On Wednesday’s episode of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” Shapiro discusses how, in the aftermath of 9/11, the far-left believed that Islamophobia was a greater threat than radical Islamic terrorism. Video and partial transcript below:
Let’s be real about this: The fact is that the United States’ actions in the aftermath of 9/11 did make America safer. We can talk as much as we want about how 9/11 was an aberration, a uniquely spectacular attempt to commit terrorism in the United States, but the fact is that I remember in the aftermath of 9/11, there was serious fear of a follow-up attack. That fear remained for years.
There was serious fear that al-Qaeda would be able to pull off another mass casualty attack in the United States. It took, actually, until the rise of ISIS for us to see similar mass casualty attacks in the West, and that was a full decade after 9/11. That was, again, because the United States and its allies [started] to retrench from the world; they started to move away from engagement with the world.
First, the evidence on the Left. So today, The New York Times originally tweeted about 9/11. This was their original tweet:
NYT: Eighteen years have passed since airplanes took aim and brought down the World Trade Center. Today, families will once again gather and grieve at the site where more than 2000 people died.
Really? Was it airplanes that took aim and brought down the World Trade Center? [sarcastically] I do remember that we launched a 20-year war on airplanes in the aftermath of that, and you were either with the airplanes or you were against the airplanes. That was the basic tenor of that.
The New York Times, obviously, then had to delete this and said, “We deleted an earlier tweet to the story and have edited for clarity. The story has also been updated.”
The story’s lead, by the way, repeated exactly the same line. The story’s lead also suggested that airplanes had taken aim. For the same reason the media refused, and still refuse, to show the actual pictures of what happened on 9/11, and refused to talk about the actual perpetrators of 9/11, and refuse to show the pictures of people leaping from the tops of flaming buildings to their death — because they don’t want to remind America what 9/11 actually was. For the same reason, the New York Times is tweeting out about how airplanes took aim….
There are eleven editorials on the website of The New York Times, as we record this, as I’m speaking these words, one of them is about 9/11 … titled “The World 9/11 Took From Us.” It’s by a person named Omar Aziz, and it’s talking about Islamophobia. So 18 years after 9/11, we are still doing the routine that the media did in the aftermath of 9/11, which was that the biggest problem facing the United States was not evil Islamic radical terrorists attempting to murder Westerners. No, the biggest problem in the United States was supposed brutal Islamophobia springing from the American people.
In other words, the radical Left knee-jerk belief that the United States is responsible for everything that happens to the United States — that the United States’ skirt was too short — led a lot of people on the Left to immediately respond by suggesting that Americans were these vicious racists who are going to attempt to target Muslims across the United States. That wave of anti-Muslim violence never materialized. By hate crime statistics, Jews were targeted every single year far more than Muslims were in the United States on a per capita basis. Yet, that media narrative remained for year: the real problem was that America, after 9/11, became Islamophobic. That was the big issue.
You see, today, in the Left’s continued crusade to paint America as a uniquely terrible place, when 9/11 really reminds us that when you look at America in relation to the rest of the world, this place is pretty effing fantastic and our ideals are pretty spectacular. The unity that surrounded 9/11 lasted for about five minutes, and certainly by now on the Left we have forgotten that unity and we’ve gone back to “America is responsible for all the sins against her. If only we would be more conciliatory and we’d be more multicultural. If only we’d be nicer to the immigrants then everything would be fine now.”
Now, that is not an argument about illegal immigration. That’s not an argument about legal immigration. I’m not making an argument on that basis. I’m saying that, for the Left, the radical Left, all of America’s sins, in the words of Jeremiah Wright, came home to roost on 9/11. That was a perspective on the Left. It remains a predominant perspective on the radical Left in the United States. It is wrong, it is dangerous, and it is morally obtuse.
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