As we approach the 25th anniversary of 9/11, Basem Boshra, Senior Director of Journalistic Standards and Public Trust at CBC News, Canada’s largest publicly funded state media apparatus, instructed his staff to refrain from referring to 9/11 as a “terrorist attack.” Instead, he insists: “the hijackings led to passenger jet crashes in Washington, DC, Pennsylvania and Manhattan.”
This is an obvious attempt at historical revisionism. Its true intent is pedagogical. A regime’s deeds are always guided by its opinions. And opinions about the United States in Canada have acquired a character that turns what ought to be an attack on Western civilization into something, at best, ambiguous and, at worst, justifiable. The CBC walked back the 9/11 memo over the weekend, but it’s important to understand the standard that produced it.
CBC can’t get anymore ridiculous right?
New memo tells CBC journalists not to call 9/11 a terrorist attack.
What do you think of this?https://t.co/qjl1S8zp48— Brian Lilley (@brianlilley) August 26, 2026
Boshra appears to be another beneficiary of unfettered Islamic immigration in Canada. Many commentators will therefore argue, with reason, that open borders and naïve multiculturalism have security repercussions. While true, it is insufficient. The deeper question is: into what climate of opinion was this man received?
For decades, Canada has formed its political self-knowledge in direct opposition to the United States. This is especially true of the Left, for whom “anti-American” is synonymous with “progressive” or “enlightened.” It is no exaggeration to say that anti-Americanism is a cornerstone of Canadian public orthodoxy and a potent instrument of successful electoral demagoguery. The career of the current Prime Minister, Mark Carney, is inseparable from this posture.
To be “not American” is, for many Canadians, a moral predicate.
This may seem trivial; a sort of provincial snobbery. But the United States is not merely one nation among many. It is the profoundest political expression of the principles of the West: equality, natural rights, and liberty. To despise America then is to despise Western Civilization. While not obvious, anti-Americanism is how hatred of Western Civilization expresses itself within the West.
Anti-Americanism rarely confines itself to policy criticism. Rather, it calls into question the regime’s legitimacy and justice. It says or implies that the American project is a standing injustice. Once this opinion is popularized, attacks on American targets are easily reinterpreted. They cease to be understood as crimes against a common civilization and are instead seen as replies to provocation.
This is the point at which a moral climate becomes a national security threat. The distance between ideas and actions is not as great as one may think. In this year alone, the American consulate in Toronto has been the target of two separate shooting attacks. In Halifax, a man was charged this month with making a bomb threat against the U.S. consulate.
The connection to Islamic terrorism here is related. These terrorists define themselves by a rejection of what they call “Western decadence.” By this, they mean the entire architecture of the West, not certain moral laxities. The United States, the most visible and powerful representative of that architecture, naturally becomes their primary target.
When they encounter a West habituated to describe the United States as racist, imperialistic, and fundamentally unjust; when they see a nation like Canada instructing its youth that moral virtue consists in distancing themselves from America; when they hear, almost everywhere in the educated world, a chorus of delegitimizing rhetoric about the American regime: then they reasonably conclude that they confront a disarmed civilization unwilling to defend itself. The line between “America is wrong” and “America has no right to exist” may be clear to the philosopher. It is not clear to the fanatic.
The situation is made more grave by the fact that the same anti-Americanism cultivated abroad flourishes within the United States. In its universities, media, and halls of power, the United States is treated as uniquely malevolent. Young Americans are explicitly taught that their founding is criminal, its prosperity is the result of plunder, and that its foreign policy is conquest.
Rarely are they introduced to the arguments by which the founders justified the regime, or to the thinkers, both ancient and modern, who supplied its foundations. The regime is condemned before it is ever understood.
This internal anti-Americanism gives a peculiar force to external anti-Americanism. It allows foreign critics to say: “We only repeat what your own best minds say about you.” It makes it more difficult for American statesmen to speak of the nation’s legitimacy without being accused, even at home, of propaganda. And it confuses the public by blurring the line between reasonable criticism rooted in the founding principles and wholesale repudiation.
Anti-American terrorism, whether the target is the World Trade Center or American consulates in friendly nations, is thus the armed manifestation of a broader intellectual disposition. It presupposes, for its moral justification, what our professors now teach: that the United States is an obstacle to a more just world. The terrorist draws one conclusion from that premise; the professor, another. Yet the premise is identical. From a national-security standpoint, this shared premise is the essential problem.
A supposed friend or ally whose political class rises to power by means of anti-Americanism is in danger of becoming, willingly or not, an auxiliary to those who seek to harm Western Civilization. Indeed, it supplies in respectable language the very delegitimization on which our enemies rely.
If this current fashion of contempt for America continues to spread among allies and dominate higher education at home, then one can predict, without resort to prophecy, that attacks like 9/11 or those against the consulates in Canada will multiply. At that point, the decision will already have been made that the American regime does not deserve to endure.
The warning is simple: Canada, the United States, and the West writ large are on the precipice of returning to the delusions of September 10. Chiefly, the liberal fantasy that commerce cures fanaticism, peace is perpetual, and that enemies simply require more diplomacy. Those delusions survived the terrorist attacks because they flatter the vanity of people who believe their refusal to judge has elevated them above both nature and history.
Our enemies do not share this delicacy.
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Dimpee Brar currently serves as the Director of Engagement for Allies for a Strong Canada. She is a writer whose work can be found in the Federalist, American Spectator, the Western Standard, and the Toronto Sun. She appears frequently on various podcasts and radio shows. You can follow her on X: @isthisdimpeeb
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