As this report explains, 9/11, on its eighth anniversary, is being recast as “a day of national service”:

“Instead of us simply remembering the horrible events and more importantly the heroes who lost their lives on 9/11, we are all going to turn into local heroes,” said Ted Tenenbaum, a Los Angeles repair shop owner who offered free handyman services Thursday and planned to do so again Friday.

Similar donations of time and labor were planned across the country after President Barack Obama and Congress declared the day would be dedicated to service this year for the first time.

Some Americans are suspicious about the new commemoration, though, fearing it could overshadow a somber day of remembrance for nearly 3,000 people killed aboard four jetliners and at the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon, and a field in western Pennsylvania.

Well, count me among the suspicious — and the outraged. This is quite obviously part of the grand exercise in amnesia, in recasting 9/11 as a feel-good celebration, as opposed to the act of war and Islamic-fundamentalist terror it was.

I’d be less suspicious had not the idea for de-horrifying 9/11 come from the crowd who has gone to war, not against those who would kill Americans, but against those who protected us and extracted life-saving information when we were most at risk. I’d be less suspicious had the president not set forth on a charm offensive with the “Muslim world,” in which through winks and nods and spitting back to them their own twisted version of history, the president assured them that America finally gets just how delinquent we’ve been and just how insensitive we’ve been to the Muslim world. I’d be less suspicious of the “plant a tree on 9/11” crowd if a “truther” hadn’t made it to the White House and hadn’t received a rousing defense from many “respectable” liberals when he was finally shoved out the door — so as not to embarrass the president on 9/11, which isn’t really about 9/11 anymore.

It isn’t just the public that needs the unfiltered and undiluted reminder each year, it is very sadly the president and a great deal of the political establishment. The moral preening that accompanies the president’s systematic and obsessive attacks on his predecessor’s anti-terror policies thrive in an environment in which the reaction to 9/11 is made out to be pathological and excessive, in which 9/11 itself is drained of meaning, and the efforts to defend America in muscular fashion are attributed to paranoid fantasies. None of that works so well if we recall clearly the events of 9/11, the ideology that animated the murderers, and the political environs from which they sprang. As Fouad Ajami in a blisteringly candid column explains, we’d do well to recall that 9/11 comes from “the wellsprings of Islamist radicalism”:

The impulse that took America from Kabul to Baghdad had been on the mark. Those were not Afghans who had struck American soil on 9/11. They were Arabs. Their terrorism came out of the pathologies of Arab political life. Their financiers were Arabs, and so were those crowds in Cairo and Nablus and Amman that had winked at the terror and had seen those attacks as America getting its comeuppance on that terrible day. Kabul had not sufficed as a return address in that twilight war; it was important to take the war into the Arab world itself, and the despot in Baghdad had drawn the short straw. He had been brazen and defiant at a time of genuine American concern, and a lesson was made of him.

No Arabs had been emotionally invested in Mullah Omar and the Taliban, but the ruler in Baghdad was a favored son of that Arab nation. The decapitation of his regime was a cautionary tale for his Arab brethren. Grant George W. Bush his due. He drew a line when the world of the Arabs was truly in the wind and played upon by powerful temptations. Mr. Obama and his advisers need not pay heroic tribute to the men and women who labored before them. But they have so maligned their predecessors and their motives that the appeal to 9/11 rings hollow and contrived. In those years behind us, American liberalism distanced itself from American patriotism, and the damage is there to see.

And now the appeal to 9/11 is muted and diffused because the Obama crowd would rather 9/11 not be about 9/11. It is shameful, but it is not surprising. This administration just isn’t into the war on terror. So go plant a tree.