In the hours leading up to the 10th anniversary of 9/11 terrorist attacks, I've been listening to different perspectives about the day and its significance, and I've been thinking a lot about my own. My children helped me put the American flags out in the yard. We started to put up our white cross, too -- the one we use at Easter and on Memorial and Veterans days.
Looking at that clean, smooth, blank, white cross, I was compelled to do something to it. The compulsion came from something I'd heard on the radio a couple of nights ago.
An author and speaker named Pamela Geller has written a book about how Islam has infiltrated America in ways almost too numerous to believe. Geller is not a paranoid, she's actually a well-educated and well-documented researcher of cultural and political change and, judging from the interview I heard, she's very plain-spoken.
Geller said many things that gave me pause, things I want to research and verify for myself. But one thing she said really stood out and needs no verification.
"It's all well and good -- and very important -- to remember the victims and the heroes of 9/11, but one thing I'm not hearing or seeing in the media is any mention of the ideology that brought about the events of that day," she said.
The ideology that spurred the 9/11 hijackers to do what they did, the ideology that prompted Nadal Hassan to go on his shooting spree at Ft. Hood, the ideology that fueled the destruction of the huge, priceless and irreplaceable Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan, the ideology that accepts the stoning or live burial of women who are raped -- instead of meting out these punishments to their attackers -- the ideology behind the bombings of embassies throughout the Middle East, the ideology that caused writer Molly Norris to give up her identity and her career to protect her life, the ideology that says if Christians and Jews cannot be converted then they must be killed, THAT ideology that no one dares name aloud for fear of having a death sentence placed on their heads, that's the ideology that is responsible for the terrible events of 9/11/01.
It has a name.
Islam.
There, I said it.
When we talk about 9/11/01 to our children, we should tell them the truth. Those men who hijacked the planes didn't just wake up one day and decide to forge a career in terrorism. They trained, planned, rehearsed, and carried out a plot of near-epic proportions one beautiful blue day in September. They committed their own insane, pathetic lives to a mission that, they believed, would propel them straight to heaven and into the arms of a crowd of virgins.
They did all of this because of Islam.
Islam made those terrorists who they were. Islam made the Twin Towers come down. Islam gave the first responders something to respond to. Islam forced the passengers of Flight 93 to drive that plane hard and fast down into the ground of a Pennsylvania field. Islam put the smoking, gaping hole in the side of the Pentagon. Islam did all that and much, much more and none of it has been good.
None of it.
With all of these things in mind, I took up my clean,smooth, blank, white cross and brought it in the house. I laid it out on the kitchen table and using big bold markers I inscribed it with the following:
9/11
NEVER FORGET
God
blesses
the
HEROES
After I was done, I stood back and looked at it. Something was still missing. Something else needed to be said.
Then I remembered Pamela Geller's remark.
Underneath the words "NEVER FORGET," I wrote, "what Islam did." Then I took the cross back outside and stuck it in the ground amidst the flags waving in my front yard so that it could speak the full truth.
When we remember 9/11, its perpetrators, its victims, its heroes, we must also remember what made those people perpetrators, victims and heroes.
When it comes time to tell your children the story of 9/11/01, I hope you'll find the courage to tell them what kind of terrorists Mohammad Atta and Co. were.
If you don't, you're not telling them the truth.
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