism, the right to revenge.”
“Let us repeat it: the 9/11 attacks in New York never happened. And if they did happen, the Twin Towers should not have been in the path of the Saudi pilgrims.”
It was Silvio Berlusconi after 9/11 who said that our culture was “superior” to theirs. But he was condemned and dismissed. And today no politician dares to utter those words anymore. Culture? Superior?
The day after the fifth anniversary of the destruction of the Twin Towers, a great Pope said that Islam was different from Greco-Judeo-Christian civilization, that holy war was inside its sacred texts and that Muhammad brought the sword. He too was condemned. And today no cardinal dares to utter those words anymore.
While people were jumping from the towers, I remember changing the channel and elsewhere, in Gaza and Ramallah, they were celebrating in the streets. Sweets were being distributed, as after October 7, the Israeli 9/11.
Anyone who saw those images must have understood.
But now we all cheer for those savages and the ignoble Flotilla, one of whose English faces, Moazzam Begg, praises Osama bin Laden as a “voice of freedom.”
Now young Westerners read Bin Laden’s writings and approve.
Now, for the anniversary of 9/11, Western public television stations ask not to speak of “terrorist attacks.”
The horrors of Hamas on October 7, 2023 also triggered a wave of sympathy similar to 9/11: but toward the Palestinian Arab perpetrators, not toward the 1,200 Israeli victims. Which, if related to the American population, corresponds to more than 40,000 dead.
This bleak picture leads me to ask: what will the 50th anniversary of 9/11 be like? I fear that the only people who will still care will be those who lost someone that day.
Our soft underbelly has not hardened. We have merely grown accustomed to living with our vulnerability, calling it, the better to digest it, a virtue.
Hamburg, for example, the city of the 9/11 attackers, already today has more mosques than churches.
Islamization advances at a brisk pace and the anniversary reminds us how ideologies aspire to power: with open violence, with subversion or with strategic tenacity.
And thank goodness The Economist this week puts Islam and Europe on the cover to say there is nothing to worry about, that the problem is “Islamophobia.”
London was hit four years after the Twin Towers and the British government has just dumped its principal ally against terrorism: Israel.
Islamization advances at a brisk pace and the anniversary reminds us how ideologies aspire to power: with open violence, with subversion or with strategic tenacity.
That morning the Islamist terrorists planted a poisonous seed that continues to grow throughout the West. “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will prefer the strong horse,” Bin Laden used to say.
Something tells me we are not the strong horse and that we are losing.
Meanwhile the head of Britain’s MI5, McCallum, warns of “the next 9/11 that will happen where we are not looking.”
Looking up at London’s Tower Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, the dome of St. Peter’s, or the Sagrada Família, who has never imagined, at least once, immediately erasing that terrible thought, the shadow of a plane heading toward those symbols of the hated West?
Published originally on September 14, 2026.
