Aerial view of the site after the collapse, with locations of the collapsed buildings outlined

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I wrote the following essay, "We Thought We Were Fighting Sharia, for the new book by Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, Truth Was My Crime: A Life Fighting for Freedom.

“There are two histories: The official history, mendacious, which is given to us; and the secret history, where you find the real causes of events, a shameful history.”

-- Honoré de Balzac

When we think back on the landmark free speech cases of the post-9/11-era, the phrase, “clash of civilizations” still comes to mind. This, of course, was the earliest, buzzy shorthand, strenuously disputed by the shush-minded, for the showdown between Islam and the West that materialized on center-stage as the dust of the World Trade Center still settled. On September 11, 2001, “al Qaeda” may have attacked the West, as we were told, but even then “clash” was problematic. Soon, it would be the “War on Terror” that we were enlisted to support, and terminology was a minefield from the start. 

Nearly five years after the final verdict on Elisabeth Sabaditsch Wolff’s European “blasphemy” case (2009-2018), I look back on an era marooned in the discontinuity of forgotten history. “Jihad”? “Sharia”? The “good fight” for “Western civilization”?  Those were the days, my friend, when Islam really seemed to be at the forefront of the juggernaut against liberty (if our leaders would only set aside their “political correctness” and acknowledge it!!!), driving jihadist shock troops of violence and mayhem against everything we thought we held precious. 

We were so deceived. I now believe our deception started long before the Twin Towers “collapsed” – turned to dust is more like it – allegedly due to being struck, ignited and catastrophically weakened by two hijacked passenger jets. Now I see that at least as many anomalies detract from the government’s line on 9/11 as from its line on the assassination of JFK; I see also how easy it is to be led. Until relatively recently, I knew little of the destruction of the five other skyscrapers in the World Trade Center (WTC) complex; and more than decade passed before I think I ever saw the shocking, videotaped fall of WTC 7, which occurred six hours after the twin towers were no more. In the interest of maximum disclosure (and some embarrassment) I should admit also that I was at the time an editorial writer and newly syndicated newspaper columnist. Mea culpa. But I was a rather quick study on Islam.

If “al Qaeda” brought down the towers, then Islamic jihad was the gravest threat to law and liberty, peace and prosperity -- a civilizational threat akin to communism, right? Maybe it was, maybe it is; but things break a little differently when you realize your own governments have internalized the tenets of a crypto-communism. Twenty years ago, I did not yet know enough to distrust what our governments wanted us to believe – and that includes what we were told we saw with our own eyes. The attacks on New York City and the Pentagon, the story of “Let’s roll” in Pennsylvania, all of it overflowed welling reserves of patriotism and solidarity. Everyone old enough will remember that rush of communal American and international emotion – a mixture or resolve and outrage which held the newly minted fear of terrorism mainly in check. That new fear was a very powerful weapon in the hands of the government. Without it, the tauntingly named Patriot Act, the anti-constitution of government control and surveillance, would never have passed. Not until the 2020 “attack” of the “novel corona virus” would the government match the power of the 9/11-trigger to create emotion (with the near-exception of the government campaign against Donald Trump), although this time around, “covid” emotion was pure panic. After 9/11, we looked to the government, at least for a time.  After covid, we were forced to look to the government and were broken by it. 

It’s easy to see how they did “covid” – how “covid” was done to us. This is partly what leads me to re-examine our post-9/11 response, Pavlovian as it also was, engineered for a special kind of crowd control on a global scale. Any re-evaluation of the struggle between free speech and sharia law in the West, exemplified in the hard-fought struggle of Elisabeth Sabaditsch Wolff’s lengthy court case, is necessarily informed by this disturbing context of manipulation and fraud.

In hindsight, then, it becomes clear there always were more formidable opponents of liberty than Islam or ”terror” – or “covid,” for that matter. These more powerful enemies of liberty were our own governments, putative keepers of constitutions, rights of man, and other defunct charters of law and liberty. Not only did they fail to protect us from any of these threats, they deployed or otherwise used these same measures against us. And do so to this day.

I don’t expect a universal chime of agreement here. For one thing, the propaganda of deflection and omission has been extremely effective. Still, I think most of us would agree that whatever happened to us on 9/11 and thereafter, in the ensuing religious and ideological battle, We, the nation-loving, liberty-loving politicians,** journalists, cartoonists, lecturers, and other patriotic citizens of the democratic nations across the wider West, lost. However, we did not lose to Islam. Ask Julian Assange. We lost our freedoms, beginning with freedom of speech and ending with the freedom to exist as European cultures, to the governments of the West. We lost to liberty-crushing, nation-destroying surveillance states, whose global capital or power center has not been, to my satisfaction, positively identified. 

Thus, it was not the caliphate that rose from the dust of 9/11; it was the surveillance state. Some might even see 9/11 as its second attempt to come to life. Remember the 1995 destruction of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City? That was an earlier mass-casualty event, as they call it, also with anomalies. The Clinton administration response to Oklahoma City was to push for “anti-terrorist” legislation that included unprecedented new surveillance powers. In 1996, however, the US Congress said no. Why? Because these new secret wiretap capabilities were unconstitutional. Five years later, they were still unconstitutional. But five years later there was a much bigger boom – plus there was that patriotic tear in the collective American eye. We can now look back to a period of time when the intensity about “Islamic terror” subsided (funny how that happened), but the Patriot Act -- the FISA court, NSA “data collection” programs, new feats of FBI overreach -- is forever. 

I put the phrase about Islamic terror in quotation marks not to dismiss the carnage and ruin of real Islamic terrorism, but rather to invoke an alarming history of government involvement, even provocation, in some number of the terror plots that span the post-9/11-era -- right up until, let’s say, that “first ISIS attack on US soil” on May 3, 2015.  Remember that one? It took place in Texas over free speech, five months after two Muslim terrorists launched a bloody attack in Paris over free speech (a Mohammed cartoon) at the Charlie Hebdo magazine headquarters and a Jewish market. Sixteen innocents died violently that day in France. Five months later, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, run by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, organized a Mohammed art show in Garland, Texas. Two ISIS sympathizers with assault weapons launched an attack on the building. They had wounded a security guard when a crack-shot policemen fired and killed both terrorists before anyone else could be harmed. All in all, it was miraculous there were not more casualties. Since I don’t recall a second “ISIS attack on US soil,” perhaps this one marks the end, or near-end, of an era.

The following year (2016), an affidavit revealed the shocking news that an undercover FBI agent had been in contact with at least two of the ISIS sympathizers involved in the Texas attack, including one of the dead shooters. The undercover FBI was even at the scene of the attack, seated in a parked car taking snaps of the security guards 30 seconds before “his” jihadis pulled up to the scene of the attack. Then the agent drove away!

“Tear up Texas,” the undercover FBI agent messaged ISIS sympathizer Elton Simpson days before the attack. 

“Bro, u don’t have to say that,” the ISIS sympathizer messaged in reply. “U know what happened in Paris?...” 

“Right,” said his FBI handler.

Simpson: “So that goes without saying… No need to be direct.”

No, no need to be direct. But it bears repeating: This FBI-ISIS exchange took place days before the terror attack. On the day of the attack itself, the undercover FBI agent even discussed targeting with another one of the ISIS plotters. In the following excerpt from an ABC report at the time of the attack, see how many FBI outrages and lies you can identify: 

“Three hours before gunmen attacked an anti-Prophet Muhammad event in Garland, Texas on Sunday, the FBI sent a bulletin to local police with a photo of one of the shooters, Elton Simpson, noting that he was `interested in the event,’ FBI director James Comey said.

“At the time, the FBI had no reason to believe that Simpson intended to attack the event, Comey told reporters Thursday. Nor did the agency know that Simpson was already on his way there.”

The perfidy goes so deep. I’m afraid it always did. No surveillance state has a commitment to its citizens, to freedom, “not even” the United States. The surveillance state, as we continue to learn by experience, is the antithesis of freedom. A 2006 diplomatic cable published in 2010 by Wikileaks laid out the US position. In the cable, US Ambassador to Denmark, Mark M. Cain, explained how it was that in “discreet discussions” he had leaned hard on the Danish prime minister and even the editor of Jyllands-Posten to prevent the re-publication of the Danish Motoons on their first anniversary. Naturally, he was successful. "On the negative side, though,” Cain cabled to the Bush State Department, “this popular center-right government has hardened its views on the absolute primacy of free speech." Excuse me, is this the old USSR speaking? Nope, this is the new USA. I guess it was just a matter of time before the FBI would be prepping for a stateside ISIS attack on the “absolute primacy of free speech.” Meanwhile, we don’t know how many attacks the US government and its Western allies might have in some way been involved in along the way. In recent years, the FBI has become nothing short of notorious for its KGB-style provocations and entrapment entrapment to subvert the people’s will. Save the West? No, Free Assange. 

Amazing, really, that through the fog and red, white and blue miasma, quite a few of us once believed we had only to speak out to assert and reclaim our God-given rights, which the encroachment of Islamic law, especially via Muslim immigration, directly threatened. It still does, of course, but that is only the case because of the encouragement, the enablement, the purposeful agenda of our own governments, those very entities that are supposed to protect our God-given rights. Or so we thought, back when it was still unclear the extent to which those entrusted to guard our liberties were scheming to destroy them, along with the indigenous nations of Europe and European America. 

Still, we kept hoping. We hoped they would wake up and follow our constitutions and laws. We hoped the tiny right-wing patriotic parties would win their national elections. We hoped Elisabeth Sabadistch-Wolff and Lars Hedegaard and Geert Wilders and Brigitte Bardot and Oriana Fallaci and Michel Houellebeq and all the rest would win back everyone’s right to free speech in the great courts of Europe. Their fidelity and inspiration is one of the untarnished legacies of the age.

Let me put it this way. Those who identified with the counter-jihad movement believed they were fighting sharia to save the “free world” in the “post-9/11” age of resurgent Islamic jihad. From the start, though, the “free world” was using terrorism and sharia to silence and control us, destroying everything they could of our traditions, our nations, our peoples. 

It turns out that was just the beginning. 

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*Especially after 9/11, there was a political renaissance in Europe where citizens developed vigorous parties campaigning for freedom over Islamic law, control of state immigration, and protections against the EU suprastate. In 2008, I traveled across Europe and interviewed members of many of these parties: Vlaams Belang, Lega Nord, Austria Freedom Party, Sweden Democrats, Swiss People’s Party, England Democrats, British National Party, Danish People’s Party, and the Dutch Party for Freedom, then “a party of one,” Geert Wilders. One US politician who took a stand on such issues in this era was US Rep. Tom Tancredo.