Britain stood with America against Islamic terrorism after 9/11. Now, it's scared to say the enemy’s name

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The 'special relationship' will not stay effective if only one side is still willing to confront Islamist extremism, the US commentator and columnist writes

Today marks a quarter-century since 19 men turned passenger jets into weapons and murdered 2,977 people in New York, Washington and a Pennsylvania field.

Sixty-seven of the dead were British - the largest loss of any nation except America. Nato invoked Article 5 for the first and only time.

Britain did not send empty words. It sent real solidarity that turned into action.

That day still shows clearest why the Special Relationship is more than a slogan. It was solid.

This spring, King Charles and Queen Camilla laid flowers at the 9/11 Memorial.

Grosvenor Square and the Queen Elizabeth II September 11th Garden in Lower Manhattan still mark the British dead.

Those gestures count. They show the institutions holding the line when political talk turns careful.

The careful talk is the problem now. This weekend the Premier League and EFL will not ask clubs for a coordinated minute’s silence or black armbands. They did on the 10th anniversary.

A working group decided automatic commemorations for distant tragedies risk becoming empty.

A poll published this week finds a third of Britons believe parts of London have become no-go zones where sharia dominates.

The national terrorism threat level has stood at Severe since April. Islamist extremism still makes up the majority of the counter-terror caseload and of those held for terrorism offences.

It grew from a slow choice — almost never stated outright — that naming the ideology is riskier than the ideology itself.

On the 20th anniversary, Douglas Murray pointed out that some commemorative documentaries had become so vague a viewer with no prior knowledge might finish them unsure why the towers fell, or half-convinced America had somehow produced its own attackers.

Five years later, the habit is stronger. The BBC’s own long-standing editorial guidelines still instruct journalists to avoid using the words “terrorist” or “terrorism” in their own voice without attribution - a policy that has applied even to 9/11 itself.

Official language reaches for “extremism,” “community tensions” and “hate”.

Even the current Labour Government has at times preferred phrases such as “extreme violence clearly intended to terrorise” rather than the plain word terrorism.

The specific theology that drove the hijackers, the 7/7 bombers and the plots still being disrupted gets treated as an awkward detail.

This argument has run for 25 years. Charles Moore noted more than a decade ago that the deepest Western split after 9/11 was not over Iraq or Afghanistan but over whether the attacks showed a civilisational challenge or an exaggerated, largely self-inflicted problem.

Britain’s political class has mostly preferred the second reading. Prevent was watered down. Progressivism insisted on moral equivalence between threats that are not the same.

The result is a country that can still deliver excellent intelligence work and still lose its nerve when plain speaking is required.

The cost is concrete. Sovereignty needs borders that work and a national identity confident enough to say what it will and will not take in.

Civilisation needs a Britain and an America that still recognise the same enemies. The alliance that answered 9/11 has not vanished. It is simply no longer equally willing to describe what it answered.

An American President who speaks without embarrassment about the threat sits in the White House.

A British Government with a different agenda sits in Downing Street. The deeper bond - language, law, the shared dead - outlasts any single Government. It does not outlast a generation taught that the West’s enemies are mainly a misunderstanding.

Millions of Americans, and Britons, have no living memory of that Tuesday morning in 2001 when the Twin Towers fell.

If the commemorations stay vague, they will inherit the rituals without the reason. Britain’s constitutional inheritance — parliamentary government, common law, a monarchy that still stands for continuity — was not built by people who refused to name their adversaries.

It was built by people who knew institutions only survive when the civilisation that made them is ready to defend itself.

Today the names are again being read in Lower Manhattan. Moments of silence will be kept. The Tribute in Light will rise. Britain will remember its 67. The question is whether it will also remember why they died, and whether that memory is still allowed to shape policy instead of just ceremony.

The alliance that stood together on September 11, 2001 remains essential.

It will not stay effective if only one side is still willing to say the enemy’s name.