Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, George W. Bush sat down with his former secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, to revisit the decisions that defined his presidency — including a line he has never retreated from. “I also made it clear that Islam was a religion of peace, not a religion of war, and that these people subverted their religion,” Bush said, according to an account of the conversation published by American Thinker. The remark resurrected a phrase Bush first used in the days after the towers fell: “Islam is peace.”
For J.B. Shurk, the writer of that American Thinker piece, the repetition is not nostalgia — it is evidence of a failed moral framework that has shaped a quarter-century of American policy. Shurk’s argument is blunt and sweeping: he contends that Islam is not a religion at all but “a cult of conquest, misery, and war,” and that Bush, along with Barack Obama, bears significant responsibility for the consequences that have followed.
The numbers Shurk cites
Shurk builds his case around a set of figures he presents as proof that the “religion of peace” framing collapses under scrutiny. He writes that there have been 50,000 Islamic terror attacks since 9/11, and that both the number of Muslims and the number of mosques in the United States have more than doubled in that same period. Shurk frames the demographic shift as a direct betrayal of the troops Bush sent abroad: Bush told Americans that the fight had to be taken “over there” so it would not have to be fought “over here,” yet, Shurk argues, his administration and Obama’s invited more Muslims into the country even as American service members died overseas.
He also reaches back twenty-five years to the cultural terrain, recalling that a woman in a burqa in the Midwest would once have drawn shock and worry from passersby, and asserting that the sight is now too common to register. These claims are presented as Shurk’s own assertions and framing; he does not cite a source for the 50,000 terror-attack figure or the doubling statistics within the piece.
A broader indictment of Europe
Much of Shurk’s essay shifts the lens to Europe, which he describes as bleeding out under what he calls “Islamic bloodlust.” He cites a recent German report indicating that foreign migrants — most of whom, he writes, are Muslim — account for 47 percent of all violent crime in Bavaria. He also points to Switzerland, where he says over 80 percent of North African asylum-seekers have been accused of committing crimes while in the country, and to the United Kingdom, which he argues is granting settlement or citizenship to a new migrant every single minute while resettling arrivals into villages whose residents have objected.
The detail Shurk treats as most damning is a nine-page booklet the British Home Office reportedly hands to Islamic migrants, explaining basic legal boundaries: that rape and pedophilia are illegal, that women have equal rights, that beating women, mutilating girls’ genitals, having sex with children or unconscious women, and leaving babies alone are all prohibited. Shurk quotes the document’s guidance that women must consent to sex in all situations and are allowed to work, study, and make their own decisions without permission from men. He notes a section specifically addressing rape, which warns that sex without consent is rape, that it is a serious crime in the UK, and that it can affect an asylum claim — and that even if a child says yes, it is still illegal.
For Shurk, the mere existence of such a document is the argument: a population that needs to be told not to rape or beat women and children cannot plausibly be described as belonging to a religion of peace.
Persecution of Christians and the domestic battlefield
Shurk also amplifies the work of writer Antonio Graceffo, whose essay this month, in Shurk’s telling, documents Muslims persecuting and murdering Christians across Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Asia — killings he says are carried out with hammers, machetes, axes, and guns, and that he describes as a genocide ignored by corporate news media and Western governments alike. He names Nigeria, the Congo, Mozambique, Syria, Pakistan, Iraq, Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, Turkey, Algeria, and Indonesia as places where Christian lives are threatened, and asks why Bush, who presents himself as a Christian, stays quiet about it.
From there Shurk turns to American politics, arguing that the consequences of Bush’s framing are now visible at home. He points to members of Congress whom he says openly support Hamas and Hezbollah; to a Muslim mayor of New York City whom he labels a terrorist sympathizer, elected twenty-five years after the attacks; and to a Muslim candidate for the U.S. Senate in Michigan who, he says, agrees with Muslim members of Congress that 9/11 was worse for Muslims because of the Islamophobia that followed. He describes a pattern of attacks — vehicles, bombs, firearms, knives — alongside street protests he characterizes as demanding justice for Hamas.
Shurk also targets institutions. He writes that, in preparation for the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, public school administrators in Fairfax County, Virginia, instructed teachers to avoid associating the attacks with Islam, to treat Muslims as heroes, and to create safe spaces for Muslim students. He notes that Virginia’s Democratic governor commemorated the anniversary, in his characterization, by ignoring the Islamic mass murder and treating the deaths of three thousand Americans as something like an inexplicable natural disaster. And he contrasts the behavior of New York’s Muslim mayor, who he says laughed during the Ground Zero ceremony, and New York’s Democratic governor, who he says left early to appear on cable news.
Underneath the political points lies a cultural worry: Shurk claims Gen Z Americans are largely indifferent to 9/11, and that some even celebrate Osama bin Laden. “Americans promised never to forget Islam’s war against the West,” he writes. “Twenty-five years later, it is obvious that too many did forget.”
What is being argued
Shurk’s piece is not a reported news story but an argument, and its central claim is that Bush’s insistence on separating Islam from the terrorists who invoked it was not a gesture of tolerance but an act of avoidance — one that made it harder for Americans to name what he sees as an existential threat. He repeatedly asks why Bush, who is eighty, feels entitled to tell Muslims what their religion means, comparing it to telling Black Americans what it means to be Black, and asking whether Bush considers himself an expert on the Quran. He marshals an array of assertions about Muhammad’s life and character, and about the nature of Islamic violence, none of which he attributes to outside scholarship.
The counterargument that Bush and others have made — that distinguishing a faith from its violent extremists protects ordinary Muslims and undermines terrorists’ recruiting — goes unaddressed in Shurk’s essay. That omission is itself part of the point: for Shurk, the distinction is the problem, and the past twenty-five years are the proof. Whether readers accept his evidence or his conclusions, his essay captures a strain of argument that has moved from the margins toward the center of one party’s politics — and it makes the case that the language of the Bush era deserves to be relitigated, not just remembered.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/bush-s-islamic-appeasement-greatly-damaged-america/