Despite ongoing media hysteria and the best propaganda efforts of groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “What’s Not Happening to American Muslims: To hear Hollywood and the media tell it, American Muslims were the ultimate victims of 9/11. What nonsense,” by Dorothy Rabinowitz for the Wall Street Journal, April 8 (thanks to Rosanne):
[…] Since the events of Sept. 11, we’ve seen the growth of a view that American Muslims became prime victims of those terror attacks–isolated, fearful, targets of hostility. President George W. Bush, who went to Washington D.C’s Islamic Center a few days after the terror assaults, told his audience that Islam was about peace and warned that the nation’s Muslims must be free to go about without fear or intimidation by other Americans–remarks he doubtless thought were called for under the circumstances.
It had not, of course, been necessary to remind Americans of who they were and were not. No menacing hordes, then or later, ever threatened American Muslims–and it has been an insult to the nation to have been lectured to the same way after every attempted terror attack, as though wild mobs of citizens might actually run through the streets attacking Muslims. Even as the ruins of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon still smoldered, countless Americans had reached out to their Muslim neighbors to reassure them.
No matter. Every report of any activity bearing resemblance to anti-Muslim sentiment became, in short order, essential news. Every actual incident, every report of a nasty sign, fitted the all-consuming theme taken up by large sectors of mainstream media: that the country’s Muslims were now hapless targets, not only of the national rage at the atrocities committed by Islamic fundamentalists, but also of racism. It was a view especially well in accord with those of a generation schooled in colleges and universities where pathological extremes of sensitivity to claims of racial, religious or sexual insult or charges of gender bias are considered perfectly normal and right.
Reporters ran with the theme in part because the media’s appetite for victim stories of any kind is inexhaustible. But this was, in addition, the kind journalists pride themselves on as socially responsible. It was also one that didn’t lack for willing subjects. For American Muslims in considerable numbers apparently subscribed to the view that theirs was the abiding suffering that had been inflicted by the 9/11 attacks. There was no missing the steady supply of Muslims available to tell inquiring reporters of their feelings of alienation and persecution.
Each FBI terrorist sting that went awry or seemed to, each wild goose chase of a home-grown jihadi threat, spurred a new portrait of besieged American Muslims. When such plots turned out to be true, and their threat enormous–most recently in the case of Najubullah Zazi, a jihadist who planned to set explosives off in the New York subway–the portrait and the theme remained the same. Since alienated American Muslims were forced to live in fear as second-class citizens, it was explained, more and more of them chose extremism and violence. In short, whether the charges of terrorist activity were false or whether they were true, American society was to blame….