Have we forgotten what we learned after 9/11? - LIVE with Douglas Murray

0:00Our subscribers fund ARK Media. They help allow us to cover Israel in the Jewish world honestly and without compromise. Join us at ARK Media.org. And to our subscribers, thank you.

0:17You are listening to an ARK Media podcast. One of the remarkable things about the post-911 world was that we were simultaneously told two things from the highest levels of government across the West. The first was, and there was much value in this, not to generalize or essentialize Muslims. Not to say that the hijackers, for instance, had any connection with Muslims in general. But at the same time, as we were told, that no Muslim should be held responsible for an act of terror carried out in the name of Islam. We were told that everybody else is collectively responsible for any ill ever done by anyone in the West.

1:00And I reject this. I think you could play one of those programs, but not both simultaneously. Well, not both simultaneously without some of us putting up our hands and calling BS. I deeply object to this, the idea that a generation should be taught every imaginable ill that has ever occurred in the American or Western past as being something for which they today must atone.

1:36It's 3 p.m. on Friday, September 11th in Israel as Israelis prepare for Rosh Hashanah. It is 8 a.m. on Friday, September 11th here in New York City. A solemn date, of course, for New Yorkers and all Americans as we mark the 25th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. Before today's episode, a quick housekeeping note. On Thursday, October 22nd, just five days ahead of the Israeli elections, Call Me Back will hold a live taping at the Stryker Center in New York City, where I'll sit down with Dan Shapiro, Dahlia Scheinlin, and Brett Stevens to discuss what's at stake in Israel's 2026 election.

2:17and what its results will mean for the U.S.-Israel relationship. Tickets have gone on sale, so if you want to join us, please follow the link in the episode description. Now, on to today's episode. Earlier this week, I had the privilege of sitting down for a conversation with Douglas Murray at a forum for the Manhattan Institute, a think tank here in New York City. The program was focused on the 25th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. The forum explored what the legacy of 9-11 demands of us now and also how New York City's security posture has changed, as well as the evolution of Islamist and anti-Western radicalism throughout the West over the last couple of decades.

3:00Again, I had this conversation with Douglas Murray, who is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He is also a columnist for the Free Press and is with CBS News. He is a bestselling author. We have featured his most recent book on this podcast. Here is an edited version of my conversation with Douglas as we reflected on this 25th anniversary since 9-11. My conversation right after this short message. This is the moment to send young Jewish adults on a birthright trip to Israel. Not next year, now. Because after two and a half years of misinformation, reality needs to speak for itself. Over the past 25 years, birthright has sent more than 900 ,000 young Jews to Israel.

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4:17Douglas, I want to start the conversation by going right back to September 11th, 2001. There's a real sense that there's so much we got right, and there's so much that we as Americans and the West understood after September 11th, 2001, call it on September 12th. What of those things that we understood do you think we have since forgotten? Or maybe now suddenly you would look back and say we misunderstood. Well, first of all, of course, it's an enormous pleasure to be here with you, Dan, and with so many friends and colleagues here today. And some readers will know I've quoted this a number of times in columns, but there's a passage in the Czech writer Milan Kondera's book, Testaments Betrayed, which he published in the 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in which he said something about the nature of history, which is always on my mind.

5:02He said, mankind operates in a fog and stumbles along the trail, makes the trail as he walks. This isn't the important thing. The important thing is that when mankind looks back, he sees the man, he sees the trail, but he doesn't see the fog. Everything looks like it was going to go the way we ended up going. And the people who weren't involved in it or have been born afterwards can make all of these judgments, on this occasion about the last quarter of a century, without understanding the fog in which we all always are moving. I hear a lot these days and have done for many years, like you, criticisms of the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

5:48There's even a sort of popular phrase on parts of the political right, as well as the left, that we didn't achieve anything, and all sorts of claims like that, all of which ignore what the world looked like on September the 11th, 12th, and in the days after. And I'm always struck when I read the memoirs of members of the Bush administration from those years, just what fog everyone was operating in. Condoleezza Rice's memoirs, Donald Rumsfeld's memoirs. For instance, there was a moment, as you know, Dan, when a package arrived at the White House shortly after September 11th. And it seemed for a moment as if almost everybody at the top of the chain of command of the United States, apart from the president, had been vulnerable to a Rice-in attack.

6:33And Condoleezza Rice in her memoir describes this moment when they're all in a room and realize that it's possible that everybody in the administration, apart from the president, is going to die. Now, operating in that kind of situation, not knowing whether there was going to be another attack and much more, is something that we seem to have forgotten. And so little credit, it seems to me, has been given to the members of the administration, patriotic men and women, who did their best in those hours and days to avert another attack. They did avert many attacks, many attacks that we know about and many that we don't.

7:10And so I'd say, first of all, that the simple fact of the fact that the American homeland was not subjected to another such attack was an enormous achievement, and an achievement by many men and women whose names we know and many whose names we don't know. So that's the first thing. The second is, of course, there are criticisms that can be made in hindsight. I'd say that they often come back to the same one that Some people have mentioned about the post-October 7th world, which is what happens when you have kinetic success and lose the war at home to a great extent. I wrote a column for the Free Press last week about public opinion after September the 11th.

7:49And again, it's one of those things which there are all of these things that have been erased by memory. For instance, one that's often on my mind has been a narrative that's been there for years now that America had an enormous amount of sympathy immediately after 9-11, and that America squandered that sympathy. And that is only partly true in my own country of birth, Great Britain. A week after 9-11, the American ambassador was on the main BBC news program, Question Time. And I remember watching it at the time. He was almost reduced to tears, not by the attacks, but by the response of the audience in the room, the audience of the British public, who were expressing a version of the sentiment that was memorably expressed in the London Review of Books, an utterly unreadable journal that doesn't seem to be interested in books, which is obsessed with Israel and America and so on.

8:45But there was a column in the London Review of Books then, written by the prominent classicist from Cambridge, Mary Beard, who never suffered any reputational damage, for writing a column in which she said, you know, however much one might deprecate the flying of planes into buildings, nevertheless, she said, many of us will have the sentiment that to some extent, America had it coming. Now, that sort of sentiment was very widely held outside of this country, among allies of this country. And it was held from the day itself, 15 years after 9-11. Half of the French public in a poll said, we still don't know who carried out the 9-11 attacks.

9:23half. So these are all things I think I'm just keen to frame from the outset are things that are sort of forgotten history and things that have not been transmitted accurately to the generation who've grown up looking back the last 25 years and forgetting the fog and I think judging the men and women involved in trying to find a path through it extremely unfairly. At the 20th anniversary of September 11th, you wrote a piece in which you observed that the U.S. and the West had lost the will to fight. First of all, do you still believe that to be the case? You remember my columns better than I do.

10:01I'm here to keep you honest. To be fair, I think it's hard to judge that from moment to moment. I think my opinion may have changed slightly on that, partly because of what I, like you, have witnessed in Israel in the last three years. It's extremely hard to know how a country is going to respond after it's attacked. And there have been extraordinary examples in recent years, you know, I'm thinking of Ukraine, but also Israel, of countries that have been attacked and where the response of young generation in both countries has been to step up. And it's good to be reminded of how many young Americans had that sentiment after 9-11.

10:36I think there were several things. I think one is something I wrote two books back, I think, in The War on the West, which is a very straightforward thing, which is you'd be a darn fool to risk your life for a country that was rotten. And it's been my belief for a long time that there's been a very concerted effort throughout our educational institutions, public institutions, some government institutions, to teach young Americans and young people in the West that the countries would come from a rotten. They never really are plain about who they're comparing us with. Sometimes if you push them, they'll talk about the wonderful healthcare opportunities in Cuba or the remarkable educational attainment of the Venezuelans.

11:17But they don't like to be specific about it, but they do like to degrade us and to morally degrade us and try to make us fall into a sort of despondency about ourselves. And I think that's been going on for a very long time. Literally the pulling down of our heritage and more, as I've said often, the defiling of our holy places. And that's been something that's been extremely concerted for a very long time. My own view was that one of the great turns in this country, which has not been remembered well enough, was the Ground Zero mosque controversy, where it really did feel to me at the time as though something crucial had shifted or was shifting, which was instead of there being a recognition, this is what, eight years after 9-11, instead of there being a recognition that there was something at the very least impolite about this attempt to set up a mosque near the World Trade Center, that if you didn't defend that, you were somehow un-American.

12:17Something strange seemed to shift in the culture that moment. That was also the moment that the word Islamophobia, for instance, started to really get massively used. And to persuade the American people that there was something bigoted here about us, about the people in the West, if we didn't go along with each of these demands. I remember that moment when all the faith leaders joined the then mayor of New York to sort of unite in saying, we must build the mosque. It was one of those cultural moments which are harder to define, but there are many such moments when one thinks about it. And as I say, it's extremely hard to say what people would fight for if they've been told that the thing that they are defending is not worth defending.

12:58And that's why my deep belief for many years and why I've exerted some of my energies in this area has been to say people have been miseducated on this, not just at education institutions, but as a country. People are miseducated here about their history. Same thing in my own country of birth. They're told that Winston Churchill's a villain and that we're bad. I was brought up in a different society where we knew that we were good, that we had made mistakes as any country had, but fundamentally at heart, we were good and a force for good in the world. It seems to me that Americans have been slowly encouraged into this sense of self-degradation to believe that America is not good.

13:37And so it's going to have to be a work of a generation to re-educate people who've been so badly miseducated. But let me propose a different take, which is a big part of this drift that you're describing, or miseducation, was made possible by our success in the years after September 11th. You talked about what the mood actually was after September 11th. The mood was also one anticipating another catastrophic attack. And it is one of the great successes here that 25 years later, there is not a jihadi transnational organization that has been able to wage a mass casualty. attack on America. And that's for a variety of reasons.

14:16The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are obviously controversial, but the U.S. and its coalition allies did basically destroy al-Qaeda, did destroy the ISIS caliphate, accomplished some extraordinary measures and set up some important programs on dealing with terror financing and upgrading our counterintelligence capabilities and our special operations. I can go on and on. So there was extraordinary success over these last couple decades. And obviously success can produce complacency. And at some point, complacency can bleed into amnesia. And if we weren't so successful over these last two and a half decades, and we were actually still in the fight, do you still think that young generation, in other words, they have the luxury of being able to buy into stupid ideas because they don't have to fight for their existence?

15:02Yes. But if they had to fight for their existence, maybe the luxury of falling in love with these stupid ideas, It wouldn't just be something they wouldn't choose. There just would be no time for it. Yes, what Rob Henderson, our colleague, describes as luxury beliefs. You always hope that people, when reality hits them, are going to shift their position, but you never know. We don't know, actually. I mean, there was a poll I've cited many times of, polls are difficult, of course, as we know, but there was a poll after the invasion of Ukraine asking Americans who would be willing to fight, stay and fight for their country if something similar happened to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

15:35It was only just the majority of Americans who said they'd stay and fight. Not to make a partisan point, but the majority of Republicans just said they would. And well, I don't like to say what the Democrats said. Now, on the one hand, of course, that poll is preposterous because it's impossible for the American public to imagine an army rolling into America from Canada, said. At the moment. But it's pretty impossible for the American imagination to have that simply because it isn't in 250 years really something that has happened. I mean, it feels different in Europe, of course, because particularly Eastern Europe is very familiar with armies going that way, armies going that way, and the knowledge that you can be battered around by every imaginable ideology and direction.

16:23That's sort of the history of the 20th century in Europe. So on the one hand, it's not worth looking at a poll like that because it is simply inconceivable. On the other hand, it does tell us something about people's attitudes. But yes, Dan, I mean, the thing that is most troubling in that is the amnesia about our successes. And the threats. And the threats. I'd say one other thing about that, which is I was recently re-watching an interview with former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld when he was interviewed by Jon Stewart when Rumsfeld's memoirs came out. I watched it because I happened to see an interview with Stuart recently in which he said that it was the most disappointing interview he'd ever done because he was hoping to ensnare his interviewee and he failed.

17:02He knew he'd failed. Anyone who knew Rumsfeld could tell him that he'd fail. But it was interesting re-watching it for many reasons. One was Rumsfeld was so intent on trying to correct the mistaken history that had already started being enforced. But the other was that even the studio audience in America then in 2009 or 10 was responding to Secretary Rumsfeld with a deference and a respect, which it seems to me has evaporated in our public life in the years since. It's actually quite hard to think of an audience now treating an equivalent politician at least as recognizing that this is a patriot who spent years in public service and therefore there was a man deserving of respect.

17:45I think that that's certainly something that has been eroded, but there are many reasons for that. So if you accept that we actually have been from a security operational standpoint successful since September 11th, but yet we seem to have been unsuccessful, which you've been speaking about now, which you've been writing about in the cultural war over what it means to be the West, what it means to be America, what it means to defend our values and defend our way of life and defend day to day life. Should the wake-up call have then been October 7th in terms of how much that, on the one hand, we, America, had been winning the post-9-11 kinetic war, but the reaction in the world to October 7th should have been a wake-up call that we had completely lost the cultural war since September 11th?

18:27I'm not sure if we've completely lost it because there are many young Americans who, and Americans of all ages, who have not fallen for this tripe. But that sense of collective guilt, which I've written about a lot, the spreading around of blame. I mean, let me just put it this way. One of the remarkable things about the post-911 world was that we were simultaneously told two things from the highest levels of government across the West. The first was, And there was much value in this not to generalize or essentialize Muslims, not to say that the hijackers, for instance, had any connection with Muslims in general.

19:05Now, there was a very sensible reason for doing that, which is, of course, nobody wanted anyone to take out their anger on their Muslim friend or neighbor. But at the same time as we were told that no Muslim should be held responsible for an act of terror carried out in the name of Islam, we were told that everybody else is collectively responsible for any ill ever done by anyone in the West. And I reject this. I think you could play one of those programs, but not both simultaneously. Well, not both simultaneously without some of us putting up our hands and calling BS. And I deeply object to this, the idea that a generation should be taught every imaginable ill that has ever occurred in the American or Western past as being something for which they today must atone.

19:53But if somebody says Allahu Akbar and detonates in Paris or London or Manchester or Tel Aviv or anywhere else, we've got to pretend that Allahu Akbar is simply the Muslim equivalent of the Lord's Prayer or, you know, that there's something deeply distasteful about asking where the ideology of that attacker may have come from. I think this has been a serious weakness in our armor. Okay, so I want to ask you about what your counsel would be to leaders today at any level of government you choose. You know, the federal government, state, municipal, I mean, you're not as pessimistic as I am, which is a weird thing for me.

20:33You're usually Debbie Downer in our conversations, and I find myself being more down on the state of the cultural debate in this country about these issues. highlighted not only by the post 9-11 world, the letter that Osama bin Laden wrote to America that suddenly got new life the last couple of years and started circulating or the reaction among young people here and throughout the West to October 7th. I'm more pessimistic than you are, but let's just say it's gradations. We're both kind of concerned. What would your counsel be to leaders to address this if you're saying to them, you've effectively won the kinetic war.

21:06America is more secure today than it was on September 10th, the day before the attacks. But no one's been paying attention to this other war. It's the war of ideas. Again, going back 25 years, it's worth remembering how many people used the actions of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, as Christopher Hitchens memorably said, as a megaphone for whatever prejudices they had themselves. So for instance, if you were somebody who believed that American capitalism had problems, you could claim that Osama bin Laden in his cave in Afghanistan was making a rather voluble critique of American capitalism. If your beef was about the Jews and Israel, you could claim that he'd done it for that reason.

21:47And by the way, one of the interesting things about the new generation who discovered the letter to America is that they clearly didn't read it. And perhaps can't read any short document. Because if you read what Azam bin Laden wrote and said repeatedly, Israel was not an important part of his argument, hardly played. His main objections and the objections of Al-Qaeda were what they saw as the outrage of the House of Saud having custody of the two holiest places within Islam. I remember once being shortly into this on a radio show with an absolute dolt called Amy Goodman, one of the most profoundly stupid people I've ever met.

22:29And I thought I'd met them all. And she was sitting beside me in a BBC studio on the World Service one day. In about 2004, four, five, something like this. And the subject of Azam bin Laden and why he'd attacked America came up. And I said, well, if you read his message, among other things, one of the top three reasons why he wanted to attack the West was because of the bringing of democracy to East Timor. Now, first of all, I noticed, as I said this, and I noticed a slight look of bafflement on my interlocutor's face. We went to a break and I noticed her googling East Timor. Now, I mention that not just to make a jab at her, although that's pleasant.

23:14I mention it because, find me the American student anywhere in this country who has, over the last 25 years, decided to live in a tent and crap in a bucket over East Timor. Find me them. They wouldn't know what I was talking about. Find me the protest. if they're so keen to pick up Osama bin Laden's arguments and regard him as having a searing critique of the West, which is really worth absorbing all these years later, get on to the East Timor question, guys, you know? And so that's the first thing, is that there's been just a massive misreading of the history and a misrepresentation of what America's enemies said they were doing it for.

23:54And now, in recent months in particular, the Jews and the Jewish state have been crowbarred into this. It's like a retrofitting of the argument. But the second thing I'd say, I suppose, on the more practical and kinetic front is the obvious thing, which is everywhere and always to try to cut off the head of the snake. I believe the administration in Washington is trying to do this at the moment with the Iranian revolutionary government. I think that's long overdue myself. A government that has spent 50 years almost producing terror around the world, killing American soldiers in Iraq and elsewhere, currently providing the drones that are used daily, which I've seen flying over me in Ukraine.

24:32This is obviously a task that's been long overdue. And anyone, however people think it should be done, the House of Saud, whatever one thinks of it, has undoubtedly reformed in the last 25 years. And things, this is not to say that it is without flaw, but they have done things in their own country, including cracking down on and stopping the funding and the funneling of money to the extreme madrassas and others. Well, I'll just say, actually, I try to explain this to people now. When you go back and think about the House of Saad pre-9-11, we talked about the House of Saad, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the way today we talk about Doha.

25:09The point is, the Saudis have made significant improvements. The revolutionary government in Iran is unfinished business. And it surprises me that it's taken 25 years to address that. As for Qatar, I've said this before, it's my belief that American companies and others involved in Qatar and receiving funds and dealing with that government in the way they have, will at some point, there will be a terrorist attack somewhere, which will lead to a similar societal opprobrium against those who've been dealing with the government. with Qatar as was existing immediately after 9-11 in those who had received funding from the Saudis.

25:50We'll be right back with more of my live conversation at the Manhattan Institute with Douglas Murray. Hi, it's Gabe Silverstein from the ARK Media team. You may know me from Research by Gabe Silverstein. Last summer, I participated in a birthright trip, so I can tell you exactly what they mean when they say one trip changes everything. Birthright didn't just connect me with my Israeli brothers and sisters in a spiritual and lasting way. Birthright gave me a deeper understanding of what it means to be a Jew and where I fit into the Jewish story. It's incredible to me that this organization exists, and I know that behind every one of these trips are generous people who made it happen, people like you.

26:30Birthright Israel's goal is to inspire and empower a new generation of Jewish young adults. To help make that happen and to create more life-changing experiences like mine, please visit OneTripChangesEverything.com. Birthright. One trip changes everything.

26:50We are back with my conversation with Douglas Murray. You wrote this piece last week that you referenced earlier about the war on truth, and that really was a big focus of yours, reflecting on this 25th anniversary. You go through in that piece the different forms in which these conspiracy theories are advanced today. I'm not talking about the technology that enables them, the podcasting, social media. Leave aside the platforms. But the style of argument that we find ourselves in these ridiculous debates trying to take on. Sometimes it's like mind-numbing. Sometimes I cannot believe I'm arguing these points.

27:27and you actually go through, I think, three different approaches that these conspiracy theories take. Can you just briefly walk through those? And then I want to ask you a question about it. I can't remember which order I did them in, but yes, a piece in Free Press I wrote last week about this. It's been much of my mind because, I mean, the conspiracy theories that used to be on the margins have certainly come into the mainstream. And not in the mainstream, I don't want to overstate it. They've come into the mainstream of the fringe, let's say that. Or the fringe now has reach that it didn't have before.

27:54So not necessarily everyone's buying into the fringe, but the fringe as an ability to traffic their ideas in a way that they may not have been able to. That's better said exactly. I think conspiracy theories about 9-11 started relatively swiftly after, but they took a while. And as I mentioned in that piece, even somebody who ended up as cranky as they come, like Gore Vidal, a year after 9-11 was merely saying that we don't know who did the attacks again. Generally, if you believe in Occam's razor, you would believe that the attacks are being carried out by the people who carried out the attacks, who boasted of carrying out the attacks and whose leaders said they carried out the attacks.

28:37There was some hilarity in the 2000s. I remember at one point when Ayman al-Zawahiri, the deputy head of al-Qaeda, they carried out an attack somewhere. I can't remember where. And various leftists in the West said that it was someone else. And al-Zawahiri came back on video again, he said, it was us. Give us the credit. What does a guy have to do? He's all been accusing them of like stolen valor. You're taking it away from us. You know, why do we go about plotting the death of the infidel if the infidel are not going to accept that it's us? But my point is that in 2002 and that sort of period, the most that the conspiratorial minded would do on the radical left and the radical right was to say, we don't really know who did it, but it might have been carried out as a way to invade Afghanistan and Iraq.

29:24They were cowardly in where they would actually make the accusation. You could sort of prod them to it. They were nervous about actually saying, for instance, that the American government or the Zionists or somebody had brought down the Twin Towers and attacked the Pentagon on Flight 93 in order to do these things. I think today, one of the alarming things, as you say, is the fringe ideas that took some years actually to gestate on the furthest fringes of the internet are things that some formerly sane and mainstream people are pushing out there. And the things they do are always the same. And I'll just quickly list a couple of those I did in that piece.

30:02One is to try to bewilder the American public by focusing on a detail so obscure that nobody could possibly have the information at hand to deal with it. So in the case of the London bombings, somebody mentioned earlier the conspiracy theorists about that who seem to believe that Tony Blair's Labour government blew up our own trains in order to invade Iraq two years earlier. They would say things like, well, the suicide bombers were claimed to have left on the 607 train from Luton to London that morning. And actually, if you look at the schedule, that train didn't arrive. Okay, in order to answer that, I'd have to become an expert on the Luton to London train timetable.

30:44I'm not sure if I've got time. So again, Occam's razor. Let's just assume if they didn't get on the 607, they got on the 614 train. The bombs still went off. Their bodies were splattered everywhere along with the bodies of their dozens of victims. This is one of the conspiracy theorists' best tools. They've done it for the last 25 years about the Twin Towers. They say things like, I've never seen towers fall like that, which is so disgusting and absurd. And the obvious explanation is, how many times have you seen civilian jetliners carrying hundreds of innocent people flown into large skyscrapers?

31:23And the answer is never. So you're pretending to be expert in something you could not possibly be expert in. But the main one all the time is the insinuation of motive without being honest about what the motive is. And as I said in that piece, it's very striking if you look, whether it's on the fringe right or the fringe left, and then increasingly, as you say, Dan, not so fringe. It's very interesting to see they will not follow through on their insinuations. If the George W. Bush administration had decided that the best way to topple Saddam Hussein was to kill 3 ,000 American citizens. And amazingly, we haven't heard anyone come out and in on the secret, come out and say, hey, you know, I mean, right.

32:06There would have had to be tens of thousands of people implicit in the plot. Ditto the claim that Tucker Carlson and others have been trying to make of the Israelis doing it. Again, how many Israelis would have to be in on the plot if they, for some reason, decided that their closest ally should be attacked and thousands of citizens in order for something else to happen. And anyway, I mean, try keeping any secret in Israel. But that one? It's possible someone's wife might have said something, you know? I mean, this is absurd. The real thing I just wanted to finish on that is there is something, it's not just about the really evil individuals who have been pushing this, particularly on the younger generation who don't have a memory of this.

32:50It's not just that. There is clearly a cognitive problem in this country of not educating people, and I include every Western country in this, not bringing people up with the skills of rationalism and reason to be able to keep this putrid stuff from festering anywhere near our body politic.

33:10You've talked a lot in this conversation about what's happening on the left, but let's, because a lot of what you're talking about is happening on the right. And I would say the platforms where it's happening have very large audiences, alarmingly large audiences. And let's also submit that these are, most of these audiences are patriotic Americans who probably would not have been saying these things or been open to these ideas in the days after September 11th or the weeks or the years after September 11th, but they are now. Why? Like what's going on? A very brief summary of it. I think in times of some ideological confusion, which you could say is essentially all times, Again, going back to Melanchondera, nothing new under the sun and all of that and Ecclesiastes.

33:53You can't say this is a period of unique confusion, but there are some things that are going on that are special at the moment. And one of them, it seems to me, is that in the midst of certain critiques in our society, people are reaching out for antidotes to them and seem, in my estimation, to be reaching for the strongest drug available on the market. Let me very quickly explain what I mean by that. In the wake of the 2008 financial crash, you all have seen and read, as I did, endless pieces about that. But just remember that the number of pieces, on that occasion mainly from the left, that said things like, after the global financial crisis, is it time to read Marx again?

34:33Do you remember all those pieces? Every major publication carried dozens of them. It was boom time for pseudo-Marxists. And then, of course, the answer was the same. A serious flaw was shown in capitalism. There needed to be a rectification of it. Why would the rectification be Karl Marx? Do you have anything else available in the store? And it's striking, again, you mentioned the letter to America of Azam bin Laden. I think there is a very strong feeling at the moment that is being encouraged by online, of course, but which is if you have a criticism of the society that you're in or something you don't like of it, don't just reach for a minor corrective.

35:17Reach for and mainline something that is the strongest ideological drug you can take. And our best hope for that is that people realize that these are, to stretch your analogy, the ideological equivalents of fentanyl, and they're not happy drugs. We need, in each of these things, whether it's in the defense of capitalism and free market, or the defense of wars in which young men and women have laid down their lives. And in all these things, we need a stronger and more robust defense of ourselves, essentially, you know, based on the fact that if we don't speak up for ourselves, who will? When you were in Israel after October 7th, 2023, you talked about a lot, you wrote about, you wrote in your book quite movingly about, you kept referring to this choose life, these two words, choose life, that among the things that inspired you most were these Israelis of all walks of life, but especially these young Israelis, that in everything they do, including how they responded to October 7th, was this protection of that principle, of that value, of that idea, that we choose and celebrate and honor life.

36:27Yes. Contrast that with what you see in America today and try to address whether or not that contrast is as stark and as grim as some might see, or whether or not you see kind of like green shoots that you are optimistic about here in the United States 25 years after September 11th. Well, on the biblical insistence that we choose life, there are certainly people in our society who seem not to want to do that. You've got to be very careful not to allow a culture of death to come in from every imaginal direction, because it's quite easy to do in the name of compassion. It's been my belief for some years that almost every evil comes in the guise of compassion.

37:09Very rarely comes in the guise of declared evil. For instance, if you want to kill the elderly, it's much easier to call it made, or to say it's assisted dying. It's much easier to cloak it entirely in the language of compassion. It's the same with right-to-life questions. It's much easier, as we saw in the Clancy case, it's much easier to portray everything, however wicked, including infanticide, in the language of compassion. And in fact, it's the best way to do evil things. But I suppose what I would say is, on the bigger question, the jihadists who attacked this city on 9-11 popularized for the first time in many people's lives a phrase which many of us heard too many times in the 25 years that came after, whether it was in London or Paris or dozens of other cities around the world, which is that they taunted us in the West with this extremely tough claim, which is that they said, we love death more than you love life.

38:09And I said on democracies and death cults, I found this for 25 years something which I had found an extremely hard thing to think on. I believed the jihadists when they said how much they loved life because I saw them in action in a number of places. I knew that they were fanatical enough to want to bring death not just to others, but to themselves. But as I said in my last book, I also think that there is an answer to that. And the answer, as I said, that I saw in Israel in the face of Hamas's onslaught was to say there's nothing wrong with loving life. That's one of the reasons we will win. And a friend I quoted earlier said after 9-11, you know, that it was, in a way, it was a day of enormous clarity because he said, everything I loved was attacked by everything I hated.

38:56And as we come up to the anniversary itself, there are news clips and things that we didn't see at the time or hear at the time or we've forgotten, which are re-emerging. And again, don't forget that many of the images were kept from us for reasons of taste and decency. But if you look at the statements of the hijackers, of the terrorists, their lust for death, their love for death is undeniable. But it's also worth remembering the flip side of that, which is that in all of the calls, all the phone calls, all the last phone calls, all the messages sent out from the Twin Towers and elsewhere from Flight 93, every one of them was about love.

39:39Every single one. People who knew that they were in their last moments choosing between burning to death or throwing themselves into thin air. Every one of them used their last moments to show love. And it seems to me that that is one of the most powerful distinctions that could exist. And it's one that is enormously to our benefit. In the Free Press, there's this piece that was just published that recounts, as the passengers forced the plane down in Pennsylvania. And I'd never really focused on this, the scene at the back of the plane where all these Americans are sitting there huddling and trying to figure out what to do.

40:16And they're, as you say, they're calling their loved ones and then they're caucusing and voting. They vote on what to do. It's an amazing American civic lesson that there they are figuring out how to confront these terrorists. They decide to take a vote on it at the back of the plane. And there's one scene that I, it was a detail I never knew, which someone points out in the back of the plane, that if they wait a certain point, they'll be over rural area. So if they force the plane down, it will minimize casualties when the plane goes down rather than being in an urban area. And they did all this knowing that they were going to die.

40:49And that to me is the ultimate expression of choosing life.

40:56I couldn't agree more. And as a society, again, societies need to choose their heroes wisely. If you choose your heroes to be people who are malcontent and resentful, you will become a malcontent and resentful society. If you choose the heroes that are worthy of respect, then you will orientate yourself as a society better. And this society not only has need of heroes, but has many heroes. And, you know, what you just said reminds me of the biblical injunction that love is strong as death, neither shall the seas drown it. and the people you just described, not just American heroes, but showed us a way forward.

41:34We will leave it there. Douglas, thank you as always. You're welcome. Congratulations. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you.

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