... This battle fundamentally is about what you think of the nature of truth, the value of life, and the content of community. You're at a university which basically believes that no one ever has the whole truth, ever, because you're human. It's part of being a human being. It's part of the limitation imposed on us by God. We are incapable of ever having the whole truth. They believe they got it. Because we don't believe you can have the whole truth, we think everybody counts and life is a journey. Hopefully we get wiser as we make this journey, and we learn from each other, and we think everybody ought to be entitled to make the journey. They believe that because they have the truth you either share their truths or you don't. If you're not a Muslim, you're an infidel. If you are and you don't agree with them, you're a heretic, and you're a legitimate target. Even a six-year old girl who went to work with her mother at the World Trade Center on September 11th. We believe that a community is you. Doesn't matter where you come from, doesn't matter what your religious faith is, you just got to accept certain rules of the game: everybody counts, everybody has a role to play, we all do better when we help each other, and we ought to argue like crazy because nobody's got the truth and we're trying to get closer. They believe communities of people are those who look alike, act alike, dress alike, and just to make sure they enforce the rules. That's why you see all those sanctimonious guys beating those women with sticks in the Taliban in the movies on television. They paint the women's windows black, so God forbid, they won't be able to see outside and might be polluted, and in some cases even shoot people when they go outside where they shouldn't go.

... This is not a perfect society, but it is one that is stumbling in the right direction. When you strip everything I said today down to one sentence, it basically comes down to this. Ever since civilizations began, people have fought with their own inner demons over whether what we have in common is the most important thing about life, or whether our differences are the most important thing about life. That's what all this comes down to. I'm glad America is a lot more different than it was when I was your age. This is a much, much more interesting country. But what gives us the freedom to celebrate our differences is the certainty of our common humanity. Otherwise we'd have to fight each other over our differences. But this is very hard to do. Remember this is a country that was born in slavery. In my lifetime Martin Luther King was killed just before, a couple of months before I graduated from Georgetown, trying to preach this message. Bobby Kennedy killed two days before our college graduation, trying to preach this message. The greatest spirit of the age, Gandhi, killed not by a mad Muslim but by a Hindu who thought he was a traitor because he thought India could be a home for the Muslims and the Sikhs and the Jains and everybody. Sadat killed not by an Israeli commando, but by the predecessor of the number two guy in Al Quaeda twenty years ago, angry at him, not a good Egyptian because he was not a faithful Muslim believing as he did in secular government and peace with Israel. And my great friend, Yitzhak Rabin killed not by a Palestinian terrorist but by an Israeli who thought he was not a good Jew or a patriotic Israeli because he wanted peace and a homeland for the Palestinians as the surest means of security for the Israelis.

... This is not easy to do, but I'm telling you, no terrorist campaign has ever succeeded, and this one won't if you don't give it permission. You can have the most exciting time in human history, but we have to defeat people who think they can find their redemption in our destruction. Then we have to be smart enough to get rid of our arrogant self-righteousness so that we don't claim for ourselves things that we deny for others. Then in the end, we've got to be able to stand up and say, we are not against Islam, but we want to have a clear understanding about what we think is the nature of truth, the value of life, and the content of community. If we do that, you will still live in the best time the world has ever known.

(Some Remarks as delivered by President William Jefferson Clinton Georgetown University). November 7, 2001