A group of New York Muslims recently took umbrage with the specific wording on the town of Owego’s new 9/11 memorial and requested that the phrase “Islamic terrorists” be removed to avoid offending peaceful Muslims.

The Islamic Organization of the Southern Tier wrote a letter to city officials in Owego criticizing the language used for the memorial describing the perpetrators of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. The memorial to the 9/11 victims, which will be dedicated Saturday, states that “19 Islamic terrorists” carried out the attacks. The group recommended that the wording be altered in order to avoid a “broad brush” that would paint the entire religion of Islam in a dangerous light and affect “the many Muslims who live in the Southern Tier,” according to Fox News.

“I don’t live in a politically correct world, I live in a historical fact world … whether it’s American, homegrown, Christianity, Islamic, you call it what it is.”

City officials were not quick to relent.

“They want us to change the word from ‘Islamic terrorist’ to either ‘terrorist’ or ‘al-Qaida terrorist,'” City Manager Donald Castelluci told Fox News’ Todd Starnes. “I sent them back an email saying I disagreed with their premise 100 percent.”

The memorial’s entire inscription reads as follows: “On September 11, 2001, nineteen Islamic terrorists unsuspectedly boarded four airliners departing East Coast airports to hijack the planes and carry out a series of coordinated attacks against the United States. This is a tribute to all the lives lost that day and to the heroic sacrifice of all who rushed to help. As Americans, we honor their memory by living our lives in freedom. We will never forget.”

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By demanding the phrase “Islamic terrorists” be replaced with a revisionist designation, the Islamic Organization of the Southern Tier invited backlash and criticism from those who do not wish to see the tragedy’s history scrubbed for the mere sake of political correctness.

“I don’t live in a politically correct world,” Castelluci told WICZ-TV. “I live in a historical fact world and [terrorism], whether it’s American, homegrown, Christianity, Islamic, you call it what it is. And we don’t whitewash things, especially here. And we think we’ve done the accurate citing of what happened.”

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Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani agreed with Castelluci, saying that the Muslims’ reluctance to acknowledge the “Islamic terrorists” who carried out the attacks would be akin to Giuliani asking to take the word “mafia out of our history books” because of his own Italian heritage.

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“My reaction to the Italian mafia was real simple: I’m Italian-American, I’m not embarrassed about them, I don’t belong to them. I want nothing to do with them and they represent the bad part of my ethnic background,” Giuliani said Tuesday on “Fox & Friends.” “Every ethnic background has a bad part. There’s a bad part to the Islamic religion.”

“The good part of the Islamic religion shouldn’t feel at all hurt by ‘Islamic terrorism.’ They should feel angry about it, they should feel like — maybe even stronger than I do — they should be wiped out,” Giuliani added, saying that people “shouldn’t become defensive about bad people in your group” because that “makes it more difficult to overcome.”

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