Of all the meaningless platitudes and unfulfilled promises made to the general public by politicians, by far the most disappointing and heartbreaking is the phrase “never again.” Associated with the destruction of the Twin Towers on 9/11, the phrase was meant as a message of determination and resolve to not allow radical Islamist terror to commit such atrocities on U.S. soil ever again. Now, three weeks before the 25th anniversary of September 11, the FBI arrested a 35-year-old Albany woman who had pledged allegiance to ISIS and planned to bomb the New York State Capitol. This short-term success in stopping such an attack is indicative of the long-term failure we as a nation have had in guarding ourselves against radical Islamist ideology.
Jessica Bowie—who converted to Islam about five years ago and used the name Aisha Saif—did not hide her motive. According to the criminal complaint, she swore bay’ah to the Islamic State, posted “Praise be to Allah for September 11,” and told FBI sources posing as ISIS facilitators that she wanted to “destroy as much of the building as possible and kill the senators while they are meeting.” She scouted the Capitol five times, bought nails to use as shrapnel, planned to carry the device in a DoorDash bag, and talked about fleeing afterward to ISIS territory in Syria—then coming back for Times Square or the White House.
This was not “mental health.” It was not “political violence” in the abstract. It was jihad, in the same ideological line that murdered 2,977 people in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania a generation ago. The same ideology that murdered 1,200 on October 7 and kidnapped hundreds more, including dozens of Americans. The same ideology that ransacked Europe and the United States for the past two decades.
Governor Kathy Hochul would not say that. She would not dare acknowledge the ideology when she requires the votes of those who adhere to that ideology.
Her statement thanked the FBI and State Police, noted that security at the Capitol had already been tightened “amid a rise in political violence and threats against public officials,” and declared that “political violence has no place in our state.” She did not mention ISIS. She did not mention Islamism. She did not mention that the suspect had praised the massacre of September 11.
That omission is the story. Planned attacks are unfortunately an everyday occurrence, and the agencies tasked with stopping those attacks are filled with incredible men and women who do a wonderful job. It is the job of our leaders to call out the ideologies that will harm their citizens and constituents. Some ideologies, like white supremacy, are easy for Democrats to denounce. Twenty-five years after the towers fell, however, the governing left still treats the ideology that produced 9/11 as the one thing that must not be named.
In the years after 9/11, a second campaign ran alongside the wars and the Patriot Act: a campaign to make “Islamophobia” the greater domestic danger. Criticism of political Islam—sharia supremacy, jihad as a duty, the treatment of apostates and Jews, the refusal to accept a secular constitutional order—was recoded as bigotry against a race or an identity group. The result was not kindness. It was a speech code.
Meanwhile, immigration from Muslim-majority countries continued and then accelerated. The foreign-born population from those countries rose from about 1.8 million in 2000 to more than 4.1 million by 2024. Lawful permanent residents from Muslim-majority nations went from roughly 102,000 in FY 2000 to about 186,000 in FY 2023. The U.S. Muslim population roughly tripled over a generation.
Most of those people are not terrorists. That is true - and it is not the point. Nations are not required to import large numbers of people from civilizations that have not made peace with liberal democracy and then pretend the ideology travels in a separate suitcase. Europe already ran that experiment. The American left insisted we could run a bigger one and call the skeptics racists.
Dearborn, Michigan, is the exhibit. It is not under formal sharia. It is a city whose civic life has been remade by a concentrated Arab and Muslim population, a Muslim mayor, mosques that dominate the skyline of daily life, and a political culture in which American taboos about Israel, jihad, and assimilation are treated as insults. Nearby Hamtramck elected an all-Muslim city council. That is not a conspiracy theory. It is a demographic and political fact.
From that world came Rashida Tlaib - who has used “from the river to the sea,” treated Hamas’s “resistance” as a product of “apartheid,” and built her career in the CAIR-adjacent ecosystem that federal prosecutors once tied to Hamas fundraising networks. From Minnesota’s Somali refugee project came Ilhan Omar, who has spent her time in Congress treating American counterterrorism and the U.S.-Israel alliance as the real scandal. Neither woman planted a bomb. Both have spent years laundering the moral vocabulary of movements that do.
Now the bench is deeper. Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist who took the oath on the Quran, is mayor of New York City. Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive who supports abolishing ICE and calls the Gaza war a genocide, just won the Democratic Senate nomination in Michigan and could become the first Muslim in the U.S. Senate.
You do not have to believe these officials are secret ISIS members to see the pattern. The American left has built a coalition in which Islamist grievance is just another oppressed identity, Israel is the original sin, and any demand that newcomers accept the Constitution over the ummah is “hate.” That coalition now runs City Hall in New York and is one election away from a Senate seat in a battleground state.
Gad Saad called it suicidal empathy: The Western habit of extending infinite moral concern to people and doctrines that would not return the favor. After 9/11, that habit became policy. We were told the real work was to protect Muslims from American suspicion. We were not told to protect Americans from an ideology that has, for 1,400 years, divided the world into the house of Islam and the house of war.
Jessica Bowie is a convert. She was not smuggled across the border last week. She was radicalized here, online, in a country that still pretends ISIS is a random brand of “extremism” with no parent ideology. That is what happens when the official culture treats the doctrine as untouchable. The videos are free. The excuses are supplied by the faculty lounge and the party platform. The governor then files the plot under “political violence,” next to whatever slogan is convenient that week.
The threat has not vanished because we stopped saying its name. An ISIS-inspired truck attack killed 14 people on Bourbon Street on New Year’s Day 2025. Federal cases against ISIS supporters have continued through 2025 and 2026, including plots aimed at Detroit nightlife, military targets, and now the New York State Capitol. Jihadist attacks are not the most common form of American political violence. They remain among the most lethal when they succeed, because the ideology aims at mass death, not a press conference.
Hochul’s statement was the tell. The plot was ISIS. The target was the Capitol of the largest state in the union. The suspect thanked god for 9/11. The governor talked about “political violence.” Twenty-five years after radical Islamist terrorists struck New York, we have a mayor who tacitly supports the ideology of the hijackers and a governor too afraid to call out the ideology by name. Our problems cannot be ignored away, no matter how much Democrats would like them to be.
Moshe Hill is a political analyst and columnist. His work can be found at www.aHillwithaView.com and on X at @HillWithView.