Friday marks twenty-five years since nineteen men turned airliners into weapons over New York and Washington. Al-Qaeda’s chief planner sits at Guantanamo. Osama bin Laden is fish food. ISIS was hunted across continents until its caliphate was a ruin. America has not taken another blow like that day.
That is the part the anniversary speeches will recite. Investigative journalist Peter Schweizer is asking the question those speeches will dodge. Did we actually win?
Bin Laden’s faction wanted the Judeo-Christian West punched in the face. The Muslim Brotherhood wanted the same prize without waking the giant. Same destination. Different timetable.
They opted for something called “civilizational jihad.” Rather than blowing things up, why don’t we just take things over?
That is Schweizer on The Drill Down. He has been documenting the method in The Invisible Coup. Immigration. Political organizing. Front groups. Ballot boxes. Europe first, then the United States. “The Muslim Brotherhood is alive and active in America today electing politicians.”
The Memo They Never Buried
This is not a podcast flourish. In 1991 a U.S.-based Brotherhood official wrote An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in North America. Federal prosecutors entered it into evidence in the Holy Land Foundation trial. The assignment was stated without poetry.
Members must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated, and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.
They called it the “Civilization-Jihadist Process.” Migration was not a side effect. It was the tool. Schweizer traces the doctrine back to hijrah, the Prophet’s flight from Mecca to Medina treated as a standing obligation until a land is “won over.”
Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Brotherhood’s most influential living ideologue for a generation, predicted Islam would return to Europe and America through da’wah rather than open war, with Westerners themselves spreading it.
Austria’s government just announced plans to ban “political Islam” and squeeze Brotherhood networks after its intelligence service described the project as a long campaign to seed Sharia and a caliphate inside Western institutions. French intelligence has already called it a decades-long “Western conquest strategy.” Washington still treats the same network as a community partner.
For there are certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ.
They Did Not Need a Building. They Needed an Election.
Zohran Mamdani is the first Muslim mayor of New York City. Families of the murdered asked him to stay away from the memorials. He signed two ceremonial orders last Friday marking the twenty-fifth anniversary, then handed the pen to his chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem. Kassem previously represented Ahmed al-Darbi, the al-Qaeda operative who pleaded guilty in 2014 to the bombing of a French oil tanker off Yemen. The smirk on the video was not an accident of lighting.
Schweizer’s verdict is colder than the ceremony.
If you look at what Mamdani’s views are on terrorism, on groups like Hamas and what those entities say about him, you realize that they didn’t have to blow up a building to take over New York. They just had to have an election strategy.
Dearborn and Minneapolis already sent the prototype to Congress. Ilhan Omar reduced September 11 to “some people did something.” Rashida Tlaib has been tied, again and again, to Brotherhood-adjacent outfits and to Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Michigan now offers Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed as a Senate prospect.
The Democratic Party did not get captured by accident. It got captured because a faction of the left stopped seeing the dead of that morning as countrymen.
Co-host Eric Eggers cited Matthew Hennessy in the Wall Street Journal. The line is worth keeping.
The radical leftists taking over the Democratic Party don’t look at the victims of 9/11 as countrymen. They don’t think of that day and feel the enormity of the loss or the magnitude of the injustice. They think we had it coming. They think we’re the bad guys.
That is the alliance Schweizer has been mapping since January. Progressives want to dismantle the American order. Islamists want to replace it. They do not have to love each other. They only have to hate the same house.
The Contrast They Will Not Platform
Schweizer is careful where the media is sloppy. Not every Muslim office-seeker is running the Brotherhood play. He names Zuhdi Jasser, a former Navy commander, physician, founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, and the Republican nominee in Arizona’s Fourth District. Jasser’s parents fled Syria. He has spent twenty-five years telling Congress that Brotherhood ideology is the taproot of modern Islamist extremism, that CAIR and its cousins are legacy shops, and that a “Sharia mentality” locates rights in the state rather than in God. He loves this country enough to fight the project by name.
Mamdani is not doing that. “Mamdani has embraced the Muslim Brotherhood.”
The difference is the whole argument. America is not at war with every person who prays toward Mecca. America is at war with a political theology that treats our Constitution as a temporary inconvenience and our compassion as an invasion route. Pretending those two things are the same is how the second faction wins without ever hijacking a plane.
Twenty-five years of airport lines, foreign wars, and intelligence work stopped the next spectacular attack. They did not stop the memorandum. They did not stop the migration strategy. They did not stop the red-green ticket from taking City Hall in the city that buried its dead under two towers of ash.
Bin Laden wanted Americans riled up. The Brotherhood wanted Americans distracted, generous, and ashamed of their own dead. Look around. One of those strategies is still operational.
