Twenty-five years after 3,000 Americans were murdered by radical Islamist terrorists, George W. Bush sat down for an interview and repeated the exact same line he gave us in the rubble. "I made it clear that Islam was a religion of peace," the former president said, marking the anniversary by defending the faith of the men who flew planes into buildings.
The man who launched two decades of war over 9/11 would like you to know the attackers' religion had nothing to do with it.
Bush's comments came timed to the 25th anniversary of September 11. He elaborated that "Islam was a religion of peace, not a religion of war, and that these people subverted their" religion — the same framing he deployed from the Islamic Center of Washington six days after the towers fell. A quarter century later, the line hasn't aged well. The numbers have.
When Bush made that original declaration in 2001, the Muslim population in the United States was approximately 2 million. Today it stands at roughly 5.5 million. Global terrorism deaths in 2025 alone reached 5,582 across 2,944 attacks, according to the data. Four Islamist groups accounted for 3,869 of those deaths — 70 percent of the worldwide total.
That's the backdrop against which a retired president re-emerges to lecture the country about tolerance.
Here's what he said in 2001
Bush's reappearance comes during a political moment that makes the "religion of peace" talking point land like a punchline nobody asked for. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani — who just this week handed a ceremonial 9/11 pen to a lawyer who defended an al-Qaeda terrorist — sits in Gracie Mansion. Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib hold congressional seats. Abdul El-Sayed ran for Michigan's Senate nomination. Hasan Piker became a Democratic cause célèbre before the party quietly tried to distance itself.
None of that happened in a vacuum. It happened in the political space Bush himself created when he decided the appropriate response to the worst attack on American soil was to pre-emptively absolve an entire religious framework of any structural criticism.
Here's what Bush conspicuously never addresses in these anniversary appearances: the trajectory. He doesn't talk about the 5,582 dead from terrorism last year. He doesn't mention that Islamist organizations still dominate global attack statistics by a three-to-one margin over every other category. He doesn't grapple with what it means that the political class he helped build now includes elected officials who can't bring themselves to condemn Hamas without a qualifying clause.
He talks about peace. He's been talking about peace for 25 years.
The conservative base moved on from George W. Bush a long time ago. The wars he started cost trillions, the nation-building failed, and the "compassionate conservatism" that once defined his brand became the template for every RINO surrender that followed. What remained was the one line — Islam is a religion of peace — repeated so often it became a loyalty test for the Washington establishment.
Bush passed that test again this week. The 70 percent of global terrorism deaths attributable to four Islamist groups did not get a mention.
Comments are closed.