The 1990s were a genuinely hopeful decade. The Soviet Union had just collapsed, and there was real optimism that peaceful, negotiated solutions could resolve even the world's most stubborn conflicts. In the Middle East, that optimism centered on the Oslo peace process (1993), which much of the world expected to end, in the summer of 2000, with a final treaty.

Instead, the talks collapsed — not because the offer on the table was unreasonable (it included the previously unthinkable division of Jerusalem), but because the other side walked away from it. Two months later, a wave of violence broke out, bringing sustained attacks on civilians, including a wave of suicide bombings that would define the next several years.

In hindsight, this was arguably the first sustained, ideologically-driven jihadist campaign against a democracy in the modern era — a year before 9/11. At the time, almost nobody described it that way. It got filed under 'conflict' and 'unrest,' 'freedom fighters resisting colonialism.' The language obscured both the nature of the violence and the deliberate targeting of civilians behind it.

That framing set a pattern that would repeat for the next twenty-five years: blame the democracy under attack, rather than examine what actually motivated the attack on it. This day traces that pattern of self-blame back to where it started and to its lamentable current dominion among the very Western infidels who are its intended victims.