9-12-26 The Weekend Hour 3: What Mohammed Atta’s Will Was Trying To Tell Us

0:00Why you deal with listening to Armstrong and getting on demand? We're not boring. Lot of news is boring. And tedious. And depressing. And makes you angry. You don't want to live your life like that. Hey, I'm Jack Armstrong. He's Joe Getty. We're Armstrong and Getty. We try to bring you the truth and help you figure out this crazy modern world. About something about a comedic tone. What? We have a winner? Yes. Listen to Armstrong and Getty on demand on the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I believe that whoever was in that room and did that was a murderer. A new podcast series, Fault Line Haditha, tells the story of a shocking crime and a cover-up at the highest levels of the United States Marine Corps. If you've got five players and you offer immunity to four, you better be right about the fifth because if you're not, then you've just given immunity to your color. Listen to Fault Line Haditha on the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:00This episode sponsored by HomeBase. HomeBase is built for small businesses trying to do it all. The neighborhood coffee shop, the local gym, the family run restaurant. With HomeBase, you can schedule your team, track time, run payroll, and manage hiring from one easy app. So you can spend less time chasing time sheets and more time running the business your customers love. More than 150,000 small businesses already use HomeBase to keep their teams on track. Start free at joinhomebase.com. HomeBase, built for small businesses that do it all. Can I have Michael Brown joins me here? The former FEMA director, talk show host Michael Brown. Brownie! No. Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job. The weekend with Michael Brown. Welcome back to Weekend with Michael Brown. Glad to have you with me. I appreciate you tuning in. As I mentioned earlier in the program, this is the, or yesterday was, the 25th anniversary of 9-11. And I want to do a little history lesson.

2:01So this is nothing to do with the terrorism attack itself. 25 years after 9-11, I think the most ignored piece of evidence is a burial plan that a comfortable graduate student wrote for himself. Years have had a time in a German apartment. And I want us to understand that history, so that particularly as we enter into this election season, we recognize that the threat that we may think we face may not be the threat that we really do face. So let's go back to April of 1996. A small apartment in Hamburg, Germany, a 27-year-old graduate student, sat down and literally wrote out his own funeral. This guy was studying architecture. His father was a lawyer back in Cairo. He spoke fluent German. He was living in one of the richest,

3:03freest, safest countries on this planet. And he had his whole life still ahead of him. And yet here he was in April of 1996, spending an entire afternoon writing careful instructions for the handling of his own corpse. No women at his grave. Not at the funeral. Not even after. No pregnant women near his body. No person who was in his own words, not clean. The man who washed him for burial was supposed to wear gloves, so no hand would ever touch his private parts. Three plain white cloths laying him on his right side. Divided his money the way that God commands. This guy's name, Muhammad Atta. Five years after he wrote those words, on the morning of September 11, 2001, he flew American Airlines flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

4:08So let's start there in that apartment. Because what is missing from that will? There's no politics in it. None. There's not a single word about American foreign policy. Not a word about Israel. Nothing about poverty or oppression or jobs or humiliation. There were no American drones in the sky in 1996. And Muhammad Atta wasn't poor. He wasn't a refugee in some camps somewhere. He was a comfortable young man in Germany, calmly arranging his own martyrdom years ahead of time. Because he believed that God would reward him for it. That will is one of the most ignored pieces of evidence that we have from September 11. And I think I know why. Because it tells us something that we do not want to hear. Here's the story we told ourselves instead. And I was in the building for part of it. So I'm not throwing rocks from the cheap sheets.

5:10I'll get to my own part later. After the towers came down, the smartest people in this country ask one question. Over and over. What went wrong? As if the reason 19 men murdered almost 3,000 people was some, you know, riddle we had to crack. As if there had to be a hidden cause underneath. Something reasonable, something we'd recognize if we just looked hard enough. And every answer we reached for was the same kind of answer. Oh, it must be poverty. It must be a lack of education. It must be humiliation or alienation or grievance about our foreign policy. It must be something that we did. I think to many people that was a comforting thought. Because if it was something that we did, then that means that something we could undo. Maybe more money, more development, better diplomacy, a peace deal, get the conditions just right and the anger goes away. Six days after the attack that we memorialized yesterday on Friday.

6:13President Bush stood in the Islamic Center of Washington and said, and he said this and I quote, the face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. Close quote. Now, I understand why my old boss said it. A decent man was trying to protect innocent Muslim Americans from being blamed for something they had nothing to do with. I think his instinct was right. Protecting your neighbors. That's right. But as an explanation, it pointed us exactly the wrong direction. It told us the man who did this thing had nothing to do with what they themselves said they believe. It told us to look everywhere except the one place the killers have been pointing the entire time. So let me bring you someone who tried to tell us the truth and got looked at like she was describing little green men. Her name is Ayan Hershey Ali. Now before you decide what box she goes in, look where she comes from, born in Somalia,

7:15a refugee, a teenager in Nairobi. She joined the Muslim Brotherhood, not as a bomb-thrower, as a true believer. She wore the veil. She prayed. She studied. And she has told us plainly what they taught her. She had a friend at school. It was a Christian girl. They walked home together. They shared lunches and secrets. She know the way teenage girls do. Ayan went to her teacher and said she could not see her friend as an enemy. You want the teacher told her? You have a duty to convert her. And if she refuses, then she is your enemy. That was the small lesson. Then came the big enemies. America, the great Satan Israel, the little Satan. In her prayers every day, she asked God to destroy the Jews. You know she was only 15 years old? Years later she got out. She renounced all of it. She ended up in the Dutch parliament.

8:16On the morning of September 11, she was working for a left of center think tank. The equivalent over here of our Democratic Party. And she watched the good educated decent people around her. Reach for the only explanation their worldview allowed. It must be our fault. It's American foreign policy. It must be Israel. Yet. She knew better. She had sat in the room where boys were taught exactly what those 19 men, those 19 hijackers. She was taught exactly what they believed. She knew it wasn't a cry for help. It was a raid. The men who planned it believed they were the strong ones. And that we were the weak ones. And that they would ultimately win. She tried to tell the sophisticated people around her. They filed her away. They went back to the comfortable story. Now you're something here up front because it matters. When a young hersi alay applied for asylum in Holland in 1992,

9:17she lied on her application. Wrong name, wrong story. She's admitted that. She says she did it to hide the family that she was fleeing from. Because she was escaping a forced marriage. Just weigh that for yourself. I'm not going to hand you a witness and hide the impeachment. You can decide whether a young woman running from a forced marriage, who later spent her life warning about exactly the ideology that arranged that marriage. You can decide whether or not she is discredited by the lie or she is explained by it. I know exactly Ryland. I'm telling you the fact either way. I said I'd tell you my part and here it is. After September 11th, this country built the largest security apparatus in our history. The Department of Homeland Security, the terror watch list, the airport lines, you still stand in. I was inside that build. I ran FEMA. I was the Undersecretary of the Department of Homeland Security. I sat in those very rooms. Here's what we got good at. We got very good at hunting the man,

10:18finding the cell, watching the plot, putting the bomber on a list and taking him off the board before he could act. That work is real and it has saved American lives. And I want to apologize for a minute of that. But we were watching the shooter. We were not watching the thing that makes the shooter. I want to explain why. That's next. Don't go away. A shocking crime and a cover-up at the highest levels of the United States Marine Corps. Someone opened the door and was the primary shooter. Is it possible you could do that and then suppress the number? A new podcast series, Fault Line Haditha, tells the story the United States government wants to keep buried. How can you not know? There were women and children in there. Can you tell us here that you don't know what happened that day? Based on thousands of pages of previously classified documents and over a hundred hours of secretly filmed video,

11:19the truth about one of the most infamous crimes in Marine Corps history can finally be told. If you've got five players and one of them is guilty of murder at least, and you offer immunity to the other four, you better be right about the fifth. Because if you're not, then you've just given immunity to your color. Listen to Fault Line Haditha on the Lie Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode sponsored by Home Base. Home Base is built for small businesses trying to do it all. The neighborhood coffee shop, the local gym, the family run restaurant. With Home Base, you can schedule your team, track time, run payroll, and manage hiring from one easy app. So you can spend less time chasing time sheets, and more time running the business your customers love. More than 150,000 small businesses already use Home Base to keep their teams on track. Start free at joinhomebase.com.

12:19Home Base, built for small businesses that do it all. Hey, welcome back to the weekend with Michael Brown. Text line, of course, is always open 3 3 1 0 3 keyword micro-micro. We're reflecting on the memorialization we did yesterday about 9 11. And I wanted to take it a step further, a step further than most people will. And I want to talk about what we got good at. Because we did. We got good at finding men, finding the terror cell, watching the plot, putting the bomber on the list, and taking them off the board before he could ever act on his ideology. Real work. As I said earlier, we were watching the shooter. We were not watching the thing that makes the shooter. We weren't watching the mosque where the sermon gets preached. The school where a child is taught who his enemies are. The charity, the charities that move the money around. The foreign governments writing the checks. We were counting terrorists. We were not paying attention to the slow patient work underneath.

13:22The work of literally turning a doctrine into a movement and doing so one institution at a time. So what did we do? We thought the war we knew had a fight. We missed the one we didn't know how to fight. Want to know what that slow work looks like when it grows all the way up? Look at Europe. Europe's probably about 15 years ahead of us. And Europe is the warning that we keep refusing to read. A girl gets to Western. She dates the wrong boy. She wants to choose her own life. So a father or a brother kills her for the shame of wanting those things. That's not a story from the seventh century. Germany's own federal criminal police office has candidates killings at roughly a dozen a year. British authorities put their count in the same range. There are names. People shot dead by their brothers on a burly in the street in 2005. A person murdered by her own family in London in 2006 and nearly every time.

14:24The authorities act surprised here. Well, that doesn't happen here. Yes, it does. It did happen there. In Rotterdam, England, over 16 years gangs of men sexually abused at least 1400 children. The official inquiry. That inquiry found that the cops and the local council knew yet they looked away. Because the perpetrators, well, they were mostly a Pakistani heritage. And everybody was afraid of being called a racist. They let children be raped rather than risk being called a name. Now, let me be precise. Many of these men were British born. They weren't immigrants. And the national data and Britain is too thin to prove one ethnic group is overrepresented across the entire country. What is not in dispute is the town level record. And the finding that officials looked away out of fear. That finding is the government's own report. Last year, Baroness Louise Casey's national audit said the same thing again.

15:25And the British government finally ordered a statutory national inquiry. It's not just the Brits. In May of 25, France's own Interior Ministry published a report warning warning that the Muslim Brotherhood is running a deliberate strategy that it calls Intraism. Working up into French institutions from below. Germany's domestic intelligence service tracks what it calls legalistic Islamism. Groups pursuing Islamist goals through lawful means. The Netherlands, they ran a parliamentary inquiry into a foreign money flowing into Dutch mosques. These are not talk show hosts. These are the governments of Europe in their own official reports. Finally, finally saying the quiet part out loud. Their critics say the reports overreach and smear ordinary believers. Well, you can read the reports and judge them for yourselves. But you cannot pretend the reports don't exist. What is this actually about?

16:25Let me be clear. This is the exact spot where the conversation jumps the rails. And where a lot of people I otherwise agree with will lose me. I'm not talking about your Muslim neighbor. Not the doctor who set your kids on. Not the family running a shop down the street. Not the American soldier who happens to pray toward Mecca. About 1.6 billion people practice Islam. And the overwhelming majority of them? What what you want. A job, a safe street. Their kids to do better than they did. Most of the people I'm about to describe as targets of this thing? Or Muslims themselves. They are the first ones that this comes for. What I'm talking about is an ideology. Islamism. A political project that wears the clothing of a religion. It teaches that the law of God misgovern everything so that there is no line between the mosque and the state. And that a free society built on the individual conscience is not a partner you negotiate with.

17:29It's an obstacle. And an obstacle gets removed. I'm not putting words anybody's mouth. This movement wrote its goals down. In 1991, a leader in the branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, a man named Mohammed Akram, wrote a memo. In 2004, the FBI pulled it out of a member's home in Virginia. It was entered into evidence in the Federal Terrorism Financing Trial, US versus the Holy Land Foundation, and Texas. It is a real document in a real court record. It describes the movements work in North America as a civilization jihadist process. And this movement speaks of eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within. Their words, their document, their court exhibit, and fair as fair. There is a serious counter argument. I'm not going to hide it. Critics, including scholars at Georgetown's Bridge Initiative,

18:31say the memo was just one man's memo. Framed is his own hopes and ambitions never adopted his official Brotherhood policy. And admitted it trial is background rather than as the thing that won the conviction. All right, that's fine. Have that argument. But you cannot waive the document away. It exists. It says what it says. And unfortunately, it lines up almost word for word with a Jan Hersey Olly was taught as a 15 year old girl. And it lines up almost word for word with what Muhammad Otter wrote in that Hamburg apartment back in 1991. I'll also tell you what I left out. There's another document that gets passed around. It's a paper from 1982 called The Project. Supposedly, a Brotherhood master plan found in Switzerland. I'm not using it. It's never been authenticated. No verified author. No court vetting nothing. If a source won't hold up, it doesn't belong in this case.

19:32The 1991 memo, it holds up. And that's why I use it. Our virtues, the virtues of Western civilization. That's the open door. And this is the trap. The very thing that makes the West worth defending or the things that this ideology uses against us. Open immigration, free speech, freedom to worship, freedom to organize, foreign money flowing freely into universities and charities. Every one of those is a glory of a free society. And every one of them is also a door left standing wide open. Look at the money. Because the money's documented and the receipts are public. Under section 117 of the Higher Education Act, American universities have to disclose large gifts and contracts from foreign sources. The Department of Education released the 2025 numbers in February of this year. In that one year, foreign governments and their proxies sent roughly $5.2 billion in gift and

20:39contracts into American higher education. The single largest source was the government of Qatar at more than 1.1 billion last year alone. Section 117. That statute lumps gifts and contracts together. And most of the Qatari money is not contracts, not donations. A lot of it pays for American universities to run branch campuses on Qataris soil in a place Qatar built called Education City. Cornell, Georgetown, Northwestern, Carnegie Mellon, that's closer to export revenue than to a bag of cash buying influence. So don't let anybody tell you it's 1.1 billion in bribes, it isn't. But don't let anyone tell you it's nothing easier, either. What is it? That's next. I'll be right back. A shocking crime and a cover-up at the highest levels of the United States Marine Corps.

21:44Someone opened the door and was the primary shooter. Is it possible you could do that and then suppress the number? A new podcast series, fault-line Haditha, tells the story the United States government wants to keep buried. How can you not know? There were women and children in there. Can you tell us here that you don't know what happened that day? Based on thousands of pages of previously classified documents and over 100 hours of secretly filmed video, the truth about one of the most infamous crimes in Marine Corps history can finally be told. If you've got five players and one of them is guilty of murder at least and you offer immunity to the other four, you better be right about the fifth because if you're not, then you've just given immunity to your color. Listen to fault-line Haditha on the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode sponsored by HomeBase. HomeBase is built for small businesses trying to do it all.

22:44The neighborhood coffee shop, the local gym, the family run restaurant. With HomeBase, you can schedule your team, track time, run payroll, and manage hiring from one easy app. So you can spend less time chasing time sheets and more time running the business your customers love. More than 150,000 small businesses already use HomeBase to keep their teams on track. Start free at joinhomebase.com. HomeBase, built for small businesses that do it all. Tonight Michael Brown joins me here. The former FEMA director, co-show host Michael Brown. Brownie! Now. Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job. The weekend with Michael Brown. Looking back the weekend with Michael Brown, text line of course is always open 3-3-1-0-3, keyword, micro-Michael. You tell me if I'm not right or you tell me if you think I'm wrong on this. We held the door open. Because holding the door open is who we are. In a movement despise everything that the door stands for,

23:44walks right through it, using our own key. You know the men who wrote our founding documents understood this danger. They built the Constitution to be a shield against tyranny. They never meant the Constitution to be a suicide path. So there are some numbers that people throw around and I want to give them to you straight. If you follow this debate, you've heard some numbers known hard. I'm going to state them the way the data actually reads. 81% of Somalis and Minneapolis are on welfare. You've heard some version of that. Here's the real thing. The 81% figure comes from the Center for Immigration Studies in a report built in December of last year, and that report is built on a decade of Census Bureau survey data. It measured the share of immigrant-headed Somali households in Minnesota. Statewide, not Minneapolis. They receive at least one welfare benefit. For households with children, it's 89%.

24:46Minnesota's own state demographer independently found that about 84% of Somali individuals are on some form of government assistance. So the magnitude is real and it's confirmed by two separate methodologies. But read it correctly. It's households headed by a foreign-born Somali, and most Minnesota Somalis are U.S. born citizens. So Somali immigrants describes a minority of the community, and the numbers carried by Medicaid and food stamps, not cash. Traditional cash welfare runs in the single digits of the low 20s, a working parent whose kid is on Medicaid and who gets snapped is counted here, which is a defensible way to count. But it is not the same as a household living off welfare. State it that way, and it's bulletproof. State it the sloppy way, and you've handed the other side a gift.

25:46Now this one is real, and it's generally from the Pew Research Center, not some knock-off poll. 44% of American Muslims have a favorable view of Hamas. That was published just this past summer in July. Among Muslim respondents, 44% viewed Hamas favorably. 13% very favorably, 31% somewhat favorably. The fine print, because you deserve it, the Muslim subsample of a general population survey is small, and Pew did not publish the margin of error for that slice. So the true error band is wider than the headline. And favorable view is not the same as material support. Hold that number with care, because 44% is not a rounding error, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of denial. Let's go to New York for comparison.

26:48New York City's Muslim and Jewish populations are now roughly comparable, somewhere near a million each, though every one of those estimates is soft. I just leave it there. When you hear it sharpened into Muslim immigrants, now outnumber Native Jews, notice that no data source actually separates people that way. That frame is framing, is doing the work the numbers do not do. Now, I've leaned on a YAHN Harsi Al-Sis testimony all the way through this, because her testimony is powerful and it's earned. So I owe you the places where I don't follow her. She argues that Islam itself, not just Islamism, is fundamentally incompatible with a free society, and she calls for ending essentially all Muslim immigration to the West. The way we cut off mass migration after World War One, I don't go there, and I want to tell you why. Judging 1.6 billion people by their faith,

27:50rather than judging institutions and individuals by their conduct, that's the move that turns a true argument into an ugly one. And I think it fails on its own terms. The data that she and I both cite, describe a community that is mostly American citizens. You cannot deport your way out of a problem that is substantially homegrown, and you shouldn't want to punish the doctor and the shopkeeper, the same way you might be ideal. The Constitution I keep invoking as a shield does not have a religious exemption. I don't want to be the guy arguing that it should. So here's my line, and it's different than all these. We should be aiming at the ideology. It's institutions, the ideology's money, not at the faith, not at your neighbor. So what does that look like? Because if the target is the ideology and its infrastructure, instead of the religion, the to-do list writes itself and none of it requires a religious test.

28:55For example, let's go through some of the, what it would look like, the to-do list. Follow the money, make a transparent. Section 117 already requires universities to disclose foreign gifts and contracts. So let's enforce that. Lower the reporting threshold, require disclosure of the terms, not just the dollar amount, extend the same daylight to mosques, charities, and think takes the take foreign government money. Sunlight is not a religious test. It's an accounting standard, and I think we should apply it to everyone. So yes, let's follow the money. Let's make a transparent. Second, let's judge institutions by conduct, not creed. You see where documentary and financial evidence shows an institution is funded by, or operationally tied to a movement, whose stated aim is subversion? Treat it that way. When it's not, leave it alone. The standard is behavior and money,

29:58provable out in the open. Not will not what building somebody praise in. I want to know what the conduct is. I want to know what they actually do. That's test number two. Test number three. Expect assimilation. Demand assimilation. And mean it. A free society is honestly allowed to ask newcomers to accept our ground rules. Equal rights for women. The rule of law over the rule of the clan. The right to leave your faith without fear of being killed for that. Those are not Western quirks. That's the price of the ticket. And asking them to pay the price of that ticket to be a part of our society is not bigotry. And here's the last thing I think we should do. We should screen immigrants honestly. Without a faith test.

30:58You see, I think we are allowed to scrutinize where someone was radicalized and what they believe about pluralism and violence. We are not allowed and should not want to screen on just religion itself. So none of that requires us to become less free. It simply requires us to stop mistaking our freedoms for a suicide path. So here we are. 25. 25 years later. Here's the choice. The anniversary of the worst Islamist attack in the history of this country. Yes, Zoran Mamdani. He was born abroad. He is himself Muslim. During his campaign, he was asked point blank to condemn the slogan, globalize the end of father. He would not do that. He said it wasn't a mayor's job to police speak. He later said he'd discourage the phrase. You can make of that what you want. I will make something of it.

32:01Ignorance was an excuse in 2001. We genuinely did not understand what had hit us. Ignorance is not. Cannot be an excuse in 2026. We have had 25 years. A shelf full of evidence and a continent full of warnings. A strong country is not one that assumes it will always muddle through. It's one that can look straight at its own soft points. Name them out loud without flinching. Fix them while they're still time and refuse to let its own virtues be turned into weapons that bring us down. That is the choice in front of us. And it is a choice. Why? Let me explain next. I'll be right back. A shocking crime and a cover-up at the highest levels of the United States Marine Corps.

33:04Someone opened the door and was the primary shooter. Is it possible you could do that and then suppress the number? A new podcast series, Vaultline Haditha, tells the story the United States government wants to keep buried. How can you not know? There were women and children in there. Can you tell us here that you don't know what happened that day? Based on thousands of pages of previously classified documents and over a hundred hours of secretly filmed video, the truth about one of the most infamous crimes in Marine Corps history can finally be told. If you've got five players and one of them is guilty of murder at least and you offer immunity to the other four, you better be right about the fifth because if you're not, then you've just given immunity to your color. Listen to Vaultline Haditha on the Lie Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode sponsored by HomeBase. HomeBase is built for small businesses trying to do it all. The neighborhood coffee shop, the local gym, the family run restaurant.

34:08With HomeBase, you can schedule your team, track time, run payroll, and manage hiring from one easy app. So you can spend less time chasing time sheets and more time running the business your customers love. More than 150,000 small businesses already use HomeBase to keep their teams on track. Start free at joinhomebase.com. HomeBase, built for small businesses that do it all. Welcome back to the beginning with Michael Brown. I know it's been a summer 36, maybe 48 hours now, depending on when you're listening to this program. But nonetheless, here we are 25 years and a day later. And I think we have a choice. As I said earlier in the last segment, ignorance was an excuse 25 years ago in 2001 because I can tell you from being inside those rooms. I'll never forget.

35:089-11, 25 years ago, was on a Tuesday. This year it was on a Friday. But on that Tuesday, I found myself being flown back by the United States Air Force back to Andrews Air Force Base. When immediately to the White House, had meetings the next morning met again. We had the CIA director there, Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Transportation, the Vice President was there, the National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice was there, the entire cabinet was there. We were all there. I sat at the table and I listened and I listened closely. Because my role in that meeting had to do what was going to happen domestically. Not for him. I was there to be ready that if anything that we did, in a foreign country, if that affected us here, I had to be prepared for that.

36:10So ignorance was really on display the day after. We listened very closely to George Tenant, the director of the CIA at the time. What did you know? Give us the five W's. The who, where, when and why? And we listened intently to what he thought, what he believed, what the intel was telling us. And as the president would walk through the room, going to us each one by one. What do you have to say about that? What do you think? How would you respond? What would you do? I remember thinking during all of those meetings, about how serious this was and how we needed to recognize that we were being attacked by Islamists. That was made clear by the CIA. It was made clear by the National Security Council. It was made clear by the National Security Director. I think Bush understood it. I think Cheney understood it. And I know that I certainly understood it.

37:11So ignorance may have been excused in those very early days. Because we generally did not understand everything about what had hit us. We may have believed that we knew exactly who hit us. But the why? Sure, we had the who, but there are still four other dubious. Who? We answered. What where, when and why? We still had the answer. We did not know. You have to remember that on that day after 9-11, we didn't know whether something else was coming. We had to prepare for that. But what was it? We didn't know. We had to keep everything locked down. The planes out of the sky. We were worried about biological, nuclear, all types of attacks. Every single one of us drawing on our own life experiences, drawing on our own expertise. How do we deal with that?

38:11So when I say that ignorance was an excuse in 2001, the ignorance was not about the who. It was about the what, where, when and why? Because we generally did not understand all of those things. We knew who to hit us. But excuse in 2026, our ignorance in 2026 is not an excuse. We've had 25 years, as I said earlier, a shelf full of evidence and a continent full of warnings. A strong country is not one that assumes it will always muddle through. A strong country is one that can look straight at our own soft spots, name them out loud without flinching, fix them while they're still tied, and refuse to let our own virtues be turned into the weapons that bring us down. I believe that is the choice in front of us. And it is a choice. And that is the good news

39:15buried in all of this, because a choice is a thing that you can still make differently. We knew what Muhammad Allah was telling us. We have in those 25 years read his will. We have heard his own witnesses. We just didn't want to believe that a man could look at everything that we had built. Everything we were ready to offer him and have him decide that he wanted to burn it down for his God. 25 years is long enough to keep pretending that we did not hear him. The time has come to hear him and to understand him. We have got to recognize that what we are fighting is an ideology. What we have to recognize is that that will that was written in the Hamburg apartment

40:15back in 1996. I think I said that was 1996 in that small apartment. Five years after he wrote that will on the morning of September 11, 2001, he flew American Airlines flight 11 into the north tower of the World Trade Center. Many people watched it on television. We watched the second plane. So on the 25th anniversary and one day of that morning, 25 years and a day later, we should go back to that Hamburg apartment because of what is missing from that will. Remember, as I said at the very beginning of this hour, the will had no politics in not a word about American foreign policy, not a single word about Israel, not a word about poverty, not a word about oppression or jobs or humiliation. It was a will about his religion. It was a will

41:19about his orthodoxy. It was his will that when you read it in the terms of what he was wanting to accomplish is a clash of civilization. It's a clash that we've seen before in human history, a clash between Western civilization that believes in the ideas that we believe in of individualism, of individual salvation, of individual beliefs in God, of individual beliefs of freedom to pursue your own self-interest. All the things that make this country great, every single one of them, opposed by an ideology living in the coat of a religion. It's not Muslim, it's not Islam, it's Islamist and unless until we recognize that it is the Islamist that want to clash with Western civilization. Why do you think they build enclaves? Why do you think they believe in Sharia law? Why

42:24do you think they want to implement that in these enclaves that they build around the country? Because they know that it cannot withstand our microscopic view of it. They cannot stand our autopsy up. It cannot withstand our view of looking at our Constitution versus their ideology. It clashes and until we admit that the clash is real, we'll fight this battle again. I don't want to, I hope we never have to, but the clash is still there 25 years and a day later and unless and until we recognize that difference between what we believe and what the Islamists believe, we'll never be able to stop them. They will always be lurking somewhere in the shadows, ready to take us down at a moment's notice. It is truly a clash of civilization that we have ignored

43:31for 25 years. I believe that we owe it to the 2,977, the almost 3,000 people that died on that day. We owe to recognize that this is a clash of civilization and let's beat that clash with our freedoms. Why are you dealing with listening to Armstrong and getting on demand? We're not boring. Lot of news is boring and tedious and depressing and makes you angry. You don't want to live your life like that. Hey, I'm Jack Armstrong. He's Joe Getty. We're Armstrong and Getty. We try to bring you the truth and help you figure out this crazy modern world. About something about a comedic tone. I believe that whoever was in that room and did that was a murderer. A new podcast series, Fault Line Haditha, tells the story of a shocking crime and a cover-up

44:35at the highest levels of the United States Marine Corps. If you've got five players and you offer immunity to four, you better be right about the fifth because if you're not, then you've just given immunity to your color. Listen to Fault Line Haditha on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.