Eric Trager was the Esther K. Wagner Fellow at The Washington Institute.
Articles & Testimony
President Obama should condition any meeting with the Egyptian leader on a clear and public renunciation of the Muslim Brotherhood's continued 9/11 revisionism.
The raising of an al-Qaeda banner by the angry mob that breached the U.S. Embassy in Cairo on Tuesday -- the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks -- was disturbingly apt. Huge majorities in major Muslim countries prefer baseless conspiracy theories to the facts of what happened that other Tuesday morning 11 years ago. Although al-Qaeda routinely brags about its "achievement," 75 percent of Egyptians, for example, still deny that Arabs carried out the attacks, as a Pew study reported in July 2011.
This denial of history has policy relevance for the United States: Mass rejection of the facts of 9/11 undermines U.S. global counterterrorism efforts. Persuading Muslims to set the record straight is a condition for any successful counterterrorism strategy...
