As the nation prepares to mark the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, columnist Liz Peek is pushing back against what she describes as a coordinated effort by left-leaning voices to rewrite the history of the deadliest terrorist assault on American soil since Pearl Harbor. In a personal and pointed essay, Peek argues that dismissive remarks by public figures and a shifting educational curriculum threaten to erase the truth about the 19 Muslim extremists who killed nearly 3,000 people in 2001.
Peek specifically calls out Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., whose past characterization of the attacks as «some people did something» has drawn widespread criticism. «She wants us to forget who it was who purposefully killed 2,977 people who were going about their daily lives,» Peek writes, noting that the hijackers were Saudi jihadis who spent years plotting maximum death and suffering. The columnist insists that memory of the attack must be preserved, not sanitized for political convenience.
Drawing on her own experience as a New Yorker on that day, Peek recounts the terror of watching the Twin Towers collapse, the frantic calls from her young daughters who feared their father’s office across the street from the World Trade Center had been hit, and the ash-covered coworkers who walked miles to her uptown apartment after bridges and tunnels were shut down. She describes ambulance drivers who gathered to help the injured but returned empty-handed because there were so few survivors, and firefighters and police officers who raced into falling buildings and perished alongside the civilians they tried to save.
In the weeks that followed, Peek recalls, New Yorkers braced for further attacks. The city went dark except for the fires that smoldered for months at Ground Zero, and major public gatherings were canceled. She describes attending a New York Philharmonic performance of the Brahms Requiem weeks later, where attendees passed through body scanners for the first time in their lives and sang the national anthem under a historic 48-star American flag from World War II. At the end, there was no applause; the audience filed out in silence, many in tears.
Peek also reflects on the historical significance of the date itself, noting that some observers linked 9/11 to a 1683 battle in which the king of Poland fought against the Ottoman Empire’s advance into Europe. Al-Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden reportedly viewed that conflict as a seminal moment in a long struggle between Islam and the West, a context most Americans did not understand at the time.
The columnist’s broader concern is educational. While at least 40 states require public schools to address the 9/11 attacks, the scope and framing of those lessons vary widely. She cites a University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education curriculum adopted by several Democratic-run states that describes the hijackers and the death toll without identifying the attackers as Muslim terrorists or mentioning bin Laden’s documented jihad against the United States. According to one survey of Middle East professors, the majority of college students have no idea why nearly 3,000 Americans died that day.
Instead of teaching about the perpetrators, Peek argues, some educators focus on Islamophobia, shifting blame onto America itself. «Sorry, Ilhan — I remember,» she writes, urging Americans to resist efforts to soften or distort the record of what happened on September 11, 2001, and who was responsible.