On this 9th anniversary of 911, I think back to that early morning phone call–”turn on your television.” Dede and I watched in horror from our California home, smoke and flames from the gaping tear in the WTC North Tower, then a plane hitting the South Tower. The Pentagon explosion and the heroic flight 93 Pennsylvania crash followed. Our planned vacation that morning was cancelled….no matter, I did not feel like a vacation.

There were plenty of good memorials posted today. Some will bring tears, like “Remembering Patrick Sullivan” by  Jack Dumphy who tells of a brother naming his kids “Mary Patrick and Shane Patrice.” You get the picture.

But the one that impressed me most is less poignant and more accusatory, more an indictment of our progressive, politically correct, and invincibly naive ignorance.  Andrew McCarthy’s NRO post “Imagining Islam” is a wake up call to all sensible Americans, no all sensible Westerners.

Andy posits a fantasy Islam that is secular and moderate. This religion is dedicated to human rights, against slavery, modern and tolerant of other religions and cultures. Arguably such a religion would have condemned the murderous killing of innocents that preceded and followed those of the WTC. It would have issued those condemnations loudly and en masse for at least the last nine years.

But for the last nine years we have heard nothing but silence.

“What excruciating truths have we yet failed to grasp on this ninth anniversary of 9/11? The first is that such an Islam does not exist. The second is that, despite this fact, American foreign and domestic policy continues to proceed as though it does exist — and as though it were the only real Islam. That is, nine years after Islamists made their commitment to our destruction as unmistakable as possible, nine years after the non-occurrence of all the wonderful things that would certainly have happened if the Islam of our dreams were the Islam of our reality, our national-security strategy is still steeped in fiction.”

Hussein Obama has put America on a foreign policy of “self delusion.” We no longer wage a “war on terror” but instead engage in sporadic “overseas contingency operations.” If we avoid saying whom we are fighting and why, we soon forget. Our president, our commander in chief, goes through the Arab world bowing and appeasing. He fights our natural allies and weakens our defenses. He now tolerates a nuclear Iran whose president shouts “Death to America!”  He has our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan pursuing “nation building” with Shria law! This the law that stones women and kills homosexuals and bans religious minorities.

In the U.S. we defend the Islamists monument to the 911 slaughter at ground zero proffered by an imam paid by the U.S. State Department. This part of the religion of peace intends to take over our country not by violence but by out populating us and enacting Shria law as it is now doing in Europe.

But the violent wing of this fantasy religion of peace is still alive and healthy: “At home, even as al-Qaeda continues its efforts to reprise 9/11, a network of Islamist organizations — coordinated by the Muslim Brotherhood and financially backed by our friends, the Saudis — proceeds with what it calls its “grand jihad” to eliminate and destroy Western civilization by sabotage. This is not a secret. The Brotherhood’s internal memoranda were seized by the FBI. They boldly announce these claims in black and white. Two years ago, the Justice Department aptly labeled the constituent organizations — including the Islamic Society of North America and the Council onAmerican Islamic Relations — as unindicted co-conspirators in a terrorism-financing case in which several of their partners were convicted of funneling millions of dollars to Hamas. Today, those Islamist organizations are right back in business, with an open door to “engaging” government policymakers, as if nothing ever happened. In our imagination, they’re moderates, too.”

Hussein Obama’s policies weaken us. By failing to recognize our enemy and the values it seeks to impose, we eventually fail to recognize our own values and will soon lose them, to our regret.