In line with the White House issued talking points to “minimize references to al-Qaeda.”
(Daily Caller) — President Barack Obama’s speech memorializing the thousands of 9/11 terror victims played down the identity and purpose of their attackers.
“Ten years ago, America confronted one of our darkest nights,” Obama said at the beginning of his Sunday night speech at the Kennedy Center. ”Mighty towers crumbled. Black smoke billowed up from the Pentagon. Airplane wreckage smoldered on a Pennsylvania field.”
Obama did not identify the attackers as Islamists or al Qaida members, and did not describe their purpose, but labeled them vaguely as “hateful killers.”
President George W. Bush was more candid in a Saturday speech at an event marking the tenth anniversary of the deaths of 40 passengers and crew who perished in the Flight 93 crash in Shanksville, Pa.
“They did nothing to provoke or deserve the deliberate act of murder that al Qaida carried out,” Bush said. He also did not identify their attackers as being motivated by Islamic theology.
Obama’s decision to downplay the religious motivations of the 9/11 strike reflected his current policy of downplaying al Qaida, the international Islamist movement, and of downplaying tensions between Americans, immigrant Muslims and some of their U.S.-based advocacy groups.
Prior to Sunday’s commemorations, guidelines the White House issued to administration officials urged them to downplay al Qaida. The terror group’s members “still have the ability to inflict harm . . . [but] Al Qaeda and its adherents have become increasingly irrelevant,” according to a copy of the guidelines publicized Aug. 29 by the New York Times.