9/11 anniversary: Do not allow terrorists to divide America: Obama

US president says they have delivered justice to Osama bin Laden

WASHINGTON: On the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, US President Barack Obama urged Americans to embrace the nation’s diversity and not to allow ‘terrorists’ to divide the country.

His comments came as Americans commemorated the September 11, 2001 attacks on Sunday with the recital of the names of the dead, tolling church bells and a tribute in lights at the site where New York City’s massive twin towers had collapsed.

“[Extremist] groups like al Qaeda and the Islamic State group [Da’ish] know that they will never be able to defeat a nation as great and as strong as America,” Obama said at a memorial service at the Pentagon, one of the sites attacked on 9/11.

“So instead they try to terrorise, in the hopes that they can stoke enough fear that we turn on each other,” the US president said, who observed a moment of silence Sunday at the Oval Office in honour of the nearly 3,000 people killed that day.



“And that’s why it is so important today that we reaffirm our character as a nation (...) our diversity, our patchwork heritage, is not a weakness. It is still and always will be one of our greatest strengths,” he added.

“This is the America that was attacked that September morning. This is the America that we must remain true to.”

He recalled that the US had dealt ‘devastating blows’ to al Qaeda. “We’ve delivered justice to Osama bin Laden.  We’ve strengthened our homeland security. We’ve prevented attacks. We’ve saved lives.”

In an indirect reference to the controversial anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant campaign rhetoric of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, Obama recalled that Americans were “a people drawn from every corner of the world, every colour, every religion, every background.”

Obama, who is a Democrat, has repeatedly criticised Trump’s statements, including the billionaire’s proposal in the wake of last December’s mass shooting attack in San Bernardino, California to ban Muslims from entering the United States.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 12^th, 2016.