For the 25th anniversary of 9/11, George W. Bush said this:

“This decision, shortly thereafter, was to go to a mosque,” Bush said on Wednesday evening. “I did so because I was deeply concerned about stories of women in coverings being harassed at shopping centers, particularly in Michigan.”

Bush revisited his 9/11 response during a conversation with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at “A Legacy of Service: America at the 25th Anniversary of 9/11,” held at his presidential center in Dallas. …

“I want you to talk about a couple of those events. You talked about going to the Islamic Center and trying to make sure that our Muslim American citizens knew that we didn’t blame them for what had happened,” said Rice.

“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 added.

That turned out to be a greatly-criticized statement, for obvious reasons. At the beginning, however, it’s understandable he didn’t want vigilante justice wreaked on ordinary Muslim-Americans. But that could have been done by just saying it – that ordinary Muslims were not terrorists and should not be attacked in retaliation. To characterize Islam itself as a “religion of peace” was absurd then and is absurd now.

That’s not to say there aren’t Koran verses supporting peace, but there are Koran verses for almost anything, including many supporting war. Nor is the religious text the only point, although the Koran probably has more advocacy of war than exists in other religions. More importantly, it’s pretty obvious that, at least in the last few decades, people acting in the name of Islam are involved in an enormous amount of the terrorism and war-making in the world, both internal (Muslim on Muslim) and internationally.

Polls are an indicator of how much support violence has in the Muslim world, including in the US. For example, in a 2024 poll (obviously taken post 10/7), 37% of Muslims in the US saw Hamas positively. And in July of 2026 the Hamas approval rate among Muslims in America had risen to 44%.

Those are, quite simply, terrible figures.