The 25th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on America on Sept. 11, 2001 has come and gone. Despite criticisms and pleas from many of the families of the victims as well as others, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani attended the ceremony held at the 9/11 Memorial Plaza in what was Ground Zero on that awful day. After days of massive attention focused on the commemoration of the attacks, the media and the political class quickly moved on to other contemporary issues and crises.
But before this moment fades into memory, it’s worth pausing and considering how understanding this historical event not only informs how the world thinks about 9/11 and its aftermath. Equally, if not more important, is the ability of mainstream liberal media, opinion leaders and politicians to shape the narrative about it, guiding discourse about today’s challenges that ought to, but often aren’t, linked to the threat the attacks represented.
Who are the true victims of 9/11?
Take, for example, the home page of The New York Times on Friday. Among its top stories were the following items: “Islamophobia Shaped a Generation of Muslim New Yorkers” and “Facing Islamophobia, Mamdani Keeps Focus on 9/11 Victims.”
As conservative commentator Ben Shapiro put it in an X post that described the feelings of many: “If you were an alien who landed on Earth this morning, and you were reading the top headlines on the NYT’s webpage, you would immediately assume that 9/11 was an attack on Muslims.”
Those stories weren’t the only ones the newspaper published that day about the anniversary, some of which discussed the actual victims of the Al-Qaeda terrorists who were responsible for the murder of the 2,977 people at the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, the Pentagon in Washington and on a field in Shanksville, Pa. Still, Shapiro’s comment aptly characterized the way so much of the country’s chattering classes prefer to think about 9/11.
They may be willing to note that the crimes committed that day were the doing of Al-Qaeda, an Islamist terror organization. But once that basic fact is acknowledged—many conspiracy theorists on the far left and far right prefer, of course, to blame the Jews for this and every other global calamity—they prefer to treat the attacks as if they were not connected to Islamist beliefs about the need for jihad against the West. Nor do they note that those ideas are supported by hundreds of millions of Muslims worldwide, even if some argue that a majority of the world’s 1.9 billion believers in Islam do not.
More to the point, they have continued to treat Muslims as if they were the primary victims of the 9/11 attacks because of an alleged backlash against them, which fueled the wave of Islamophobia the Times references in its articles.
The newspaper, like much of the mainstream press, treats this backlash as if it were an obvious fact that can be asserted without the need to prove it. Indeed, they have been doing that for the better part of the last two decades. But, as I first pointed out in October 2010 in Commentary magazine, the claim that American Muslims were subjected to widespread and/or systematic discrimination or violence is simply a myth. At that time, the hoax about a 9/11 backlash was used to support an effort to build a Muslim community center and mosque on the footprint of one of the buildings destroyed in the World Trade Center disaster.
The failed effort to build that center and mosque was rooted in a desire to flip the narrative about the terror attacks to focus on the sufferings of Muslims, rather than people who were murdered by Al-Qaeda or the generational war Islamists were waging against the West. While it was never built, the supporters of this project did succeed in doing something more important: They helped set the tone of media commentary about Islamophobia then and since, while downplaying the truth about Islamism.
A myth promoted by interested parties
To point this out is not to deny some examples of prejudice or increases in reported hate crimes against Muslims after 9/11. But most were anecdotal and not rooted in objective proof. Indeed, the studies often cited as backing up these claims are the works of groups funded by left-wing donors whose purpose is to depict the United States as Islamophobic. Others, like Georgetown University’s Bridge Institute, were created and funded by Qatar, the main sponsor of the Muslim Brotherhood.
More objective studies, like FBI hate-crime statistics, point to a very different conclusion. They show a huge increase in religion-based hate crimes in the past 25 years. Its victims, however, are Jews, not Muslims. Though making up less than 2% of the American population, reported hate crimes against Jews have consistently made up the overwhelming majority of such offenses in the United States.
U.S. government officials, starting with President George W. Bush, who laughably repeatedly insisted that Islam was “a religion of peace,” bent over backwards to disassociate Al-Qaeda (and then its successors and fellow Islamists, such as ISIS, Hamas and Hezbollah) from normative Muslim ideas. At the same time, American popular culture similarly generally shunned depictions of Muslim terrorists in films and TV shows or explorations of how they were inspired by their faith for fear of validating prejudice.
This dovetailed with the way progressives were imposing new doctrines about race, intersectionality and settler-colonialism on American academia during this same period. It led to a generation being indoctrinated in toxic ideas that labeled Muslims as Third World peoples who were always victims of “white” imperialism and racism, regardless of their own actions. At the same time, Jews and the State of Israel were falsely depicted as “white” oppressors who were always in the wrong, even when they were—as during the Hamas-led Palestinian-Arab terror attacks in southern Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023—the victims of atrocities, torture, rape, kidnapping and murder.
Radical doctrines v. the facts
While these radical obsessions exacerbated racial divisions in the United States, they led most of the chattering classes to assume that Americans were Islamophobic while granting a permission slip to an unprecedented surge of antisemitism, especially after Oct. 7.
But as the Times’s account of Mamdani’s plight as a victim of Islamophobia makes clear, most of what falls under the rubric of that form of prejudice is actually something very different.
If many New Yorkers and others are critical of Mamdani, it’s not because they hate Muslims. It’s because they understand that he is someone who has dedicated his career to supporting Islamists and seeking the destruction of the only Jewish state on the planet. The same applies to other supposed contemporary victims of Islamophobia, like Michigan Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.
Indeed, the organization most often cited by liberal media sources as the authority on Islamophobia—the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)—was founded as a front group for fundraisers for Hamas and is guilty of spreading Jew-hatred. The majority of what CAIR labels as “Islamophobia” is nothing more than noting prejudice against Jews and examples of antipathy for Western civilization that emanates from the Muslim community.
And far from such views being relegated to the margins where hate groups dwell, they have been mainstreamed by the corporate press, as well as the former Biden administration, which created a “National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia and Anti-Arab Hate” by following CAIR’s lead. Just as shocking was Biden’s willingness to include CAIR as a consultant in its confused and ineffective effort to counter antisemitism.
If a generation of Muslims thinks of themselves as victims, it is not because they have been subjected to a campaign of hate and violence in the United States. It’s because they have been taught—as is the case with so many others of their fellow Americans—that their country is irredeemably racist. They may deny that they are the ones spreading hate. But their widespread involvement in spreading prejudice and bigotry against Jews and Israel, or organizing pro-Hamas rallies on college campuses and in U.S. city streets after Oct. 7, cannot be denied. Yet since their prejudices have been validated by those who focus on Islamophobia while ignoring antisemitism, they continue to point to 9/11 as if they are the ones who were wronged that day and ever since.
The impulse to oppose all forms of prejudice is laudable. Yet one of the primary reasons why antisemitism is out of control in the United States is because those who spread it have largely been granted a pass for doing so because of lies about America after 9/11 and leftist doctrines about race. The belief that the Jews and Israel are inherently evil and guilty of horrible crimes like “genocide” and “apartheid” was once only believed by those who dwelled in the fever swamps of American politics on the far left and far right. But now, such blood libels are routinely given credence by publications like the Times.
By treating the backlash myth as fact and treating Mamdani—a politician whose entire career has been dedicated to spreading blood libels against the Jewish state—as a victim of prejudice rather than a hate-monger, outlets like the Times didn’t just get the 9/11 anniversary story wrong. Sadly, it has become part of the mindset that has allowed American antisemitism to fester and go mainstream.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS. Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
