Today is a momentous and horrible day. It is a day on a level with December 7^th 1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour and which was described by US President Franklin D Roosevelt as ‘a date that will live in infamy’.

Today is the 25^th anniversary of another day of infamy, a day when Islamic terrorists attacked the United States and committed mass murder in New York, Washington DC and in the skies above Pennsylvania. It is a day etched indelibly on my mind and my soul.

I recall the day and where I was and what I was doing when the attacks happened as if it were yesterday. I remember sitting at my desk in work and watching on my terminal as the initial news reports were coming in, that a small plane had hit one of the World Trade Centre towers. This was followed by other slightly later reports that left me in no doubt that this was not a tragic aircraft accident but a horrendous attack on America in particular and the West in general.

Watching the horrors unfold from a desk in London 3,500 miles away from New York was a surreal experience. I knew that I was watching real time mass murder by Islamic terrorists who had previously had little impact on my own world at the time, as my country’s main terror threat back then was from dissident Irish Republicans, it was only later and after 9/11 that Islam became the primary threat to us. I knew instinctively that this was one of the days that the world changed and it did indeed.

The days and years after 9/11 brought yet more Islamic terror and more wars, some of which were more justifiable and effective than others. After 9/11 there were more deaths of Westerners in other terror attacks, thousands of those over the last quarter century and many changes in our societies that became necessary because of this new and abominable threat. Anti-vehicle attack barriers, increased security on airline transport and a climate of fear of what the enemy might do next became the constant companion of Western societies and our citizens and its been that way since that day in September. Government buildings that I once could enter freely as of right if I had good reason to do so, such as the Palace of Westminster, became fortresses of steel, x-rays and suspicion and they became that way because of the Islamic terrorism of 9/11.

9/11 broke much in the Western world. It broke the complacency of governments and peoples about the nature of the threat we face and exposed a great deal of the bad political and administrative decision making that had allowed groups like Al Qaida to form and operate. For many people it broke their naivety about the ideology of Islam and made them realised that it’s not like other faiths. It made people realise that contained within Islam’s followers are not just decent people (the sort of ordinary Muslim bod who I refer to as ‘Mohammed from the tyre shop’) who may merely just worship a different deity to the rest of us, but also those who are death cultists, who see the deaths of innocent people as a worship activity.

9/11 changed the world and not for the better, as was the case with the massive geopolitical changes that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite states. It ushered in a world of increased fear of war on our doorsteps and the sometimes unforeseen consequences of war, both in the areas where the war was fought and here at home. Although we are no longer shown the parade of flag-draped coffins of British and American soldiers as their remains came home to Dover Air Force Base in the USA or through the town of Royal Wootton Bassett in Wiltshire in the UK, the war is not over. We are still being attacked on a monotonously regular basis in the West by Islamic terrorists; the deaths caused by these terrorists are still piling up but now they are mostly civilian bodies and not military ones.

9/11 changed the world and it changed it in a similar and radical way to how 7^th December 1941 or 28^th July 1914 when World War I started, which also brought about massive changes. There is now a pre-9/11 world and a post-9/11 world and we can no more return to that world than a French person in 1920 could return to the Belle Epoque of pre-1914 France. This is the post-9/11 world with all its threats, countermeasures and atrocities that we now have to live in.

Although 9/11 is a quarter century away in the past and new generations have grown up not knowing of the world before the attacks, that doesn’t mean that we should not counter the threats that are still with us. The post 9/11 world has given and will continue to give us atrocities from both within and without Western nations and the war against Islamic terrorism cannot in any way be said to be over. Twenty five years on from 9/11 the fight against Islamic terrorism continues and I doubt that it will abate in my lifetime.

May the memory of the innocent people murdered on 9/11 be for a blessing and may their murders and other terrorist murders be avenged.

מי ייתן וזכרם של החפים מפשע שנרצחו ב-11 בספטמבר יהיה לברכה, ומי ייתן ורציחותיהם ורציחות טרור אחרות ינקמו.