“The wide gap between U.S. President George W. Bush’s words and deeds vis-à-vis Islam and Muslims doomed to failure his speech at the United Nations on September 19, which could neither appease Muslims nor pacify the ever growing Islamophobia.

“President Bush has denied that the West is engaged in a war against Islam as a ‘false propaganda’, but confirmed his country’s determination to carry on with its ‘war on terror’ and its ‘great ideological struggle’ at the start of the 21st century exclusively against Muslims and Muslim countries.

“Bush is also on record as saying that ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ and praising Islam’s ‘commitment to religious freedom’, statements that were criticized by the popular U.S. televangelist Pat Robertson.

“These rare expressions of respect to Islam would have been welcomed by Muslims were they not swept to utter oblivion in the collective memory of the American public by his incessantly flowing anti-Muslim terminology: Islamic radicalism, Islamic fascism, Islamic extremism and extremists, Islamic or Islamist terrorism and terrorists, radical Islamists or Islamist and Islamic radicals, etc.

“His September 19 speech was almost exclusively confined to the Middle East, an overwhelmingly Muslim region. The absence of even a reference to the North Korean pillar of his so-called ‘axis of evil’ was revealing enough that his WWIII ‘on terror’ has shrunk to focus exclusively on the Muslim Middle East.”

Nicola Nasser at Global Research, 28 September 2006