There are moments in history that feel too big to be wrapped in anything but grief, and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks was one of those moments. For a few days, Americans stopped scrolling and remembered the nearly three thousand people murdered by Al-Qaeda in New York, at the Pentagon, and in a Pennsylvania field. Politicians stood solemnly; cameras captured tears; families laid flowers. But according to Jonathan Tobin, editor-in-chief of JNS, the anniversary was not just a time of remembrance—it was also a revealing window into how the mainstream media, elite opinion, and politicians have spent the past quarter-century reshaping what 9/11 actually means. Even as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani attended the Ground Zero ceremony, the conversation was already drifting elsewhere, pulled by the urgency of today’s crises. Tobin argues that before this moment fades, we should pause and ask uncomfortable questions: Why did coverage of the deadliest terrorist attack in American history turn into a story about prejudice against Muslims? Who gets to be called a victim, and who gets blamed? And how did the narrative about 9/11 become so detached from the ideology that caused it? For Tobin, understanding 9/11 is not just about history—it is about the way the story has been told, the lies that have been normalized, and the consequences we are still living with, especially when it comes to the alarming rise in antisemitism.
The clearest example of this strange narrative shift can be found, Tobin says, by looking at The New York Times on the anniversary itself. Among its top stories were headlines like “Islamophobia Shaped a Generation of Muslim New Yorkers” and “Facing Islamophobia, Mamdani Keeps Focus on 9/11 Victims.” To conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, it was as if the newspaper was describing 9/11 as an attack on Muslims rather than an attack by Islamist terrorists. Tobin quoted Shapiro’s acid observation: if a space alien landed on Earth that morning and read the Times homepage, it would conclude that the main victims of 9/11 were Muslims. Now, it is true that the paper also ran other stories about the actual victims and the horrors of that day. But the thrust of so much elite commentary, Tobin argues, has been to treat 9/11 as a crime that happened to be committed by Muslims while refusing to draw any meaningful line from the attackers’ faith to their actions. The word “jihad” is avoided. The fact that Al-Qaeda was inspired by a reading of Islam that demands war against the West is treated as an inconvenient truth. And instead of dwelling on the murder of 2,977 people, the media have become obsessed with the supposed backlash against American Muslims. Tobin is not saying that every Muslim in the world supported the attacks—he acknowledges that many did not. But he is saying that the constant focus on “Islamophobia” has flipped the script: now, the people who happen to share a religion with the attackers are cast as the real casualties of 9/11, while the dead and their grieving families are pushed to the background. It is a strange, painful twist—and for Tobin, it is not an accident. It is a deliberate story shaped by interested parties.
Is there any truth to the idea that American Muslims faced widespread discrimination or violence after 9/11? Tobin says no—or at least, not nearly as much as the media have led us to believe. He first made this argument in Commentary magazine in 2010, when the controversy over building a Muslim community center and mosque near Ground Zero was dominating headlines. Back then, supporters of the project claimed that a wave of anti-Muslim hate had swept the country and that the center would help heal wounds. Tobin saw it differently: the entire effort, in his view, was an attempt to reframe the story of 9/11 around the suffering of Muslims rather than the people killed by Al-Qaeda. The mosque wasn’t built, but the larger project succeeded. The “backlash myth” took root, he argues, because it was promoted by powerful institutions. Many of the studies cited as proof of rampant Islamophobia, he notes, were produced by groups funded by left-wing donors whose mission is to portray the United States as inherently bigoted. Others, like Georgetown University’s Bridge Institute, were created with funding from Qatar, one of the biggest state sponsors of the Muslim Brotherhood. Meanwhile, more objective sources tell a very different story. Tobin points to FBI hate-crime statistics, which for years have shown that the largest number of religion-based hate crimes in America target Jews, not Muslims. Jews make up less than two percent of the population, and yet they consistently account for the overwhelming majority of reported religious hate crimes. That does not mean anti-Muslim prejudice does not exist—Tobin concedes there are anecdotal examples—but he insists it has been wildly exaggerated for political purposes. The myth of the Muslim victim, he argues, has been used to silence criticism of Islamist extremism and to shift blame from the terrorists to the society their movement attacked.
This narrative did not develop in a vacuum. Tobin traces it back to the deliberate choices of American leaders and cultural gatekeepers in the years after 9/11. President George W. Bush kept insisting that Islam was a “religion of peace,” even as Al-Qaeda and its successors continued to justify murder in the name of God. Hollywood and television networks shied away from depicting Muslim terrorists as real villains, afraid that doing so would “validate prejudice.” In academia, the rise of intersectionality and postcolonial theory taught a generation that Muslims were simply another group of oppressed “people of color,” victims of Western imperialism and racism no matter what they believed or did. At the same time, Jews and the State of Israel were redefined as white oppressors, always in the wrong, even when they were the ones being massacred. That framework made it almost impossible to talk honestly about the ideological roots of 9/11, because doing so would require acknowledging that some non-white, non-Western actors are capable of evil. It also made it easier for a new kind of hatred to flourish. Tobin argues that the same people who screamed about Islamophobia gave a free pass to an explosion of antisemitism, especially after the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023. When terrorists raped, tortured, burned, and murdered Israeli civilians, many progressives rushed to justify it as a form of “resistance.” That cruelty did not come from nowhere. It was fed by years of anti-Israel propaganda in classrooms and newsrooms, all of it cushioned by a moral framework that saw Jews as evil and their enemies as victims. The result, Tobin says, is a generation taught to hate under the cover of compassion.
For Tobin, the symbol of this twisted narrative is Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the New York politician who attended the 9/11 ceremony while being portrayed by the Times as a victim of Islamophobia. But Tobin asks us to look closer. Is Mamdani hated because he is Muslim? Or because he has dedicated his career to supporting Islamist groups and seeking the destruction of the only Jewish state in the world? Tobin believes it is clearly the latter. The same could be said of other political figures, like Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who are similarly held up as victims of prejudice whenever they face criticism. Tobin’s point is sharp: you should not get to call yourself a victim of bigotry when your own politics are built on spreading hatred against Jews and Israel. He also points to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, which is constantly cited by the liberal media as the ultimate authority on Islamophobia. But CAIR, in Tobin’s words, was founded as a front group for Hamas fundraisers and has a long record of spreading Jew-hatred. Most of what CAIR labels “Islamophobia” is actually just criticism of Muslim bad behavior—and sometimes it is simply the crime of supporting Jewish people. Even worse, this agenda was ratified by the Biden administration, which created a “National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia and Anti-Arab Hate” by taking its cues from CAIR. The same administration, he notes, included CAIR as a consultant in its supposed fight against antisemitism. To Tobin, this is shocking: a government strategy legitimizing an organization tied to terrorism while ignoring the real victims of prejudice in America. The result of all this, he says, is that a generation of young Muslims has been taught to think of themselves as permanent victims in a country that has actually given them enormous freedom and opportunity. They may deny that they themselves spread hate, but their presence at pro-Hamas rallies, on college campuses, and in city streets after October 7 suggests otherwise.
Tobin ends with a plea for honesty. It is a good thing, he says, to oppose all forms of prejudice—bigotry of any kind should be condemned, no one should be attacked for their faith. But what has happened in America is the opposite of that. Antisemitism has spiraled out of control, not because people are fighting Islamophobia, but because the people who spread hatred against Jews have been given a pass by the very institutions that claim to care about justice. Lies about America after 9/11, combined with leftist racial doctrines, have made it respectable to demonize the Jewish state and Jewish people. Once confined to the fever swamps of the far left and far right, accusations of “genocide,” “apartheid,” and other blood libels are now calmly repeated by respected newspapers like the Times. When an outlet like the Times treats Zohran Mamdani as a victim rather than a hate-monger, Tobin argues, it is not just getting an anniversary story wrong—it is contributing to a culture in which antisemitism has festered and gone mainstream. The impulse to protect Muslims from discrimination is understandablees, but it should not require pretending that Jews are imaginary enemies. On this twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, Tobin asks us to remember who the real victims were: the thousands of Americans murdered by Islamist terrorists, and now also the millions of Jews around the world who face a rising tide of hatred that the media helped create. If we want to honor the dead, we can start by refusing to let their memory be hijacked for a narrative that turns the murderers into the oppressed and the victims into the oppressors. That, Tobin says, is the least we owe them.