For those of you who may be new to the “End of Day” report, on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I was driving past the Pentagon on my way to Capitol Hill when a hijacked plane slammed into the nerve center of America’s military power. The force of the explosion rocked my car and those around me.

As I veered onto the Memorial Bridge I could see smoke and flames billowing out of the Pentagon. I had friends and neighbors who worked there — people who dedicated their lives to the defense of our nation. Some had survived foreign battlefields only to die at the heart of America’s government and power.

Here we are 18 years after 9/11. Some of the children born on that fateful day are today joining the ranks of our great military to fight in a war that still rages around the world.

It still grates on me when I hear people refer to 9/11 as “a tragedy.” We don’t refer to Pearl Harbor as a tragedy. It was more than a tragedy. It was an act of war. It was an atrocity. 

It is also grates on me when someone like Rep. Ilhan Omar says, “Some people did something.” And apparently Nicholas Haros was also upset by that outrageous statement. Thank you, Mr. Haros! You spoke for millions of us yesterday.

For the past 18 years, there has been an ongoing effort by Islamic supremacists to bring down the West. Virtually every major European city has had to drag its dead out of the rubble.

London. Paris. Berlin. Brussels. Madrid. Manchester. Nice. 

There have been similar atrocities in cities around the world.

Bali. Mumbai. Sri Lanka. Nairobi. Ankara. Belsan.

We have experienced attacks in San Bernardino, Fort Hood, Orlando, Boston, Chattanooga, Little Rock, and Manhattan. An untold number of attacks have been thwarted by the diligent work of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies. 

Unfortunately, many Americans have gone back to sleep, even though the threat remains. Others have turned the war against radical Islam into a civil-rights issue. Perhaps the most depressing part of what has happened in the years since is that so few are willing to publicly name the enemy. 

The struggle we’re in for the survival of civilization is often referred to as “the war on terror.” That is ludicrous. It’s like referring to World War II as a “war on Panzers,” without any reference to the Nazis. Incredibly, The New York Times appeared to blame “airplanes” for the attack.

All over the Western world, young people are lectured to respect Islam. Fair enough. We should be respectful of other faiths and views. 

But I am not aware of any educational effort in the Islamic world, not in Saudi Arabia or Somalia, Indonesia or Iran, aimed at teaching young Muslims to respect westerners and non-Muslims. In fact, in many Muslim nations, they are taught Islamic supremacy and it comes in many forms, whether Sunni or Shiite. 

When Donald Trump called for “extreme vetting” and tried to restrict immigration from certain Islamic nations for obvious reasons, many people resisted his commonsense efforts to secure our homeland and denounced his order as a “Muslim ban." 

Incredibly, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, has been able to avoid justice after all this time due to our politically correct confusion. It was recently announced that his trial has been scheduled for 2021. 

(By the way, just a few years ago, Mohammed wrote in a letter from Gitmo to President Obama that I had to be destroyed.)

Americans who watched their sons and daughters die at the Pentagon and the World Trade Towers have since died themselves without seeing Mohammed brought to justice.

In addition, hundreds of jihadists, particularly during the Obama years, were released from Gitmo. Lorraine Arias-Beliveau, whose brother was murdered on 9/11, said yesterday that Gitmo seemed like a "sanctuary state” to her. What a powerful analogy. 

In World War II, we did things very differently. Two teams of Nazi saboteurs infiltrated the United States in the summer of 1942. They were captured within days, tried by a military tribunal, and executed in a matter of weeks.

The Nuremberg trials of the remaining Nazi leadership began in November 1945 and concluded in October 1946. Ten defendants sentenced to death were executed two weeks after the trials ended. That’s the kind of decisiveness that stems from courage and confidence in the righteousness of a just cause. 

And the defense of Western civilization against the barbarism of radical Islam, which today is demanding a second Holocaust through the annihilation of the state of Israel, is most certainly a just and righteous cause.

Trump Wins

President Trump once again defied the conventional wisdom by putting his political capital on the line Monday night. He and Vice President Pence went to North Carolina to campaign for state Sen. Dan Bishop, who was locked in a tight race for the Ninth Congressional District.

The GOP barely held the seat in the 2018 elections. The Republican candidate won a bitter primary fight and prevailed in the general election by just over 900 votes. But the result was invalidated after allegations of voter fraud surfaced and a new election was ordered.

Bishop ran as an unapologetically pro-Trump candidate, describing himself as “pro-life, pro-gun and pro-wall.” The Democrats ran Dan McCready, their candidate in the 2018 race, who first declared for the seat in 2017. 

The last public poll, conducted before President Trump’s Monday rally, gave McCready a three-point lead.

Yet after Trump’s visit, and after running for more than two years, McCready lost Tuesday night by a much wider margin (nearly 4,000 votes) than he did last November.

Congratulations, Congressman-elect Bishop! And congratulations, Mr. President and Vice President Pence!