Nine years on

It's been nine years since that infamous day on 9/11 when the twin towers fell. I remember that day like it was this morning. I remember my wife waking me because a friend had called her and told her about the first airplane strike in New York. I remember turning on the television just minutes before the second plane struck. I remember seeing it hit the tower; the newsreader oblivious to what was happening on the screen. I remember the gut-wrenching realisation that this was no accident. I remember the Pentagon being hit. I remember the fourth going down in a field and no one yet knowing the story of the heroism and sacrifice on that flight. I remember the air traffic shutting down; the fear my neighbours felt when a police prop plane flew overhead and they didn't know what it was; the relief when we saw jet fighters streak across the sky. I remember my thirst for any news and my thanking God for the Internet.

I remember the fear and uncertainty as we learned who the enemy was. I remember not knowing what would happen in the days ahead. Would madmen show up in the streets with machine guns? Would poison gas be released in the shopping centres? I remember having a very serious conversation with a good friend about what handgun to buy--not whether to, just if a Walther PPK was the best choice. I remember putting together the emergency kits that we carry in our cars to this day.

Since then, we've had nine years of triumph and tragedy. There isn't room here to summarise it all. That would take a book to do it justice. I'm also not so sure that a memorial is the best thing to put forward now. What is more appropriate is a call to arms. Why? because I have always firmly believed that it is only the British and Americans who provide the world with the proper leadership needed in a war to preserve civilisation, which is what we are engaged in. Without it, I fear for our future. I fear that our leadership is now neglected and rudderless. In London we have a schizophrenic coalition that thinks that defence of the realm is secondary to protecting the jobs of NHS bureaucrats and ensuring that foreign aid cheques to Third World dictators arrive on time. In the Washington, we have a President (a man whom I believe to be a profound fool in the truest sense of the word) who apologises profusely for his own country, promotes absurd myths of an Islamic golden age, and only pursues the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan because he knows that if he hauled America's forces (not his, never his) back at the end of a rope as he'd like, he'd be committing political suicide. In both, we have governments unwilling to identify, let alone confront the Jihadists who wish to turn freedom into a memory and each man a prisoner within the confines of his own skull. They share a mindset that makes a crank pastor of a tiny heretical congregation into a world menace to be condemned by the leader of the Free World because his burning of a Koran might ironically send the adherents of the "Religion of Peace" into a homicidal rage. It is a sign of a political class that is, to put it bluntly and generously, gutless.

The Jihadists don't frighten me. This spinelessness does. This unwillingness to admit that we are in a war for our lives does. This is a war that the Jihadists cannot win, but we can lose if we allow ourselves to do so. If we apologise over and over for existing; if we hypocritically defend the building of a victory mosque at Ground Zero yet throw up our hands in horror at a crackpot burning a Koran while our enemies burn alive Christians, Jews, Muslims, and anyone else they see as Kuffirs; if we bleat on about multiculturalism and the "vibrancy" brought on by uncontrolled (mark that word) immigration; if we do not see that fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan means less fighting on our own shores; if we do not recognise that a US army officer gunning down his fellow soldiers while screaming "Allah akbar" really is an enemy action; if we do not see the enemy for who he is and the necessity of fighting him until he is utterly defeated and fleeing for his life, then we are in for very dark days.

Will we be defeated by the Jihadists? Will St. Paul's become a mosque and will the call to prayer echo out from the Washington Monument? No, but if our political class do not step up and do the job they were hired to do, then within a generation a very frightened people will sweep them aside and do it for them because when it gets to that point, it really will be a war for survival as a people and as a civilisation. And if that happens, it will be war to the knife and God have mercy on us all.

Don't let that happen.