The CubanAmerican Voice, Julio M. Shiling, September 10, 2026 / This September 11 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of a barbaric attack on the United States and the broader West. Nearly three thousand innocents were murdered in a meticulously planned spectacle of mass death. Airliners became missiles. Office towers became tombs. The images remain seared into collective memory: the fireballs, the collapsing steel, the desperate leaps into empty air. It was not merely a crime. It was a declaration.
That declaration was not issued by a random collection of criminal fanatics operating in a vacuum. The men who steered those planes were enacting, at a more spectacular and public level, the long-standing dictums of an ideology called Islam. Employing the Koran-sanctioned ideological war known as jihad—a continuous campaign of conquest that has persisted, in one form or another, since the seventh century—Islamists have sought to reorder the world according to their “sacred” texts. The Al-Qaeda brigades that executed the 2001 attacks, like Hamas, the Taliban, ISIS, various Shiite caliphate aspirants, and a host of other Muslim fundamentalist organizations, share a common denominator that summons them to war against the West: the Judeo-Christian civilization that still, however imperfectly, upholds individual conscience, limited government, and the separation of the sacred from the coercive power of the state. That threat has not expired. It is ever present.
History supplies the necessary context. Within a century of Muhammad’s death in 632, the Islamic conquests had violently transformed the political and religious geography of the Christian world. Through successive military campaigns, Muslim armies swept across predominantly Christian territories in Syria, Palestine, Egypt, North Africa, and much of the Iberian Peninsula. They brought under Islamic rule lands that had been Christian for centuries and that contained some of Christianity’s oldest churches, patriarchates, theological centers, and communities. By the early eighth century, an enormous portion—arguably approaching two- thirds—of the principal Christian territories surrounding the Mediterranean and extending into the Near East had been conquered and occupied by Islamic powers. The speed and scale of this expansion were unprecedented: in little more than a century, the sword of Islam had severed vast regions from the Christian world and placed them under Muslim political domination.
The pattern did not end in the eighth century. It merely changed tactics when direct military supremacy became unavailable. Today not every methodology of conquest is openly violent. Some rely on softer instruments: demographic weight, legal activism, and the systematic refusal to assimilate. Large-scale Muslim immigration into Western countries has too often functioned less as an invitation to join an existing liberal order than as a deliberate project to transform that order—its laws, its traditions, its political models, and its cultural self-understanding. Parallel societies form. Demands for sharia accommodations multiply. Free speech is progressively constrained by the fear of offense or violence. The long historical project continues by other means.
Compounding the danger is the contemporary marriage between Islamism and Western Marxism. Both reject liberal democracy, pluralism, and basic civil liberties as bourgeois illusions or as obstacles to the final victory of the “righteous.” One supplies the eschatological energy of pseudo-religious absolutism; the other supplies the language of systemic oppression and the tactics of institutional capture. Together they form a united front against the open society. Universities, media organizations, and portions of the political class have proven remarkably susceptible to this alliance, treating any frank discussion of Islamic doctrine or jihadist continuity as evidence of bigotry rather than as an elementary exercise in self-preservation.
Twenty-five years after the towers fell, the West still struggles to name the threat accurately. Official commemorations prefer the anodyne language of “extremism” or “hate,” as if the problem were a free-floating psychological disorder rather than a coherent ideological system with “sacred” texts, historical precedents, and living institutions. The result is strategic confusion. Policy oscillates between military campaigns that degrade specific networks and domestic arrangements that expand the demographic and cultural space in which those networks recruit and operate. The enemy is simultaneously bombed abroad and accommodated at home.
The 2001 attacks were not an aberration. They were a particularly successful raid in a longer war. The ideology that animated the nineteen hijackers continues to inspire successive generations of militants, from the killers of Charlie Hebdo to the perpetrators of the October 7 massacre to the countless plots disrupted or successful across Europe and North America. The soft-power variant of the same project advances through migration patterns, birth rates, and the quiet rewriting of social norms under the banner of diversity. Both fronts matter. Both are expressions of the same underlying claim: that the political and moral order of the West is illegitimate and must ultimately yield.
An honest accounting on this anniversary requires more than ritual mourning. It requires the recovery of historical memory and the willingness to speak plainly about the doctrinal sources of the conflict. Jihad is not a metaphor. It is a program. The territories lost in the seventh and eighth centuries were not recovered by wishful thinking or by appeals to shared humanity. They were lost by the sword and held by the sword. The modern West retains advantages the Byzantine and Visigothic worlds did not possess—technological superiority, institutional resilience, and a still- functioning tradition of critical inquiry. Those advantages are useless if the will to defend them is eroded by sentimentality or by the fear of being called names or of offending.
September 11 should therefore be remembered not as a closed chapter of tragedy but as a permanent reminder. The jihad waged by those perpetrators twenty-five years ago is still ongoing. The methods evolve. The ultimate objective does not. A civilization that refuses to recognize an existential challenge will eventually cease to be a civilization at all. Clarity is the first requirement of survival. On this anniversary, that clarity remains overdue.
© The CubanAmerican Voice. All rights reserved.
Author Julio M. Shiling