Never Forget? Oh, They Forgot!

Never Forget? Oh, They Forgot!

On September 11, 2001, New York experienced one of the most horrific attacks in modern history. Nineteen Islamist terrorists hijacked four civilian aircraft and deliberately turned them into weapons against American civilians. Two planes destroyed the World Trade Center, another struck the Pentagon, and nearly 3,000 people were murdered. For New Yorkers in particular, September 11 was not simply a geopolitical event. It was a trauma experienced personally, collectively and almost unimaginably.

The phrase that emerged from that trauma was simple: “Never Forget.”

Today, twenty-five years later, it is worth asking what exactly we were supposed to remember.

I am not suggesting that every Muslim should somehow bear responsibility for the crimes of al-Qaeda and radical Islam in general. That would be both absurd and unjust. Nor does the election of Zohran Mamdani as New York’s mayor prove that New Yorkers have somehow forgotten September 11. Mamdani is not an Islamist terrorist, and his religion is not the issue.

The uncomfortable question is a different one: what happens when the historical memory of Islamist terrorism survives as a ceremony, while the political and moral lessons that were supposed to accompany that memory gradually disappear?

That question became unavoidable when New York elected Mamdani. His political career has been closely associated with a strongly pro-Islamist/Palestinian and sharply critical view of Israel. He has repeatedly described Israel’s conduct in Gaza in terms of genocide, while resisting political formulations that many Jews regard as essential to distinguishing Palestinian national aspirations from Hamas terrorism. His wife, Rama Duwaji, has also faced scrutiny over older social-media activity supporting Palestinian terrorists and, more recently, material that celebrated the October 7 attack before being deleted or ‘explained’.

None of this establishes that Mamdani supports al-Qaeda or celebrated September 11 (in the absence of clear evidence, or a personal account from someone who knows him well). But it does raise a legitimate question about the political culture that now exists in the city that was once the most visible target of Islamist terrorism.

How much of the memory of September 11 remains when the next generation increasingly encounters terrorism through a political vocabulary in which the distinction between terrorist and victim can become blurred?

That is a question worth asking not only about New York, but about human beings generally.

I am a Romanian Jew, and I grew up with another phrase that was supposed to be permanent: “Never Again.”

The Holocaust was not merely an event that happened to European Jews. It was supposed to have taught humanity something fundamental about what happens when antisemitism, racial hatred, authoritarianism and dehumanization are allowed to develop unchecked. The world built memorials, museums and educational programs around that lesson. The words “Never Again” became almost sacred.

And yet October 7, 2023 exposed just how conditional historical memory can become.

Hamas and other terrorists murdered more than 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals, deliberately targeting civilians, and took hundreds of people hostage. The attack was the largest massacre of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust. It was not a military battle in which civilians unfortunately happened to die. The deliberate murder, mutilation, rape, kidnapping and humiliation of civilians was central to what happened.

Yet almost immediately, in Western universities, on social media and on the streets of major cities, a significant part of the political left responded not primarily by condemning the massacre but by explaining it. Israel’s policies were invoked. Zionism was blamed. Colonialism was invoked. The word “resistance” was applied to organizations and individuals who had deliberately murdered civilians.

Of course, history and context matter. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict did not begin on October 7, and, if you study history, Arabs in the area should focus all blame for any issues they’ve faced on a simply fact: they were never able to accept that Jews could survive, let alone have one, single state of their own. And the fact that Jews were connected for 3000+ years to that specific land, made it even more important for Muslims, for Arabs (a colonial implant in Eretz Israel) to eliminate the Jews.

The disturbing realization after October 7 was that for some people, “Never Again” had apparently come to mean “never again to the people whose suffering I recognize.” The universal moral principle had become conditional upon one’s political sympathies.

For Jews, this was particularly painful. We had been told for decades that the Holocaust had permanently changed the moral consciousness of the world. We had been encouraged to believe that the international community had learned the lesson. Yet when Jews were again murdered in large numbers, many of the same societies that had solemnly promised “Never Again” immediately began arguing about whether the victims were sufficiently innocent to deserve unconditional sympathy. Just like prior to the Holocaust or in the immediate aftermath of it. Because the culture of combatting antisemitism and learning the lessons from the Holocaust did not start in May 1945! It took decades, and some countries were never denazified (eg. Austria, as well as East Germany and the other Communist block countries).

This is not simply about hypocrisy. It reveals something much deeper about the way human societies remember.

We like to believe that history teaches lessons. In reality, history does not teach anything by itself. People teach lessons from history. Families teach them. Schools teach them. Communities teach them. Museums teach them. Survivors teach them. Parents teach them to their children. And when that transmission weakens, historical memory becomes detached from moral memory.

There is a Romanian example that illustrates this particularly well.

I come from Timișoara, the city where the Romanian Revolution of December 1989 began. For those who lived through communism, the events of December 1989 were not abstract history. They were a dramatic rupture in the lives of an entire generation. People went onto the streets against Ceaușescu’s dictatorship. The regime responded with violence. More than a thousand people were killed in Timisoara, Bucharest and other places. The protests spread, and within days the communist regime collapsed. At least, in part, we now know..

Timișoara was at the beginning of that extraordinary transformation.

And yet, if you walk through Timișoara today and speak to young people, you can encounter people who know surprisingly little about what happened there in December 1989. Some know that there was a revolution. Some know that Ceaușescu was overthrown, while others know almost nothing about the whole subject.

The same process is happening with the Holocaust. It is happening with September 11. And it is already happening with October 7.

Every generation moves further away from the events that shaped the previous one. The people who personally remember the Holocaust are disappearing. The children who watched the World Trade Center collapse are now middle-aged. Those who remember communist Romania as adults are becoming elderly. Meanwhile, young people encounter these events primarily through social media, simplified narratives and political arguments.

And social media has made the problem even worse because it rewards emotional certainty rather than historical complexity. A teenager can encounter a thirty-second video portraying a terrorist as a revolutionary hero without ever seeing the photographs of the people he murdered. A slogan can travel around the world faster than the history required to understand it.

This is why I increasingly distrust the phrase “Never Forget” when it is used as a ceremonial conclusion rather than a moral commitment.

Remembering September 11 should mean more than remembering the images of the Twin Towers. It should mean remembering that Islamist terrorism deliberately targeted civilians because the terrorists believed that murdering innocent people was justified by their ideology and for spreading Islam throughout the world. I believe Osama bin Laden and those he sent to murder on the streets of America would laugh now, knowing that Mamdani is NYC Mayor. Not a fact, just a hunch. You can disagree!

Remembering the Holocaust should mean more than remembering Auschwitz. It should mean remembering how antisemitism transformed ordinary people, institutions and governments into participants in the persecution and murder of millions.

Remembering October 7 should mean more than remembering the photographs of the victims. It should mean refusing to sanitize or romanticize the people who deliberately murdered them.

And remembering December 1989 should mean more than knowing that Ceaușescu disappeared from power. It should mean understanding that freedom was not inevitable and that ordinary people sometimes have to take enormous risks to defend it.

There is a tendency to believe that once enough monuments have been built, enough documentaries made and enough commemorations held, the lessons of history will remain permanently embedded in society. They will not. Every generation has to learn them again.

That is particularly important for Jews. We cannot assume that the Holocaust will forever protect us from antisemitism simply because the Holocaust is universally recognized as evil. We cannot assume that the world will remember October 7 in the way we remember it. And we cannot assume that the moral vocabulary of “Never Again” will remain intact simply because politicians continue to use the phrase.

The same applies to Americans and September 11. The same applies to Romanians and December 1989.

A person can know that six million Jews were murdered and still become an antisemite. Someone can know that the Twin Towers were destroyed on September 11 and still minimize the Islamic ideology that produced the attack. A Romanian can know that the communist dictatorship collapsed in December 1989 without understanding what life under that dictatorship actually meant.

Knowing the date is not the same as understanding the event.

Remembering the dead is not the same as defending the living.

And repeating “Never Again” is meaningless unless we are prepared to recognize the next “again” when it happens.

Twenty-five years after September 11, that is the question New York should be asking.

And three years after October 7, it is a question the entire Western world should be asking itself.

What did we promise never to forget — and have we already forgotten?