violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic
faith. And it’s important for my fellow
Americans to understand that. The English
translation is not as eloquent as the original
Arabic, but let me quote from the Koran,
itself: In the long run, evil in the extreme will
be the end of those who do evil. For that they
rejected the signs of Allah and held them up
to ridicule. The face of terror is not the true
faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all
about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t
represent peace. They represent evil and
war.^36In 2001 there was little reason why the American people
should have known that much about Islam, after all, the first
massive bomb attack on the World Trade Center in 1993
had failed,^37 and two major terrorist attacks against the USA
in 1999 had also failed,^38 suggesting that Islam was not
much of a real threat to Americans at home. However,
following the massive escalation in the threat to Americans
on 9/11, it was to be expected that ordinary people would
look to their President (their Commander in Chief) for an
explanation and contextualization of such shocking events.
President Bush was not only claiming expertise on the
contents of the Koran but hammering that point home to
the public by purporting to have read the Koran in
Arabic: there could be no clearer marker of expertise, than
to have peppered his talk with claims about how much more
eloquent was the message of Islam as found in the original