Liz Cheney’s group Keep America Safe is running an ad against the so-called Ground Zero mosque implying that only some people “remember” 9/11.

I remember.

I was in fifth grade.

Around 8 a.m. Central time, I returned to the community room of Weber Elementary. I remember joking with my friends as we walked through the doors, jumping up to touch the metal frame, and as always, missing.

I remember seeing the TV perched in the corner of the room set to Channel 7 showing two sky scrapers, one burning. Those of us just coming back from the gym assumed the obvious — that we were, for some reason, watching a movie. I remember seeing one of our counselors crying.

Something was wrong.

Those of us in Mr. Lawson’s fifth- and sixth-grade class ran to our homeroom. Mr. Lawson was working at his desk when we got in, drinking coffee from an absolutely ridiculous 64-ounce Kum & Go mug. We told him to turn on the news.

We watched United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower. When the Pentagon was hit as well, it was obvious we were under attack.

I remember watching the towers collapse.

I remember not crying. My mom had told me that when JFK was shot, her teacher cried. Mr. Lawson was stoic. Clearly, this couldn’t be worse than that.

I remember watching President Bush address the nation that night.

I remember being inspired by his rhetoric. I felt the swell in my chest of patriotism and pride.

I remember reading of the murder of American Sikhs mistaken for Muslims during the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

I remember my utter lack of surprise.

I remember learning about Islam and how Muslims are members of Islam. I remember learning about the dozens of praises that Muslims give to Allah. This seemed to me, at the time, a strange custom. But as I’ve grown, I have come to believe more and more strongly that we must live and let live — a creed enshrined in our founding documents.

I remember my mom telling me that if America declared war on Islam, it would not be a war that we could win — that there were more than a billion Muslims in the world. I remember realizing that that was exactly what Al Qaeda was trying to provoke us into doing.

Preventing the construction of the proposed Islamic cultural center (which would contain, among other things, basketball courts, a swimming pool and, yes, a mosque) a couple blocks from Ground Zero would prove that America has indeed changed.

It would demonstrate that we have lost the ability to differentiate between radical extremists and a peaceful religion with more than 1.5 billion members. It would demonstrate that we no longer think of the Constitution as a set of principles but as a technicality to be waived as needed. It would demonstrate that 19 men armed with box cutters and a terrorist network operating from a cave were capable of fatally damaging the founding spirit of this great nation.

If Al Qaeda succeeds in redefining Islam as a violent, extremist religion — and it kills me that I need to iterate that it isn’t — it will have successfully co-opted the deaths of 2,976 Americans at Ground Zero and thousands more in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This cannot be.

We must prove that America is still that shining city on the hill and that it will take far more than a handful of extremists to even dim, let alone extinguish, our light.