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Obama urges embracing diversity as US remembers victims of 9/11
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US President Barack Obama yesterday urged Americans on the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks to embrace the nation’s diversity and not to allow “terrorists” to divide the country.
Extremist organizations like al-Qaida and the Islamic State group “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 September 11, 2001.
“So instead they try to terrorize, in the hopes that they can stoke enough fear that we turn on each other,” said Obama, who had observed a moment of silence at the Oval Office in honor 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.”
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 color, every religion, every background.”
Obama, who is a Democrat, has repeatedly criticized 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.
In the 15 years since the al-Qaida suicide plane strikes on the Pentagon, New York’s World Trade Center, and in Pennsylvania, “the threat has evolved,” Obama said.
“With our stronger defenses, terrorists often attempt attacks on a smaller but still deadly scale,” he added, recalling the Boston marathon bombings, the nightclub massacre in Orlando in June and the carnage in San Bernardino.
Americans commemorated the 15th anniversary 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 collapsed.
As classical music drifted across the 9/11 Memorial plaza in lower Manhattan, family members and first responders slowly read the names and delivered personal memories of the victims killed in the worst attack on US soil since the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Tom Acquarviva lost his 29-year-old son Paul, who worked at financial services firm Canter Fitzgerald on the 101st to 105th floors of the North Tower, just above where the first plane struck. Paul was one of 658 Cantor Fitzgerald employees killed in the attack.
“We miss him terribly. Terribly, terribly, terribly. Not a day goes by that we don’t remember him,” Acquarviva said. But he felt a sense of hope: “There are more people here today than there ever have been.”
The ceremony paused for six moments of silence: four to mark the exact times four hijacked planes were crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon near Washington D.C., and a Pennsylvania field. The last two record when the North and South towers of the Trade Center crumpled.
It was held by two reflecting pools with waterfalls that now stand in the towers’ former footprints, and watched over by an honor guard of police and firefighters.
More than 340 firefighters and 60 police were killed on that sunny Tuesday morning in 2001.
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