Why don't the young learn?

To the Editor:

Why are they acting like idiots, everyone wants to know?

The young, I mean. The students.

Why are they marching and harassing, disrupting ordinary folks and vandalizing and destroying property, to support terrorism?

Why do they blow off the wanton murder, kidnap and rape of Israeli civilians? Armed paratroopers drop into a music festival, something most of those protestors would be happy to attend, and hunt down and shoot and kill fleeing, unarmed attendees, and that does not register.

Earlier, why did a letter from Osama bin Laden justifying the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks go viral on TikTok and many too young to have experienced or remember the attacks voice support?

Because they have been taught to hate western, Judeo-Christian, and – this is very important – democratic societies.

Post 9/11, way too many of our educators, and our politicians and pop culture, too cowardly and too vain to teach the truth, instead propagandize that the great sin of 9/11 is not fanatical, hate filled jihad inspired terrorists flying hijacked jetliners into occupied office towers.

It’s Islamophobia. That is, American and western hate and intolerance. In fact, when it comes to 9/11 and jihad terrorism, that is pretty much all they teach.

Even though any single jihad-inspired attack targeting Americans was worse than all the “Islamophobia,” combined. 

Every incident directed at Muslims, no matter how random or isolated or obscure, is the responsibility of all Americans and a reflection of the American character, demanding endless introspection and reeducation.

No attack by a jihad-inspired terrorist is in any way connected to Islam as a whole, including 9/11. Each and every attack is the sole responsibility of the individual perpetrators.

Therefore, there is no need to consider or examine the motives of the “terrorists,” or exactly who they were or where they came from.

And our educators do not. They do not teach about the 9/11 attacks; they “observe” the “events of 9/11.” When “a group of men,” “took over two planes and flew them into the World Trade Center.”

When asked by a student, why? The answer is, “I don’t know.”

In fact, most of the time, post 9/11, after a jihad-inspired attack, our political leaders did not even recognize or acknowledge the attackers or their motives and did their best to deny it. 

And no attack, including 9/11, has any greater meaning or impact beyond the loss and pain inflicted.

Our official annual commemorations at “Ground Zero,” beginning with the first in ’02, never recognized the attacks or their greater meaning and magnitude beyond the “loss” and, of course, “the grief” they caused.

Our billion-dollar, eight-acre National September 11 Memorial at the WTC was designed specifically so it remakes the site so it does not recognize the attacks.

So visitors do not judge the 9/11 terrorists as “guilty,” or their American victims as “innocent.”

There are no lessons to be found; no resolution or inspiration provided.

All we are to do here is commiserate in our hurt feelings.

So, students today discard terrorist attacks and respond with productions of and tributes to their vanity? 

So have we.

For a decade, I fought to restore the iconic Koenig Sphere, which stood in the center of the World Trade Center plaza and on 9/11, though bashed and torn, miraculously survived the attacks intact, to its proper place at the memorial plaza. 

It was denied. Do you know why? Because it would remind visitors of the attacks.

We erase history and are shocked, shocked! That the young have not learned its lessons.

The behavior of so much of the young is insane and disturbing. However, we asked for it.

(The author’s brother, Capt. Billy Burke, Engine Co. 21, FDNY, gave his life on 9/11.)

Michael Burke