By Tejas
On the morning of September 11, 2001, nineteen hijackers murdered nearly 3,000 people and injured roughly 6,000 more. Less than a year earlier, the same movement had blown a hole in the side of the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen, killing 17 American sailors. A quarter century later, the country still observes the anniversary with the same ritual it adopted that first year: names read aloud, bells rung, two beams of light pointed at the sky over Lower Manhattan. In a September 2026 Jerusalem Post op-ed, Adam Milstein argued that the ritual has become a substitute for the lesson. His headline did not soften the point: “Twenty-five years after 9/11, the ideology that struck us is winning.”
The claim is deliberately provocative, because by most conventional measures the United States won the war that followed. Al-Qaeda’s founder is dead. The attack has never been repeated on that scale. Airports, intelligence agencies, and federal law enforcement were rebuilt around the threat. Adam Milstein does not dispute any of that. His argument is that the military contest was only one front, and that the ideological contest, the one over whether Western societies still believe their own values are worth defending, has been quietly ceded.
Adam Milstein frames the problem as a question rather than a slogan. “What happens when a civilization loses confidence in its own values while its enemies remain completely convinced of theirs?” he asks in the op-ed. The phrasing matters. He is not describing an enemy that grew stronger. He is describing a society that grew less sure of itself, and an adversary that never wavered.
That framing comes naturally to someone with his biography. Adam Milstein was born in Haifa in 1952 and served in the Israel Defense Forces during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, a conflict Israelis still study as a case history in what happens when a confident society stops taking a stated threat literally. By September 2001 he had lived in the United States for two decades, building a career in Los Angeles commercial real estate after earning an MBA from USC. He describes himself as an Israeli-American “Strategic Venture Philanthropist,” and the Adam and Gila Milstein Family Foundation he co-founded with his wife Gila has spent a quarter century funding organizations that track exactly the kind of ideological drift he now says has gone mainstream.
The op-ed is specific about where Milstein sees the retreat. He points to back-to-school materials promoted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations that, in his account, attributed the 9/11 attacks to “American support for Israel” and recommended the writings of Osama bin Laden to students. For Milstein, the significance is not that a single advocacy organization produced a single objectionable document. It is that the document circulated as educational material at all, inside a country that once told itself it would never forget who attacked it or why.
He also describes a moment from New York City’s own commemoration, in which Mayor Zohran Mamdani signed a 9/11 memorial order and then handed the ceremonial pen to an attorney who had represented a convicted al-Qaeda operative. Milstein treats the gesture as a symptom rather than a scandal. In a city where the attacks are still physically present, he reads the choice as evidence that the moral clarity of 2001 has thinned to the point where the distinction between victims and perpetrators no longer registers as obvious to people in positions of civic authority.
The deeper argument in the op-ed concerns a habit of thought Milstein calls out directly. When extremists attack Western societies, he writes, audiences are encouraged to examine the attackers’ grievances. When Western societies defend themselves, the defense itself is treated as the problem, and in some quarters the very existence of the defending society is cast as illegitimate. He calls this a moral asymmetry, and he argues that once it settles in, “there is no moral basis for defending civilization at all.”
This is the point where Milstein’s 9/11 essay connects to the analysis he has developed over years of writing. He argues that the ideological threat no longer travels primarily through terror cells. It travels through what he calls an Islamo-Left Alliance, a convergence between radical Islamist movements and segments of the activist left that share, in his reading, a rejection of Western institutions as “instruments of oppression.” He has made versions of this case before, including in the Jewish Policy Center’s journal, where he paired his warning about that alliance with a warning about extremists on the far right. The anniversary essay narrows the lens to a single question: whether a society that cannot say plainly what it is defending will be able to defend anything.
What separates the piece from a lament is that Milstein names the things he believes are at stake. He lists them in short, flat sentences, almost like a civics syllabus: “Freedom of speech. Freedom of religion. Equality before the law. The rights of minorities. Democratic elections. An independent judiciary. The peaceful transfer of power.”
The list is notable for what it leaves out. None of the items is specific to Israel or to the Jewish community, the subjects Adam Milstein writes about most often. That is intentional. His argument is that the people who attacked the United States in 2001 were not attacking a foreign policy. They were attacking a way of organizing human life, and the values on his list are the ones that make that way of life distinctive. A defense of them is not a partisan position, in his framing. It is the minimum a free society owes its own founding commitments.
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The op-ed closes with prescriptions rather than mourning, which is characteristic of how Milstein writes. He calls for teaching children “who attacked America on September 11 and why,” a direct rebuke to curricula that treat the attacks as an event without authors. He urges scrutiny of organizations seeking influence over American institutions, a challenge to activist movements that have made hostility toward the United States fashionable, and a refusal to accept the premise that “every conflict has two equally valid sides.”
The last prescription is the one that gives the essay its shape. “Never forget,” he argues, has to mean more than an annual act of grief. In his words, it means “naming who attacked us, defending what they attacked.” Remembrance without that content, in Milstein’s view, becomes a ceremony that comforts the living while teaching the next generation nothing.
There is a practical logic underneath the rhetoric, and it reflects the way Adam Milstein approaches nearly every problem he takes on. He does not believe ideas defend themselves. In his philanthropy, he funds research groups, education watchdogs, and advocacy networks on the theory that convictions only survive when someone builds the institutions that carry them forward. The 9/11 essay applies the same logic to national memory. A country that wants its children to understand why the towers fell has to teach it deliberately, the way it teaches any other foundational event, and it has to be willing to name the ideology responsible even when doing so is socially uncomfortable.
Twenty-five years is long enough for a generation of Americans to reach adulthood with no memory of the day itself. That, more than any single document or gesture, is what gives Milstein’s warning its urgency. The people who watched the attacks live are becoming the minority. What the majority learns about September 11 will come from schools, media, and civic leaders. If those institutions have lost confidence in the values the attacks targeted, Adam Milstein argues, the hijackers will have achieved something in the long run that they could not accomplish in a single morning.
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