Twelve years after the events of September 11, 2001, Fjordman has some personal reflections on that awful day and all that has occurred since.

9/11, Twelve Years On
by Fjordman

It’s been twelve years since September 11, 2001, when a group of Arab Muslim Jihadist terrorists murdered thousands of unarmed civilians on American soil. A lot has happened since then. Perhaps the single most positive development is that millions of ordinary people in Europe and the Western world are waking up. Many are now a lot more aware of the Islamic threat than they were in 2001.

The single most negative development is that this has so far not changed the outlook and policies of Western governments, other than in mostly cosmetic ways. The divide between the common people who cherish their nation and culture and the ruling elites who want open borders no matter the cost is growing wider throughout the Western world. It is threatening to become a chasm.

Mass immigration, including Muslim immigration, continues at breakneck speed. The attitude of the ruling elites and Western mass media towards everything Islamic is as suicidal as ever. If anything, fear and self-censorship concerning issues related to Islam and Islamization are more widespread now than they was just a few years ago.

I’ve been told that I am more “radical” now than I was a decade ago. Others may judge whether this is the case, but if there is any truth to it, it is only because I respond to real-life events.

Now that my true identity is known, I can report that on September 11 2001 I was living in Egypt as a student of Arabic language at the American University in Cairo. I was never more than mediocre in Arabic, and my Arabic skills are now quite weak, since I haven’t practiced that language for years. Yet I still learned a lot about the local attitudes, culture and religion from living in the Middle East.

It is simplistic to suggest that is was a single event than turned me against Islam. After exposure to Arabic-Islamic culture, both through living there and through my studies, I was already growing more skeptical of Islam before September 2001. There were probably mention several dozen separate events plus self-studies that made me grow even more skeptical over the next few years. I also learned a lot from working in the Palestinian territories and spending some time in Israel. But 9/11 certainly accelerated something that was already underway in my mind. Living in the biggest city in the Arabic-speaking world at that moment was an eye-opener.

As I’ve stated in the past, what shocked me the most was not that quite a few of the local Arabs (though by no means all) were openly happy about the attacks. I already knew that there is a lot of anti-Western hatred among Muslims in many countries. What shocked me the most was the extent to which Western mass media tried to downplay or hide this simple fact. This wasn’t just true of a single newspaper or a single country, but represented a wider trend throughout the Western world.

More here.