BEDMINSTER, New Jersey — After nearly 21 years and what seems to be an endless river of pain, this is what the 9/11 story has come to.
Three relatives of victims of America’s deadliest terror attack — a wife who lost her husband; a mother who lost her son; a son who lost his father — stood Tuesday on a patch of grass by the local public library in this community of rolling hills and horse pastures. Two miles away sat a golf course owned by former President Donald Trump.
It was 9:20 a.m. The humidity and 90-degree temperatures of recent days had softened. But tempers still steamed over Trump’s decision to host a golf tournament financed by Saudi Arabia despite new declassified FBI files with evidence that at least a dozen Saudi officials provided financial and logistical support to the team of Islamists who pulled off the Sept. 11 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people.
The LIV Golf tournament, at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, begins Thursday with a one-day pro-am competition, followed on Friday by a three-day, 54-hole tournament featuring such stars as Phil Mickelson, Bryson DeChambeau, Brooks Koepka and Patrick Reed.
The LIV Golf series, which features several tournaments in the coming months, culminating at Trump’s Doral course in Miami, describes itself as “golf as you’ve never seen it.” That may be one of the most prophetic understatements of sports — in this case, with the additional controversy of 9/11 and Saudi Arabia’s alleged links to Islamist terrorism lurking in the shadows.
None of the golfers signed up to play have commented in depth about accusations that they are wrongfully taking money from a regime that also supported the 9/11 attacks, in which 19 operatives of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida terror network — 15 of whom were Saudi citizens — hijacked four commercial jetliners on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. The hijackers crashed two jets into the twin towers of New York City’s World Trade Center, a third into the Pentagon and a fourth into a farm field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
On Tuesday, on the lawn outside Bedminster’s Clarence Dillon Public Library, here was Terry Strada, who lost her husband, Tom, in the rubble of the trade center’s twin towers, which collapsed after the hijacked jets crashed into them. Only four days before Tom perished, Strada, who lived at the time in nearby Basking Ridge, gave birth to the couple’s youngest child.
“Offensive, disrespectful,” Strada said of…
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