Sept. 11 has been annually observed since 2001 as Patriot Day – that is, until Sept. 11, 2009, when President Barack Hussein Obama proclaimed it "Patriot Day and National Day of Service and Remembrance." Why would the Obama regime redefine Patriot Day into a community-organizing slogan?
Patriot Day is not a day to gayly attend a community-organizing meeting of ACORN, whose organizers Obama trained, whose lawyer Obama was, and to whose corrupt leaders Obama has conduited millions of taxpayer dollars.
Today, the third Friday of September, is annual National POW/MIA Recognition Day, dedicated to honoring and remembering all those who suffered as prisoners of war and all the thousands still missing in action. Retired Rear Adm. Jeremiah Denton, former U.S. senator, R-Ala., a Vietnam prisoner of war for seven years, seven months, who detailed the torture and suffering of American POWs in his powerful book, "When Hell Was In Session" (a new edition of which will be released by WND Books on Veterans Day), will be the keynote speaker at national ceremonies at the Pentagon. Will the original purpose of POW/MIA Recognition Day be the next changed by Obama?
Patriot Day is a day of solemn remembrance of the horror of 9/11/2001 and the need to stand united against the Islamist terrorism that caused the death of almost 3,000 innocent people, including over 400 fire, police and other emergency personnel who died in valiant attempts to rescue those victims.
Instead, Obama, a Saul-Alinsky-indoctrinated former "community organizer" cum president, diminishes the "Patriot" essence of Patriot Day to proclaim: "I call upon the people of the United States to participate in community service" as his first priority of 9/11 observances. The media almost universally reported Sept. 11, 2009, as "the first National Service Day."
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Thus, Obama and his regime have shamefully degraded Patriot Day by an act further evidencing his apparently unrestrained narcissistic self-worship. He apparently is so self-absorbed that he is unable to recognize that Patriot Day is not about him and his community-organizer agenda or his personality cult.
Patriot Day is about those innocents who died and those heroes who died trying to save those innocents. It is about remembering and honoring the ordinary Americans on Flight 93, who, knowing that they would die, rose up and fought the Islamist terrorists who had hijacked the plane in order to fly it into the Capitol. That patriotic spirit is what is needed if we are to defend American freedom from Islamist jihadist terrorism.
Remarkably, Obama issued a proclamation that speaks of thousands who were killed, but never identifies who or what killed them. How is it that Barack Hussein Obama never identifies the attack as terrorism, or the perpetrators as terrorists, or identifies them as Muslim fanatics, almost all 19 of whom were Saudi Arabian members of al-Qaida. Why?
Patriot Day was established as a result of the action of the U.S. House of Representatives, by a vote of 407 to 0, on Oct. 25, 2001, to adopt Joint Resolution 71, which requested the president to designate Sept. 11 each year as "Patriot Day" in remembrance of all those who died as a result of the 9/11 attack on America. Then-President George Bush, on Dec. 18, 2001, signed Joint Resolution 71 into law, establishing Sept. 11 as Patriot Day.
Since then, Patriot Day has become an American tradition – a day of nationwide solemn observances, especially among veterans, remembering the horror of 9/11, remembering terrorism's victims, remembering the heroes, and remembering the reasons why we must be prepared to stand and fight terrorism and the terrorists if we are to preserve freedom, just as we do on POW/MIA Day, Veterans Day, Pearl Harbor Day, Four Chaplains Day, Memorial Day or D-Day.
In his proclamation, Obama said he was changing Patriot Day because the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, adopted April 21, 2009, which reauthorized and re-formed many federal national service laws, "recognizes September 11 as a National Day of Service." Why would the Obama regime use this massive statute to set a new National Service Day on the already-existing Patriot Day? That is not explained, but is apparent: It is naught but cover for Obama to pursue his community organizer's agenda, so clearly set out in his mentor Saul Alinsky's "Rules For Radicals."
I, with other veterans, observed Patriot Day as Patriot Day, notwithstanding Obama's purporting to change a day of patriotic purpose into a community organizer's opportunity to change patriots into statist subjects or serfs kowtowing to government.
The nation should repudiate Obama's tortured redefining of Patriot Day. Congress should act to restore Patriot Day. And neither Obama nor any other self-obsessed, narcissistic politician should ever again attempt to pervert Patriot Day – or POW/MIA Day, Veterans Day, Pearl Harbor Day, Four Chaplains Day, Memorial Day or D-Day – from a day remembering and honoring those who lost their lives by acts of war, as 9/11 was, into an opportunity to advance that politician's personal political agenda or personality cult.
Rees Lloyd is a longtime civil-rights lawyer and a veterans affairs activist.