Friday, September 11 will be the 25th anniversary of the jihad attacks that took the lives of nearly 3,000 people in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania, and the far left’s propaganda arm, the establishment media, is already hard at work repeating the lesson that leftists want us to take away from this grim milestone: It was all our fault. And now, “Islamophobia” is worse than ever, underscoring the left’s second big takeaway from 9/11: Muslims were the real victims.
As you’d expect, PBS and NPR are pushing this hard. A New York Times writer (of course) named Rozina Ali has a new book out, Seasons of Fury: Four Families and the Rise of Islamophobia in America, and the far-left networks are pushing it hard, as it gives them just the lurid picture of Muslim victimhood they seem to want for the anniversary of the largest terror attack ever on American soil.
“Lurid” is no overstatement. The Amazon page for Seasons of Fury says that “through the powerful stories of four families across eight decades, Ali narrates a range of Muslim experiences shaped by relentless suspicion and prejudice.” And it looks as if “relentless suspicion and prejudice” has been the least of it.
Ali apparently wants us to believe that all the Muslims who have streamed into this country in large numbers since 9/11 have had all their hopes and dreams explode in their faces with the force of, say, a plane crashing into a skyscraper: “Ultimately, the U.S. government’s Islamophobic policies disillusioned generations of Muslims who sought the promise of the American dream only to find their communities torn apart, their relatives imprisoned, and their religion villainized by politicians and media. Ali’s story of how we got to our terrifying present is a magisterial accomplishment and a damning indictment of the United States’ abandonment of its core principles in the face of fear.”
NPR’s Tuesday interview with Ali painted a similar picture:
After the Sept. 11 attacks, assaults against Muslims in the U.S. surged. At the same time the U.S. government launched a sweeping War on Terror that brought arrests, deportations and surveillance into Muslim communities. Journalist Rozina Ali was a teenager at the time and remembers her father warning her, “Don’t tell anyone you’re Muslim.” In her new book, “Seasons of Fury,” Ali traces the rise and persistence of Islamophobia through the lives of four Muslim American families. We talk to her about how the War on Terror reshaped Muslim life in America and what it will take to counter Islamophobia now....
“Assaults”? Physical, verbal, or both? Are we talking about innocent people being attacked here, or that “assaults” on Muslims surged after 9/11, but that term isn’t defined, either. Were large numbers of Muslims in the U.S. physically attacked? Or do rude encounters involving verbal assaults also count as “assaults” for NPR?
This is a pertinent question because the idea that Muslims have been victimized wholesale since 9/11 is wildly exaggerated. The FBI Crime Data Explorer says that from 2021 to 2026, there were 16,290 hate crimes that were “Anti-Black or African American”; second were 8,236 hate crimes that were classified as “Anti-Jewish.”
After that, there is a steep drop-off. There were 5,306 “Anti-Gay (Male)” hate crimes, 4,782 “Anti-White” hate crimes, and so on. Finishing tenth in the hate crimes standings were “Anti-Islamic (Muslim)” hate crimes, which numbered 1,170.
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That’s 1,170 more than there should have been, but it also completely refutes Rozina Ali’s nightmare scenario. Also, Ali suggests that after 9/11, innocent Muslims were unjustly placed under suspicion. If that’s true, it’s unfortunate, but was anyone justifiably placed under suspicion? Did the “sweeping War on Terror” that “brought arrests, deportations and surveillance into Muslim communities” ever arrest or deport or place under surveillance someone who deserved it? Or did it only ever target innocent Muslims? And if any of the people to whom it subjected this treatment were really guilty, weren’t these procedures actually justified?
Also, since 9/11, the U.S. Muslim population increased from 1.8 million in 2001 to 4.5 million today. Why did they come in such large numbers to this dangerous, hostile place?
And remember: the establishment media is just getting warmed up. In the days before the anniversary of 9/11, expect much, much more of this sort of thing.
