Imagine if you had told someone on 11 September 2001 that in 25 years’ time the streets of New York City would ring out with sympathy for Islamofascism. Imagine if you had said to one of the startled souls watching American lives be incinerated by Islamist filth that one day the West would swarm with youths cosplaying as Islamist filth. Imagine if you had said that in a mere quarter of a century even our leafiest campuses would be awash with jihad chic, with silver-spoon students gushing over an Islamo-army (Hamas) every bit as hateful and medieval as the one that burnt New Yorkers alive.

Imagine if you had said on that apocalyptic day that one day the twisted beliefs of Osama bin Laden would be commonplace in radical circles. Imagine you had said that his anti-Semitic cry that ‘the creation of Israel is a crime which must be erased’ would become the luxury belief of every smug activist. Imagine you had said that the very justification for that day’s pitiless massacre of New York innocents – namely, that America had become the ‘servant’ of ‘the Jews’ petty state’ – would soon be the hot take of the every woke leftist and crank rightist in Christendom. Imagine if over the thud of WTC workers falling to their deaths, you had said that one day Western youths will gush over bin Laden’s writings, and thank him for ‘open[ing] their eyes’ to the evils of America and Israel.

Imagine if you had said there will be further acts of Islamist inhumanity – smaller in scale but equal in evil intent – and that our response would not be horror, but nonchalance. Imagine if you said Islamists will one day massacre girls in Manchester, England and people would say, ‘Don’t look back in anger’. Imagine if you said there will soon be an Islamist atrocity in which more children would perish than on 9/11 – the Nice truck attack – and our response would be awkward silence followed by craven, snivelling amnesia. Imagine if you said that one day it will be a cancellable offence to talk shit about the totalitarian ideology that wreaked such savagery upon New York City.

Imagine if you said that in the near future it will be tantamount to a crime to criticise Islam. That kids in Europe would be interrogated by police for scuffing pages of a Koran. That people would be arrested for calling Muhammad a paedo. That police forces would discuss ditching the word ‘jihad’ so as to not offend Muslims. That people would lose their jobs – even their lives – for ‘blaspheming’ against Islam. And that all the while the intellectual classes would spinelessly whimper: ‘Well, if you’re going to be Islamophobic…’ Just imagine it: you turn to someone as the swirling fires of religious hate consume two of the greatest towers ever built by Man and say: ‘I bet we won’t be allowed to criticise this religion soon.’

They wouldn’t have believed you. More than that, your grim prophesying would have caused them immense pain. It was bad enough that they had to watch as nearly 3,000 lives were ruthlessly sacrificed to the cause of Islamist carnage. The knowledge that aspects of that cause, certain of its tenets, would one day hold sway over youthful imaginations and official policymaking would have pushed them over the edge. The revelation of a future West so consumed by self-loathing that it would wonder if perhaps it deserves the terror and bloodshed of Islamism would have been too much to take. ‘You mean’, they would have said, ‘that the enemies of civilisation who visited New York City today ended up winning?’.

Yes. Yes, that is kind of what I mean.

For here we are, 25 years after the greatest Islamist outrage in history, and it is safer to sympathise with Islamists than to condemn them as a foreign pox on our civilisation. Plaudits await the bourgeois youths who put on keffiyehs and cheer the Islamist foes of Zionism and its Western backers. Shame and blacklisting await the brave souls who say Islamism is the greatest menace the West faces. Hating the West is the intellectual bread and butter of bourgeois society, while those of us who love Western civilisation, and think it infinitely superior to any desert ideology that hates homosexuals and puts women in black sacks, risk being branded as racist. Behold the creeping, sickening victory of the Islamo-imagination, the slow-motion conquest of the West by the rancid anti-civilisational bigotry of the very men who brought terror to New York City 25 years ago today.

We have a tendency to focus on the visceral terror of 9/11. Every documentary, every book, dwells on the sheer pain of the day. The jumpers from the towers. The voicemails people left before being engulfed by al-Qaeda’s flames. The fight for survival on Flight 93 before it plunged into a field in Pennsylvania. All of this is important – of course it is. But the fixation on individual agony can distract us from the almost unbearable moral weight of that day. Emotionalism risks numbing us to the deeper, harder truth of 9/11. Which is that it was not just a tragedy, not even just terrorism, but an act of calculated and savage war against Western civilisation itself.

‘Are you Americans willing to fight for your civilisation?’ – that was the unspoken cry of this Islamist stab at the heart of the West. The selection of NYC as the prime target – alongside the Pentagon – was no accident. On one side, the self-styled Mujahideen of a seventh-century ideology with 21st-century tendencies. On the other, the greatest city Earth has ever known: the teeming, mettlesome metropolis that is the throbbing heart of Western culture and publishing and attitude. ‘The man that hates America hates the human race’, said Brendan Behan. 9/11 was barbarous proof of that. NYC was attacked as a proxy for the West itself, as a gleaming testament to the 20th-century spirit of reason, growth and swagger. Nothing – and I mean nothing – offends the cave-dwelling rich boys of the Islamist disease more than New York Fuckin’ City.

The importance of this historic atrocity is not only that it laid brutish waste to so much precious life but also that it set a moral test for the West. And while we have done our moral duty by the former – righteously commemorating all who died – we have catastrophically failed at the latter. For 25 years we have shirked our generational responsibility to assert the greater moral virtue of Western civilisation over the infantile, murderous rage of Islamism and its braindead apologists. On the contrary, we have bowed to the truthless creed of anti-Westernism, all but agreeing with the death worshippers of Islamism that our moral universe is in fact a violent, polluting, marauding and Zio-cucked horror show.

This is what 9/11 exposed: the pre-existing self-hatreds of the West. It raised to the surface of our societies, like scum on water, our shame at being modern and powerful and enlightened and special. Some clocked the explosive impact 9/11 would have in terms of entrenching and worsening our moral malaise. Martin Amis called it an act of ‘horrorism’, of ‘maximum malevolence’, of ‘pure totalitarian evil’. All should have united against this ‘fantastic vehemence ranged against [America]’, he said. But we didn’t. We ermed and ahhed. We said the West has done bad things too. We said, ‘What about Vietnam?’. To hell with your moral equivalence, said Amis. Whatever the undoubted sins of the West, the ‘paranoid, irrational, death-loving, freedom-hating’ Islamist ideology is worse. He was right. Others were too. Yet their words, like the World Trade Center, crumbled and evaporated into the dust of history.

Twenty-five years on, our moral corrosion has worsened. Bin Laden is dead and al-Qaeda is a busted flush, yet on 9/11 those religious tyrants planted a seed that continues to grow. The seed of doubt. The seed of self-loathing. It was this disease of self-flagellation that was animated like Frankenstein’s monster 25 years ago. The West needs to learn to love itself again. For the 3,000 dead, for New York City, for civilisation itself, it’s time we reminded ourselves of our greatness. Say it with me: we are better than them.