One of the speakers at Friday’s ceremony in New York City commemorating the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 jihad attacks was the son of one of the victims of the fateful day, and he came with a warning for all of us.
Michael Massaroli, according to the New York Daily News, is the son of Michael Massaroli Sr., who was 38 years old when he was killed on 9/11. Massaroli Sr., the Daily News reports, was “the vice president of operations for the brokerage firm Cantor Fitzgerald,” and “was working on the 101st floor when a hijacked plane crashed into the North Tower.”
25 years later, Massaroli Jr. said: “We have seen a medley of people come up today of all races, all religions, all creeds. And this tragedy is just that, it’s a tragedy.” In other words, shut up, you “Islamophobes.”
The son of a man killed in the Sept. 11 attacks spoke out against using the tragedy to spread hateful, Islamophobic rhetoric during Friday’s ceremony marking 25 years since the attacks.
— CBS News (@CBSNews) September 11, 2026
“You do my dad’s legacy, the legacy of all these victims, no honor by using this tragedy to… pic.twitter.com/Rv6n7PsL6K
Massaroli continued: “I’ve had to grow up and spend the past 25 years seeing people use it to hate on our Muslim brothers and sisters, to hate on people who don’t look like them. And that’s wrong and that does no honor to the victims here. I want to use the little platform I have to ask for that to please stop.”
Here is a man who has been thoroughly indoctrinated. He has been told all his life that it is “hate” to discuss the motivating ideology behind the attacks that murdered his father. He has been told that opposition to jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women and non-Muslims is just hatred of “people who don’t look like” the people who are doing that opposing.
This is ridiculous on its face, for the people who have risked life and limb to speak out against jihad terror include people of all races, belying Massaroli’s leftist assumption that such opposition is a “white supremacist” enterprise. In fact, some of the foremost voices speaking out against this scourge have been Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a black woman from Somalia; Brigitte Gabriel, a brown woman from Lebanon, and Nonie Darwish, a brown ex-Muslim from Egypt. Hey Mike Massaroli, if you’re reading this, tell me about how racist those women (and multitudes of other women and men from Muslim countries who now oppose this system of sanctified and glorified violence) really are.
Another non-white ex-Muslim foe of jihad, the Iranian dissident Sara Ghorbani, responded to Massaroli: “Naming the terrorists isn’t hate.” That’s all that was happening when Massaroli issued his warning against “hate”: the names of the victims had been read out. Ghorbani continued: “You are disrespecting the memory of 2,977 innocent people murdered by Muslim terrorists in a terrorist act and using them to accuse the rest of the world of Islamophobia. That’s disgusting to say the least.”
Michael Massaroli has fallen for the strategy of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and other Muslim and leftist groups since 9/11: tar the entire discussion of the jihad ideology as an exercise in “racism,” “bigotry” and “Islamophobia,” and dismiss it accordingly.
Related: Ex-Muslim Criticizes Islam, and for Leftists, It's Time for a Virtue-Signaling Party
This has been particularly true regarding any and all discussion of Islamic supremacism, and of the nonviolent efforts to bring Sharia to the U.S. This young man is evidently not very thoughtful, and never attempted to look beyond the cant and propaganda he was being fed. Since 9/11, Americans have been inundated with twaddle about how Islam is a religion of peace and Muslims were the innocent victims of a wave of “Islamophobia” that followed the 9/11 attacks, which, we were endlessly told, had nothing, nothing whatsoever, to do with Islam, which is as peaceful and gentle as a lamb.
Michael Massaroli appears to have read all this, and heard all this, and studied it carefully, and internalized it deeply. After all, to do otherwise would have been to become a “far-right Islamophobe,” and few people nowadays have the intestinal fortitude to become such a comprehensively hated villain as that.
Michael Massaroli cannot, however, be too harshly criticized; after all, as the son of a jihad murder victim, he might have become an effective and powerful voice against jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women and others. So extra efforts were likely made in order to ensure that he didn’t develop any independent thoughts. And they worked.
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