Choose Your Heroes Wisely

Earlier this month, America got three stories that expose a stark contrast, and almost no one noticed.

On September 11, the country marked twenty-five years since Danny Lewin, an IDF Sayeret Matkal veteran and Akamai co-founder, became the first person killed in America’s deadliest terrorist attack, and since Flight 93’s passengers forced their plane into a Pennsylvania field short of Washington. Days later, 60 Minutes aired the first interview with Air Force officer Dude 44 Bravo, who spent 50 hours behind enemy lines in Iran with a broken back after his F-15E was shot down near Isfahan. In between, rapper Macklemore (Benjamin Haggerty) was pulled from Ed Sheeran’s tour after Patriots owner Robert Kraft barred him from Gillette Stadium, citing antisemitic rhetoric and imagery.

Ask the average American to name any of them. Most will get one, and it won’t be the first three.

The man in seat 9B: Lewin sat one row behind hijacking ringleader Mohamed Atta on Flight 11. When Atta and a second hijacker rose toward the cockpit, Lewin, a former officer in Israel’s elite commando unit Sayeret Matkal, got up to stop them, and a third hijacker, who was seated behind him, slashed his throat. He bled out on the cabin floor; twenty minutes later, the flight he couldn’t save hit the North Tower.

He has a memorial made from Ground Zero steel in Israel, the only one outside the US listing every 9/11 victim by name. Israel built him a monument; America barely built him a Wikipedia page. A commando who charged two hijackers bare-handed to save a plane of Americans is, in the country he died defending, nearly a footnote.

The passengers who did the math: Flight 93’s passengers made airphone calls, learning what had already happened in New York and at the Pentagon. Todd Beamer, Mark Bingham, Tom Burnett, and Jeremy Glick did what no one on the first three planes could: vote, organize, and storm the cockpit. Beamer’s “let’s roll” became the closest thing that day produced to a rallying cry. The plane went down outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, short of its target. Forty passengers and crew made that call in real time, families on the phone, almost certainly saving the Capitol or the White House.

The Air Force officer who had to survive alone: in April, an F-15E went down over central Iran near Isfahan, targeting facilities tied to Iran’s missile and drone programs. The pilot, Dude 44 Alpha, was recovered within hours. His weapons systems officer, Dude 44 Bravo, was not: his parachute failed to open properly, he hit the ground at over 70 miles an hour with a broken back and spent 50 hours evading Iranian forces before a rescue team reached him. He credited faith and training, not luck.

The rapper almost everyone can name: that week’s biggest story involved a musician who did far more than say two words. Opening for Ed Sheeran at MetLife Stadium, Macklemore wore a keffiyeh, projected footage of destroyed Gaza neighborhoods on the stadium screens, performed a song accusing Israel of “genocide,” and led anti-Israel chants. His verdict predates the evidence: on October 19, 2023, twelve days after Hamas’s massacre, mass rapes, and kidnappings, and eight days before Israel’s ground operation began, Macklemore posted that Gaza was an “unfolding genocide.” A verdict issued before a single soldier crossed the border isn’t an assessment, it’s a script. Curating war-zone images for sixty thousand people, with no mention of the group that massacred roughly 1,200 people in a day, is among the oldest propaganda techniques: let the picture make the accusation facts can’t sustain, as Leni Riefenstahl did at Nuremberg. The “genocide” charge doesn’t survive the numbers either: genocides annihilate a large share of a targeted population; this one hasn’t, not remotely. Macklemore repeated a blood libel with staging.

Kraft, who founded the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism in 2019, said the decision was about that pattern, not silencing advocacy for Palestinians. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez turned it into something else: “It’s become clear that this is not just about one music artist… but how just a handful of stadium owners and the elite can prevent an entire massive issue, in this case, the genocide in Gaza” … …arguing that powerful “elites” can suppress speech on Gaza.

Start with the premise buried in that sentence: that Gaza coverage is suppressed. Israel draws more global media attention, UN resolutions, and campus protest energy than any conflict on earth. A million Uyghurs remain in Chinese camps, tens of thousands of Nigerian Christians have been murdered by Islamist militias, Yemen’s civil war has starved children by the hundreds of thousands, and Hamas has killed Palestinians for collaboration and dissent – none of it drawing a Macklemore visual or an AOC mention. An issue this dominant is the opposite of suppressed. It’s selection by people with no credibility to lecture anyone about whose lives matter.

There’s a second layer in AOC’s framing: “a handful of stadium owners and the elite.” Progressives who’d catch a coded slur against any other minority hear “the elite” applied to a businessman opposing antisemitism and detect nothing. A shadowy elite secretly deciding what the public sees is among the oldest antisemitic tropes there is, especially aimed at a Jewish philanthropist who’s spent a decade fighting that hate.

None of this is about Macklemore’s right to say what he wants, or Kraft’s right to decide who performs in his stadium. Both rights are real; neither is the point.

The point is what a society chooses to remember and lionize. In the West today, Danny Lewin does not trend. The Flight 93 heroes do not trend. Dude 44 Bravo does not trend. This isn’t uniquely American: every algorithm-driven culture runs on the same incentive – outrage monetizes, sacrifice doesn’t – quietly training a generation which one to mistake for the other.

Heroism used to mean something you did. Now it too often means something you said, ideally from a stage to a camera. Within a day, singer Paloma Faith called Macklemore “a rare and important voice… a hero.” Rosie O’Donnell, Kehlani, and Finneas echoed similar praise, for a multimillionaire losing a few tour dates, while gaining millions of clicks and followers. Lewin got a memorial, Flight 93’s passengers a national park, Dude 44 Bravo one 60 Minutes segment months later – not a wave of celebrities in a day – because none performed for an audience. They got a knife to the throat, a vote over an airphone, a broken back in Iran.

Who a society calls a hero is not a minor detail; it’s close to the whole diagnosis. A culture that reaches for “hero” for a multimillionaire who lost a few tour dates, over men who kept a hijacked plane out of the Capitol, has told you what it’s stopped recognizing as heroic. Choose your heroes wisely: the choice was never about them; it’s a mirror. Whoever earns that word confesses what you believe matters most and handing it to whoever says the most faddish thing on the biggest stage shows how cheap that adulation has become.

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.