US President Joe Biden called on his people to unite despite the political differences taking place in the United States, in a speech he delivered yesterday, Monday, during the commemoration of the 22nd anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001, which claimed the lives of about 3,000 people.
In his speech at a ceremony at a military base in Alaska, Biden urged the people to commemorate the attacks by renewing their components’ faith in each other, adding, “We must not lose our sense of national unity, let this be the common cause of our time.”
He also said that terrorism, including political and ideological violence, is the antithesis of everything the United States stands for.
This comes in light of the intense political polarization taking place in the country, amid expectations of a widening gap between Americans as the date of the next presidential elections approaches, in which Biden may compete with former President Donald Trump, who is being tried in several cases, including attempting to tamper with the results of the presidential elections in the state of Georgia in 2020, which His Democratic rival, Biden, won.
White terrorism
Biden’s call to reject terrorism and political and ideological violence comes at a time when the United States is facing the challenge of right-wing extremist groups that believe in the theory of white supremacy and have become a security challenge in the country.
Biden had accused supporters of his predecessor (Trump) in the Republican Party of following in his footsteps in embracing the theory of white supremacy and restricting voters’ rights, in a speech he delivered last October on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the inauguration of a memorial to Martin Luther King in the capital.
The president said that representatives of the Republican Party in the country, from state governors to officials charged with supervising elections, launched a “relentless attack” on voters’ rights before the elections to renew half of the members of Congress scheduled for next year, and the presidential elections scheduled for 2024.
On January 6, 2021, the United States witnessed riots that it was not familiar with before, when hundreds of Trump supporters stormed the Congress building and wreaked havoc in it, while members of Congress were certifying the victory of the Democratic candidate (Biden) in the presidential elections held. In November 2020.
Observers believe that the United States – which launched a relentless war on terrorism after the September attacks – today faces another challenge, which is domestic terrorism posed by extremist right-wing groups.
2,977 people were killed in the September attacks claimed by Al-Qaeda, as two planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers in New York, and a third plane crashed into the Pentagon. The fourth – which appeared to be targeting the Congress building or the White House – crashed in a wooded area in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after a counterattack by passengers, and none of the passengers on the four planes survived.
The late Al-Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden, justified those attacks at the time as a response to the ongoing injustice being practiced “against our children in Palestine, Iraq, Somalia, South Sudan, and elsewhere, such as in Kashmir and Assam.”
The September 11 attacks are still fresh in the minds of Americans, and what happened to the twin towers that collapsed in a flood of flame, dust and metal.
It is noteworthy that the United States launched two wars on Afghanistan and Iraq after the September 11 attacks, causing the deaths of more than 500,000 civilians, leaving more than 6,200 American soldiers dead, and costing Washington 4,000 billion dollars.
