Not every American president has sounded the right notes for our national pain after the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. Twelve days after Hamas unleashed its mass murder in Israel on October 7, 2023, President Joe Biden suggested that 9/11 was all about the Arabs and the Muslims.
"I know many of you in the Muslim American community or the Arab American community, the Palestinian American community, and so many others are outraged and hurting, saying to yourselves, 'Here we go again,' with Islamophobia and distrust we saw after 9/11,” Biden declared. He said after 9/11, America “sought and got justice,” but “we made mistakes, so I cautioned the government of Israel not to be blinded by rage.”
“Blinded by rage.” That’s Biden’s caption for the War on Terror, and President Obama wanted to cancel the T-word. It wasn’t a surprise from the man whose minister Jeremiah Wright said 9/11 was the “chickens coming home to roost” for American imperialism.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, all of us can quickly remember the national unity, when even the network news stars solemnly spoke in a unified way, for a brief time. But some were quick to jump off that bandwagon.
Radical leftist filmmaker Michael Moore was trashing the president three days after the mass murder. "Keep crying, Mr. Bush. Keep running to Omaha or wherever it is you go while others die, just as you ran during Vietnam while claiming to be ‘on duty’ in the Air National Guard. Nine boys from my high school died in that miserable war. And now you are asking for ‘unity’ so you can start another one? Do not insult me or my country like this!”
Six days after 9/11, ABC’s “Politically Incorrect” host Bill Maher started digging a grave for his ABC career with this beaut: "We have been the cowards. Lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away, that’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it -- not cowardly."
Then there was daytime talk-show legend Phil Donahue, who appeared on “The O’Reilly Factor” two weeks after 9/11. Naturally, Phil thought we had 9/11 coming: “We went alone when we bombed Tripoli at night, a crowded city where old people and children were sleeping. 1986, Reagan. We killed [Libyan dictator Moammar] Qaddafi’s kid, and lots of other children. One person said, well, several people, ‘Well, he’s adopted’ they said of the kid. And [in return] we got Pan Am 103, Lockerbie. Tell those loved ones, it was December 21, my birthday."
In The Nation magazine, Katha Pollitt wrote about arguing with her more patriotic daughter – who then attended high school blocks from the World Trade Center -- about what the American flag represented. She suggested a compromise: the flag “has to bear a wide range of meanings, from simple, dignified sorrow to the violent anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry that has already resulted in murder, vandalism and arson around the country and harassment on New York City streets and campuses.”
I will always remember driving into the crime scene at the Pentagon parking lot on that day as a journalist, after seeing plumes of black smoke billow past the hotels in the Crystal City neighborhood to the south. It’s a day you easily remember the outrage where you were. But 25 years later, in the Mamdani days, it can be a little demoralizing to realize where we are.
