America Marks 25 Years Since 9/11 — With a Seventh Silence for the Still-Dying
Four former presidents joined the Ground Zero commemoration as America marked a quarter-century since the attacks; for the first time a seventh moment of silence honoured the thousands who have died since from illnesses contracted at the site. Mr Trump, at the Pentagon, tied the anniversary to the present: “we’re being tested today”, calling Iran “the world’s number one sponsor of terror”. Some victims’ families used the day to demand he hold Saudi Arabia accountable instead.
Anniversaries measure distance, and this one measured how thoroughly the meanings have scattered: a wartime president conscripting the day against a new enemy; families litigating the old one; New York’s first Muslim mayor shaking Rudy Giuliani’s hand at the memorial while the ceremony’s final speaker condemned those who turned grief into Islamophobia. The seventh silence is the day’s truest addition — the attack’s toll still compounds through dust-borne disease, a slow casualty list that outgrew the first. And the geopolitical rhyme went unspoken but not unnoticed: twenty-five years after one Middle Eastern war began in Manhattan, another is being managed from the same city’s UN podium next week. Watch how the war rhetoric borrows the anniversary’s moral capital — it already started at the Pentagon.