Saturday marks twenty years since Islamic jihadis attacked New York City and Washington, and the establishment media is doing all it can to ensure that Americans grasp the true significance of those attacks: not that America was hit by a global jihad that has only gained in strength since then and could hit us again, but that Muslims were and are the true victims of that fateful day. In the last few days, the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press have published lengthy pieces to that effect, and more in this vein is certain to come this week.
The LA Times on Friday published a lengthy weeper entitled “Muslim youth in America: A generation shadowed by the aftermath of 9/11,” all about how some people say rude things to innocent Muslims just because some people did something way back two decades ago. The article begins: “On a rainy day during her sophomore year of high school, as Aissata Ba studied in the library, a photo popped into her phone. It showed a beheading by Islamic State militants, along with a caption in red letters: ‘Go back to your country.’” In the big bad, “Islamophobic” USA, the perpetrator of this horror got off scot-free: “Ba reported the incident. Administrators never tracked down the person who sent it.”
Then there was “the boy in sixth grade who would say ‘allahu Akbar,’ Arabic for ‘God is great,’ and throw his backpack near her, pretending it was a bomb.” Actually, “Allahu akbar” means “Allah is greater,” that is, greater than your god; it is a declaration of the superiority of Islam and its victory over other religions, which is why Islamic jihadists so often scream out this phrase while committing acts of violence against unbelievers.
But the Los Angeles Times doesn’t explain any of that; it’s too busy explaining how Muslims are the true victims of the 9/11 attacks: “Asked when they thought such incidents became common, the Ba family didn’t hesitate. ‘It started with 9/11,’ said Ba’s mom, Zeinebou, who immigrated to Chicago in 1999. That day in 2001 caused a chain of tragedies — for the nearly 3,000 people who perished during the attacks in New York, at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania; for the young men and women who died serving their country in the wars that followed; and for Muslims, and those perceived as Muslim, who became targets of hate.”
It would be much easier to sympathize with all this if not for the fact that since 9/11, Islamic advocacy groups such as the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), with eager help from the establishment media, have insisted that any honest investigation of the motivating ideology behind the attacks, and jihad terror in general, constituted “hate.” Then there are the numerous fake anti-Muslim hate crimes, fabricated apparently in order to buttress the claim that Muslims are uniquely harassed and victimized in the United States.
The facts don’t bear out this claim. FBI hate crime statistics show that anti-Semitic hate crimes are far more common than attacks on Muslims, which actually dropped 42% in the last year. No hate crime is justified, but the idea that Muslims are living in fear of MAGA-hat-wearing redneck vigilantes in America is Leftist fantasy.
Despite these facts, the AP came out with its own Muslims-Are-Victims 9/11 story on Tuesday: “Two decades after 9/11, Muslim Americans still fighting bias.” It opened with another unsubstantiated anecdote that, as all such anecdotes do, revealed more than it intended: “A car passed, the driver’s window rolled down and the man spat an epithet at two little girls wearing their hijabs: ‘Terrorist!’ It was 2001, mere weeks after the twin towers at the World Trade Center fell, and 10-year-old Shahana Hanif and her younger sister were walking to the local mosque from their Brooklyn home. Unsure, afraid, the girls ran. As the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks approaches, Hanif can still recall the shock of the moment, her confusion over how anyone could look at her, a child, and see a threat. ‘It’s not a nice, kind word. It means violence, it means dangerous. It is meant to shock whoever … is on the receiving end of it,’ she says.”
If that really happened, it’s a shame, but the fact that both the LA Times and AP had to lead with stories of people saying rude things to Muslims unwittingly reveals that they didn’t have anything worse to head up their stories: no stories of Muslims being attacked, of mosques being burnt down, of laws targeting Muslims in the United States and denying them basic rights. Nor should there be such stories. But the fact that there aren’t any gives the lie to the entire establishment narrative.
The UK’s Guardian, meanwhile, published a story Monday showing where all this is tending: “But while the FBI, CIA, police and the newly created Department of Homeland Security scoured the country and the world for radicalized Muslims, an existing threat was overlooked – white supremacist extremists already in the US, whose numbers and influence have continued to grow in the last two decades.”
Of course. It’s those “white supremacist extremists” we have to really watch out for. No doubt the FBI is still hoping to find some. But as the Taliban seals its takeover of Afghanistan, this downplaying of a real threat in favor of one created for propaganda purposes carries a sting unintended by its authors. Sometime soon, while we’re hunting for “white supremacists” and making sure Muslims aren’t called rude names, we may suddenly be reminded of who the victims of 9/11 really were, in ways that could rival the horror and tragedy of that unforgettable day.
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