Last Wednesday, a co-pilot on a Flydubai flight bound for Tel Aviv attacked his captain mid-flight with a crash axe, trying to seize the plane and put it into the ground in Israel. A wounded pilot and a planeload of strangers stopped him. Days later, Al Qaeda's propaganda wing praised the attempt by name, invoked September 11 directly, and called for copycat hijackings against American and Israeli aircraft.
I wrote recently about 25 years since September 11, and three since October 7. I didn't think I'd be writing again so soon about an attempted mass-casualty atrocity that the people cheering it are openly calling a sequel. But here we are. So let me ask the question plainly instead of dressing it up: what, exactly, did we learn?
I'm starting to think the honest answer is not much. And I'm tired of pretending otherwise for the sake of sounding gracious.
After September 11, President Bush stood in a mosque and told the country "Islam is peace." I understand the impulse behind it. Nobody wanted ordinary Muslim neighbors paying for what 19 men did. Fine. But 25 years later, I'm done granting that strategy the benefit of the doubt just because the intention sounded nice. A slogan isn't a policy, and repeating it for two and a half decades while the ideology that produced September 11 kept finding new recruiters, new platforms, and new sympathizers in plain sight is not evidence the strategy worked. It's evidence we mistook saying the kind thing for doing the hard thing, and never circled back to check whether it was true.
After October 7, the same reflex showed up again, dressed in slightly different language from a different administration, aimed at the same reassurance. And I watched the same pattern play out on a faster clock. Hamas filmed its own atrocities and uploaded them for the world to see, and within weeks, the loudest voices on American college campuses and American airwaves weren't condemning what they'd watched. They were explaining it. Contextualizing it. Occasionally cheering it outright.
Hasan Piker built an audience doing exactly that. Abdul El-Sayed wrote, on the record, equating the deaths of 3,000 Americans on September 11 with American deaths in the wars that followed, in the same breath, like two sides of a ledger that balance out. Zohran Mamdani has spent a career refusing the easy, obvious condemnations that should cost a public figure nothing to give, and gave them anyway as though withholding them was the braver position. Ilhan Omar has spent years testing exactly how far "just asking questions" can stretch before it becomes something else entirely, and has rarely found the edge of it.
I'm not interested anymore in being told this is a fringe phenomenon. Fringe movements don't produce sitting members of Congress, mayoral nominees, and the loudest voices in Democratic primaries. This is not the fringe. This is increasingly the mainstream of one entire wing of American politics, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of dishonesty.
And now I watch Tucker Carlson, a man who built his name on refusing to take the establishment's word for anything, treat "genocide" as settled fact about Gaza, on the same week Gaza's own health ministry released mortality data that cuts hard against that claim, and turn his fire on American officials who were trying to do the genuinely difficult thing: protect innocent Palestinians without pretending Hamas and the ideology behind it don't exist. I don't know what moved him there, and I'm done speculating about motive. I only know what I watched happen: the skeptic stopped being skeptical exactly when skepticism became inconvenient.
So, 25 years out, three years out, here's where I actually land, with no bow on top of it. The "Islam is peace" framing wasn't dishonest because every Muslim who says it is lying — that's not an argument I'm willing to make, and I'd reject it from anyone who tried to make it to me. It was dishonest, or at best naive, because it let American leaders avoid a harder, more specific conversation: which organizations, which mosques, which funding streams, which ideologies are actually producing the next axe-wielding co-pilot, and which public figures in our own country are providing cover for them once they emerge. Twenty-five years of pleasant rhetoric didn't answer that question. It postponed it.
A man tried to fly a plane into the ground over Israel last week. He failed by luck and courage, not by policy. Al Qaeda is already asking who's next. I don't know if we've learned anything in 25 years that actually prevents that question from having an answer. I'd like to believe we have. I no longer assume it.