 So, a topic came out which I thought was really interesting. It's something that particularly Ankhana had been talking about for a long time, but other people we've been talking about. And that is the significance of 9-11 to what's happening today. And 9-11 is, I think, in American history, in modern American history, is a key event, is a pivotal event, and I think to a logic's extent, is shaping the world in which we live today. I don't want to go over some of the ways in which that manifests itself, and some of the consequences that I think have come about because of 9-11, and kind of the response to 9-11. Because it's really, I think the pivot is not so much 9-11. I think the real impact on the culture is how a political class responded to 9-11, how the culture responded to 9-11. And that has really paved its way to what we're experiencing now. So, let's talk about that. I'll remind everybody, you can ask questions on pretty much anything. I'm known to answer questions on pretty much anything. And to do that, you can use the super chat, the super chat feature on YouTube. It's just a button at the bottom there. It's easy to do. You can also use that to support the show and to support what I do. This is these funds make the show possible. All right, really what they do is they make it possible for me to devote the time I need for the show. Because the actual, this setup doesn't cost that much money. What cost money is my time. So, let's talk about 9-11. So, we'll divvy it up into a number of different buckets. So, let's start with the idea that to this day, it is a complete and not a mystery to a political and to some extent a cultural elites. Who actually attacked us in 9-11? I don't think there's any conception of who that is. There's this vague notion that it was terrorists. But that's about it. Terrorists attacked us on 9-11. And as a consequence, we need to fight terrorism. We're the terrorists. It's really interesting because it's the first, maybe not the first big lie, but certainly it's the big lie that has defined kind of our culture, I think, in the 21st century. If you after 9-11 suggested, as many of us did, that maybe Islam had something to do with it. Oh no, God forbid. No. You know, George Bush invites Muslim Imams to the White House to celebrate the Ramadan a month after 9-11, right, in October of 2001, in his famous speech to join a session of Congress. Islam is a religion of peace. God forbid you mention the term Islam. Now, think about that in the context of conspiracy theories when everybody knew they were Muslim, right? All of them. Every single one of the terrorists. And that Islam was not an accidental feature of the attack that they did. The attack was done in the name of Islam. But it wasn't even a politician's can even say it's radical Islam, militant Islam. I mean, we gave them a million different terms that they could use. We use the term totalitarian Islam, Islamists, jihadists, something that would link this to the religion. God forbid. And it was God forbid because remember George Bush was religious and of course the left didn't want to insult anybody. You know, that and the right is religious. They don't want to blame religion. Religions. All religions are peace. All those millions of people who've died in religious wars. No. I mean, terrorists. Was it warriors? It's wars. God forbid. Again, you can't name religion as the source, as the cause, as the motivation for any atrocity that's ever happened. So what you get is this silence. And you're not allowed to say certain things. And you're canceled. If you do say certain things. And if you think about the first protests on campuses of speakers, I remember being with, I don't think they were protesting me as much, but I was with Daniel pipes. I did a lot of events in those days. I don't know if you guys know who Daniel pipes us. But Daniel pipes of Amity's form was excellent after 9 11 is an analysis and is an analysis of what happened. Not quite as good as that in minutes, but really, really good. And we would do events with him. But he was known as, you know, the so called Islamophobic notice Islamophobic, you're afraid of Muslims. So you blame on everything. What a bizarre term. But the demonstrations, the attempts to silence. I was attacked more by people after 9 11 in talks that I gave all over the country, I interrupted attacked than I ever was by Tifa or in more modern times by by the modern left. In over and I gave a talk, I can't remember what year it was, maybe six or seven. You know, I literally they stormed the stage. A bunch of them spent the night in jail. Luckily, I had really good security. The Irvine police were there and they clamped down on these guys and they put them in handcuffs and they immediately whiz them off to it. So these guys were prepared. But it was scary in those days. I you know, I don't know how often I often I've said this but you know, I don't know if you guys know, but I still we will protest in the post 9 11 when I used to talk about foreign policy stuff. That's how because we get death threats. Again, people demonstrate and threaten and and you know, in all kinds of ways and so my my wife and my Chief Administrative Officer, the Iranian student, insisted that I wear a boat of vests like I accommodated the wishes I would travel all over the world with a bulletproof vest when I when I spoke on on terrorism, foreign policy, morality of war, Israel, all of those things that it was one of these you and assured. So most people couldn't tell. So if you look at the video, you won't be able to tell. But security guys would always tell they would look at me and say, you're wearing a vest, right? And and the answer was yes. So given, you know, given the death threats, given their tax much worse than anything we've experienced since then, Ilan. I mean, the threats he got over over what of identifying Islam as a source of the 9 11 attacks. I mean, they were gonna, you know, decapitate him and his family. I mean, it was scary. It was scary at the Institute in the in the first 10 years in the first 10 years after 9 11. So and of course, we got no support from the intellectuals with the exception of people like Daniel Pipes. Think about what happened during the Danish cartoons. Again, many of you were too young to remember the Danish cartoons. Well, when the Danish cartoons came out, there were demonstrations and riots all over the world. George Bush in his immense courage said that yeah, you know, it's inappropriate to publish the cartoons because it affects it's offensive. So we shouldn't really do it. Then no newspaper in the United States would run the cartoons. They all chickened out. They all were afraid. We went on campuses. We blew the cartooners out to massive posters. And we went on campuses and put them up on stage behind us and did panels and free speech during the cartoon, the Danish cartoon crisis. Now you know, I will profess and people would freak out and the universities would freak out and the universities in NYU, New York University, they allowed us to do the event only if we didn't show the cartoons. And if we only allowed students and did not allow general public in. So we ended up doing the event with the cartoons in the back all covered with sheets, which was actually more effective because here was the silencing that we were talking about. In some places wouldn't provide security. They wouldn't protect our right to speak, even though we were legitimate and invited and people were threatening violence. So the whole attitude about the certain things you can't say, think about world culture, certain things you can't say, you're offensive to a particular group. Muslims in this case. That got really embedded in American culture around the issue of Islam after 9 11. I don't think there was this attitude. I mean, there was some political correctness in the 90s. But there was no Oh, you can't offend XYZ. You can't say anything to offend them. You can't name certain groups in certain contexts. And if you think about today, you can list all the groups that you can't offend, you can't name, you can't do anything. So you know, that's one dimension. I think the dimension of speech, self censorship, think about how many people in the 2000s started to self censor, started to talk about terrorists without naming the terrorists started talking about what motivated them would drove them. I mean, think about we engaged in multiple wars without ever naming the enemy, refusing to name the enemy, like who's that we're going to Iraq, why because terrorists attacks us in 9 11? What does you rock have anything to do? Oh, they have weapons of mass destruction. What does that have to do with 9 11 blank? Nothing. Right? We're going to build democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq. Why? Because we were attacked in 9 11. What does that have make the world is safer place for whom from whom blank nothing. And of course, in Iraq, we brought in all the tribal leaders, let them write an Islamist constitution with Islam everywhere in it. And we said nothing yet, whatever, whatever you guys do want to do, that's fine. You can keep your Islam because you know, Islam had nothing to do with 9 11. So that's okay. We just happened to attack a bunch of Islamic countries. But we want to preserve Islam. We don't want to do anything about Islam. We just, you know, just don't worry, be happy. Everything's fine. So everybody think about a culture where everybody knew Islam had something to do with it. But nobody was willing to say it. All the intellectuals, all the political leaders, all the quote elites were silent, refuse to talk about it self censored. And the rest of the people are looking at this and saying, What the hell? We know what happened. We get what happened. And you won't tell us. And I think that's the, it's not the beginning because everything has been building up over decades. But it really is a major a major step towards the distrust of elites, the distrust of the media, the distrust of our political class, you know, the fact that they're so brazenly lying to us, and so brazenly self censoring and forcing us to self sense censor as well. And again, that whole attitude towards the elites towards our politicians, that has, you know, increased as we've, as we moved into today's culture. It's all over the culture. So so it's, it's two aspects of this came out of 911. The self censorship, speech issue, and the distrust issue, the distrust issue, we stopped trusting the so called authorities, the so called people who supposedly knew what they were doing. This includes our generals, and includes the entire establishment would not tell us who actually committed the 911. And it and of course it continued, right? Because there were terrorist attacks after 911. And they were, you know, in the terrorist attack before 911. There was the call there was others. And never blame anybody. And of course, Europe is even worse, because there they have more they had more terrorist attacks, at least in terms of numbers. I'm not sure in terms of casualties, if they've got to the level of 911, in terms of percentage of the population, I don't think so, even cumulative. But it was major, right? There was a train in there was a train in Spain, you know, pretty quickly after 911. And then there was a bunch of ISIS later on. And you can never say that this was caused by Muslims. And of course, Europe cave completely to Danish cartoons. And we saw what happened. What was the other big event with regards cartoons, right? In France, Charlie Hebdo, right? Charlie Hebdo. Remember the terrorist went in killed all the cartoonists, shot the place up. And everybody went out in the streets. We are Charlie Hebdo. Yes, we, you know, Charlie, remember that? Yes, we Charlie on Twitter. Everybody changed their hand to the just we are Charlie. How many of those people showed cartoons? Because if you're Charlie Hebdo, isn't it incumbent on you to show the cartoons? Isn't that what means to be Charlie Hebdo? Almost nobody. Nobody posted them on Twitter. Nobody posted them on Facebook. Nobody, nobody because you can't offend. Even though they just murdered a bunch of people, and you can't name the religion, you can't name the cause. So that is such a massive betrayal of the American people, the European people, such a massive betrayal by the people in charge of all of us, they're supposed to be in charge of protecting us. I'll trust in the ability to protect us goes out the door when they won't even name the enemy. They won't even name who attacked us. They refuse to do it. So that's one aspect. I think everything comes from that in a sense, because if you don't name the enemy, how do you fight it? You can't. It's a haphazard, you know, uncoordinated, unintegrated attempt to fight a bunch of different groups that you can't tie together because you can't name what ties them together. You leave a lot of groups that are affiliated with the actual event with radical Islam or Islamic totalitarianism, you leave them free because you can't attack them because they gave you no cause, supposedly because Islam is not responsible. See, go to Afghanistan. What are you doing there? What's the purpose? Who are you trying to kill? You know, are you going after Taliban or are you just going after al-Qaeda? And if you're going after both for the purpose of what? What's going to replace the Taliban? Are we going to stay there? Are we going to leave? No answers. Nobody knows. We go to Iraq. What's the connection? Why do we care? Why American kids dying in Iraq? For whom? For what? What's the connection with the attack? Are we then going to go to Iran, which might you could argue is the origin of the problem? No, they tell us and no, they indeed they didn't indeed they handed Iraq to the Iranians. A complete disastrous policy that led to defeat. We lost Afghanistan. We lost Iraq. I don't know, 6,000 American kids died for no reason. Soldiers in both in both missions. We failed. You know, somebody says Saudi Arabia. No, Saudi Arabia is our friend. Saudi Arabia is our ally. Oh, but it's Saudi Arabia's ideology that fuels the terrorists. Well, but you can't say that. There is no ideology. They're just terrorists. That's it. It's no ideology. So we can't blame Saudis and we can go after the Saudis and 16 of the terrorists with Saudis. Oh, that doesn't matter. Just accident just happened to be from Saudi Arabia. They could have been from, you know, New Guinea. They could have been from anywhere. So Saudi is our friend. It's an ally in the war on terrorism because it's just terrorism. So the failure, the American failure, they make a defeat and we should call it a defeat in Iraq and in Saudi Arabia in Iraq and Afghanistan by basically the worst elements within Islam has infected our culture with, you know, multiple things. One, no self-esteem. America is no longer exceptional. There's nothing special about America. The wars are not just because they never explained. So we're just like Russia invading Ukraine. I see that all the time from conservatives and liberals. Putin's not particularly bad. He's not worse than America. America went into Iraq. He's going into Ukraine. What's the difference? There's no difference, right? And since it was never explained, since it was never justified, and since we left it a bigger mess than when we came, arguably, what is the difference? Afghanistan? What do we do there? Nothing. Taliban was there before. Taliban is there now. Spent 20 years there and did zilch, nothing, except get a lot of Americans killed. I reviewed on my show a few months ago, years ago, I can't tell the movie Outpost. I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Outpost. I highly recommend it. It's just, it's a fantastic movie that illustrates, it's true story based on true story of an outpost in Afghanistan. The other, the other, what's the words? Disregard, our politicians and our generals have towards American soldiers. They don't care. They're just fodder. Just fodder for political games, for diplomatic games, for the, for the, for the, for the, you know, for, for whatever the generals and the politicians come up with. This is an outpost that there was no reason for American troops to be there and they were there clearly at a disadvantage versus the Taliban, and they were going to die and they were going to be killed and everybody knew it. Nobody cared. Nobody cared. And the movie kind of shows that and shows the battle. And it's heart wrenching. Your, your, your cry of outrage over, over our politicians and the disregard they had for American lives. They have a lot of disregard for Afghan lives, lots of regard for Afghan lives, complete disregard for American lives. Same happened in Iraq, massive regard for Iraqi lives, complete disregard for American lives. And Americans became cynical, became cynical about their government, cynical about foreign policy became, you know, became cynical about their own country. We lose the country. We can't win a war. We haven't won a war since World War Two. You know, these are primitive barbaric cultures. We can't even beat them. Why were we even there? What were we trying to achieve? Well, we didn't achieve anything. And everybody knows we didn't achieve anything. And now with Biden retreat, I mean, it was perfect. What Biden did was actually perfect, the perfect ending for Afghanistan. Since it was a fiasco from day one, it's appropriate. It's a fiasco at the end. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran book show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me, you get value from listening, you get value from watching, show your appreciation. You can do that by going to Iran book show dot com slash support by going to Patreon, subscribe star locals, and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those, any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see the Iran book show grow, please consider sharing our content. And of course, subscribe, press that little bell button right down there on YouTube, so that you get announcement when we go live. And for those of you who already subscribers and those of you who already supporters of the show. Thank you. I very much appreciate it.