“As President Biden noted during his recent visit to Israel, America itself has at times fallen short of our higher values when engaged in war, and in the aftermath of 9/11, the U.S. government wasn’t interested in heeding the advice of even our allies when it came to the steps we took to protect ourselves against Al Qaeda” (emphasis added).
That was the composite character president David Garrow charted in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, in his October 24 statement on the Hamas invasion of Israel.
With no identification of the “allies” and no details of their “advice” to the U.S. government, it’s hard to know what the former president was talking about. In similar style, the two winos in the famous Bill Cosby routine also produced “incoherency.” That was funny, but the former president is serious.
Obama and Biden have been talking up the “mistakes” the USA allegedly made after 9/11, implying that it was full-on “Islamophobia” on the home front and a vast military campaign abroad. That invites a look back.
On September 11, 2001, President Bush said, “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” Sounds good but there was no massive military campaign abroad against nations such as Iran, a major sponsor of terrorism, and Pakistan, where 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden found refuge. The 9/11 terrorists were all Muslims, but President Bush was at pains to distance the attack from any connection with Islam.
“The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam,” Bush said on September 17, 2001. “That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.” Muslims “make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country, and they need to be treated with respect,” Bush said. “Women who cover their heads in this country must feel comfortable going outside their homes,” and so on.
After 9/11 there was no massive wave of attacks on Muslims in the United States. Obama is hoping that people don’t know or forgot what happened, and that they will take his word for it. Fortunately, some reminders about the composite character have surfaced in “The Obama Factor,” an August 2 interview in Tablet.
Obama was reportedly infuriated when David Garrow exposed Dreams from My Father as a novel. For Tablet’s David Samuels, “there was something about this fictional character that he created actually becoming president that helped precipitate the disaster that we are living through now.” Samuels has a point.
Remember, “if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor,” and Nidal Hasan’s terrorist mass murder at Fort Hood was “workplace violence,” not even gun violence. And don’t forget the planeloads of cash to Iran’s Islamic regime, still chanting “death to Israel, death to America.” As inspector Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) said, in all this excitement people may have lost track.
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