MAR 29, 2024 JLM 72°F 03:43 PM 08:43 AM EST
Media's 9/11 Coverage Shifted from a Critical Look at al-Qaida to Attacking America

Whispered first, then shouted from the dust and wreckage of that September morning in 2001 came the words that have become a mantra: Never forget.

And in the two decades since the attacks of 9/11, there is much we never did forget: the deaths, the despair, the fire, the fear, the photographs of the missing. But this 20-year anniversary has revealed that there is, too, much we tragically, dangerously, lost track of along the way: our commitment to democracy; our dedication to the American ideal; our defense of the Enlightenment values of the West; and our devotion to their survival. And most of all, to remember the ideology of the Islamist terrorist perpetrators of the single largest terrorist attack on American soil.

In their place, across editorial pages and in opinion-laden monologues recited over cable news, we've been subjected to accusations, self-flagellations, apologetics, and regrets. In a New York Times op-ed included in a section devoted to the anniversary, for instance, Farah Stockman declared that the war in Afghanistan had been corrupt from the start, the entire enterprise only about money and defense contractors' profits.

Yet in the same breath, Stockman also insisted that America had invested too much money in Afghanistan, and was therefore to blame for the country's corruption. In her eyes, in other words, not those killed in 9/11, but the Afghan people wronged by America were the real victims, and America, not al-Qaida, the evildoer.

Then there was Michelle Goldberg's contribution to the same Times 9/11 anniversary section, in which she explained "How 9/11 Turned America Into a Half-Crazed Fading Power."

"We inflated the stature of our enemies to match our need for retribution," Goldberg wrote. "We launched hubristic wars to remake the world... we midwifed worse terrorists than those we set out to fight."

But it wasn't just the Times. An Atlantic article, for instance, told us that "After 9/11, the U.S. Got Almost Everything Wrong." And it also wasn't just in America: In the UK, for instance, a Guardian piece reviled "the most epically damaging man-made calamity of recent times." And in the Netherlands, national daily the Volkskrant stated, "The war on terrorism ... has entirely missed; [it] has only spawned more innocent victims and an irreparable chasm between conservative Islam and the Western world." What's more, the Volkskrant added, "Since 9/11, innocent Muslims around the world have been the victims of Islamophobia."

All of which translates into simply this: that even after over 50 Islamist terror attacks in Europe and America since 9/11; and even in the face of the Taliban's return to power in Afghanistan, a resurgent al-Qaida, and dozens of ISIS fighters about to be released from European prisons, we live with a global media that frequently appears more comfortable condemning counterterror policy and strategy than with criticizing the terrorists themselves.

In other words, they have bought fully into the notion, oft-promoted by Islamist groups, that any criticism of radical Islamist ideology – including even satirical cartoons – is to be reviled as "Islamophobia." It's a notion that translates into a near-hatred of the United States; and if criticism of Islamism is "Islamophobia," then what we are seeing can only be described putting forth a form of "Ameriphobia" in its place.

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