NY Times Highlights ‘Islamophobia’ on 9/11; Ben Shapiro Responds

The New York Times really chose a lane for the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Not a sober front page about the families, the first responders, the warnings we missed, or the Islamist ideology that drove the attacks. Instead, a big spotlight on Islamophobia, with the predictable insinuation that anyone who notices the imbalance is “stoking outrage.” If your lead emotion on 9/11 is scolding Americans, you’ve lost the plot.

Ben Shapiro’s point is pretty simple: imagine you knew nothing about what happened that day and you saw those headlines first. You’d come away thinking the main story of 9/11 is how Muslims were treated afterward, not why 2,977 people were murdered in coordinated attacks. That doesn’t mean anti-Muslim bigotry isn’t real or that it never should be covered. It means timing and emphasis matter, and on this anniversary the Times managed to sound like it was writing a corrective essay to its own readers instead of marking a national wound. The paper isn’t “contextualizing” 9/11. It’s rerouting it.

Then there’s the move that always follows: critique the critic. Not “Here’s why we framed it this way,” but “Look at this person trying to rile you up.” That’s a dodge. People are allowed to react to what a major newspaper chooses to elevate on a day like this. And plenty of Americans, including many who’ve been fair to Muslim neighbors for years, can still say out loud that 9/11 was an Islamist terror attack and the anniversary should not be used to redirect sympathy away from the victims. Calling that reaction ‘outrage’ is just a way to avoid accountability.

We don’t need a media class that treats remembrance like an HR seminar. We need one that can hold two truths at once: innocent people should never be targeted for their faith, and the nation also has a right to name the enemy that attacked it. If the New York Times can’t do that without getting defensive, that tells you something about its priorities, not ours.