Dear Friend,
One year ago today, Charlie Kirk was shot and murdered while taking questions from college students in Utah. He was 31. I spoke with him the night before. It was a working Zoom call, the kind we had done many times, going through the questions about Israel he knew were coming on his campus tour. Nearly half the questions Charlie got on campuses were about Israel, and he wanted to be ready. I have not stopped thinking about that call.
At the end of it, Charlie said something I keep coming back to. He said the four pillars of Western civilization are the United States, Israel, Jews, and Christians. One sentence. That was Charlie. He could put into a single line what most people cannot explain in an hour, and he understood, as a Bible-believing Christian, that the enemies of Israel are the enemies of America and of everything both nations were built on.
This week my colleague Rabbi Elie Mischel sat down with me for a longer conversation about Charlie: how we first met over a Shabbat dinner in Phoenix, why he never went down the anti-Israel road that so many young conservatives are now walking, where I think his blind spots were, and how the Israel Truth Network, the rapid-response project we run today, was his idea from start to finish. He named it and pushed for it, but did not live to see it launch. I hope you will read the interview here.
Tomorrow marks 25 years since September 11, 2001. Twenty-five years is long enough for the memory to fade, but the forces that brought down the towers have not gone anywhere. This anniversary deserves more than a moment of silence. It deserves a real conversation with people who were there.
This Monday, September 14, I will be moderating a live webinar, 25 Years After 9/11: Three Men. One Morning That Changed Everything, with three men who lived that day from three very different places. Frank Gaffney, one of America's leading national security experts, who has spent 25 years warning about the threat we still refuse to name. Dan Burmawi, who was a Muslim teenager celebrating the attacks that morning and who later left Islam and now fights the ideology he was raised in. And Jeffrey Morgenstern, whose sister Nancy went to work in the towers that day and never came home. Terror, loss, and redemption, told by the people who carry them.
This is not a history lecture. It is a conversation about where we are now, 25 years later, and what it will take to defend the civilization those attacks were meant to destroy. I hope you will join us.
Monday, September 14 at 2pm Eastern / 1pm Central / 9pm Israel
REGISTER HERE
With blessings from Israel,
Rabbi Pesach Wolicki
