It has been 11 years since that fateful Tuesday morning when 19 members of al-Qaeda mur-dered over 3,000 people by hijacking four planes and crashing them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. The Islamic extremists had declared war on America and we retaliated by sending troops overseas to deal with them. Americans became increasingly suspi-cious of individuals of Middle Eastern descent at the same time as anti-American sentiment spread abroad. 4,023 days later, the situation has gotten worse. Aggression by the Bush administration certainly infuriated the extremists, but disengagement by the Obama Administration has allowed them to gain power. What began as an attack on America has progressed into something much more terrifying: the formation of an Islamic Caliphate. This process began with the Arab Spring of 2011 and continued last week with attacks on U.S. embassies.

The Islamic Caliphate theory first became popular after the Arab Spring of 2011. The theory is that the revolutions were actually a cover for a movement to unify the Arab nations under the ban-ner of Islam. In other words, they concealed an organized attempt to create a so-called “United States of Islam.” At first I didn’t believe the Arab nations could ever coalesce into a single body. As events unfolded, however, I was enlightened. Events in Egypt were particularly illuminating. The Egyptians replaced an American ally with a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group whose slogan is “Islam is the Solution”. One of his first acts as presi-dent was to meet with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a man whose has vowed to “wipe Israel off the map.” This friendship between a man who sees the spread of Islam as the answer to the world’s problem and a man who wants to eliminate non-Muslims scares me. If this doesn’t make you at least entertain the possibility that Arab nations are working together in the name of Islam, then hopefully the events that happened this week will help you see the light.

When I turned on the news last Tuesday, I was speechless. America was under attack again. The media reported that the protests in Egypt and Libya were sparked by outrage over some anti-Islamic film vilifying the prophet Mohammed, but that is misleading. The people involved in the attacks were bloodthirsty America-haters who purposefully waited until the anniversary of September 11 to make their move. No content in any movie is justification for killing other human beings. I’m ashamed and insulted that the media is making such claims. The fact that these at-tacks happened on the anniversary of 9/11 is not a coincidence. These at-tacks were organized terrorist attacks against America by Islamic extrem-ists. In Cairo, the protesters tore down the American flag and replaced it with one that read, “There is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet,” and covered the walls in statements like “We have 1.5 billion Bin Ladens” and “United States of Muslim.” That seems to be more than a spontaneous reaction to some YouTube video to me.

The government’s response has been pathetic. President Obama’s first statement on the situa-tion amounted to nothing more than an apology for the video. Obama continues to alienate our allies and be cordial toward our enemies. He elects to go on David Letterman instead of meeting with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and he is willing to appease terrorists attacking American property and killing innocent Americans. These events would never have happened if Obama had not been so soft on the Middle East. Obama’s policy of disengagement in the Middle East, however, has left a void that al-Qaeda is only happy to fill. Things need to change. If they aren’t going to act like allies, we should not treat them as allies. $1.3 billion of U.S. aid goes to the Egyptian army each year and yet the inept individuals guarding the U.S. embassy let the protesters wander in. I won’t stand for this and neither should you. It’s time to take back the Middle East.

Contact Matt Eichel at [email protected].