Mike Pence: “I was here on September 11, 2001. I saw the skies filled with mud-brown smoke rising from the devastation at the…”

“I was here on September 11, 2001. I saw the skies filled with mud-brown smoke rising from the devastation at the Pentagon. I felt that anger that every American felt then and that continues to simmer in the lesser angels of our nature to this very hour. There is in my heartland Indiana district a small mosque in Muncie, Indiana, where each weekend a small community, less than 1,000 people of Arabic descent, gather to practice their religious faith, each of them contributing in important ways in our community. They reached me in the immediate hours after September 11 and expressed to me their concern as family people for their well-being in the wake of this attack that was unanimously effected by Arab extremists against our country. It was then that I issued a statement I read again today. I said then that the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are not representative of the overwhelming majority of Arabs or Muslims in the United States, and we could not allow anger at this horrible act to lead us to hate or discriminate against innocent individuals who happened to be of Middle Eastern descent. I said that terror has no regard for religion or ethnicity, and if we attack the innocent simply because of their ethnic status, we are no better than the terrorists who attacked us.”