On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, National Public Radio is not only giving us a reminder to "never forget" what happened that dark day, but why it was defunded for pushing anti-American propaganda.
In the aftermath of the deadliest terror attack on American soil, when 3,000 people died and an entire nation mourned, the leftist media contrived a narrative to turn Muslims into victims.
It was called "Islamophobia." That was the narrative the left pushed: If Americans question Islamism, or the prospect of fellow-traveling Muslims failing to condemn it, then they were inherently "irrational."
NPR recently blasted Americans who criticize New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and have asked that he not attend the 9/11 memorial ceremonies.
In a "Here & Now" podcast segment called "9/11 and the long shadow of Islamophobia" co-produced with WBUR of Boston, the network put former New York City Mayor Rudy Guiliani on blast and complained about purported "Islamophobia."
Here is how the NPR-WBUR podcast explained its segment: "Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani called on current Mayor Zohran Mamdani not to attend an annual ceremony commemorating the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Giuliani also made false claims about Islam, Mamdani’s religion. Mamdani said he will attend the ceremony. Moustafa Bayoumi, professor at Brooklyn College, explains more."
What were Guiliani's "false claims" according to the segment?
“They have every desire to take us over," he said in a Newsmax interview. "This is not, they want to be just another religion. They want to dominate us."
It is fascinating to me that NPR-WBUR takes a nuanced ideological debate and boils it down simply to this is "false."
Since its origins in the 7th century, Islam has been one of the most successful religions in world history for conquering nations through political violence.
That is not my personal opinion. That is historical literacy.
So, whether or not you like Guiliani's opinion, fear of radical Islam is not "irrational." The fear is given more specific grounding when we examine Zohran Mamdani's background.
Mamdani is not only a radical socialist, but he is personally tied to a number of Islamists, some of whom have espoused violent rhetoric.
There is Siraj Wahhaj, who is the longtime imam of Masjid At-Taqwa in Brooklyn. During the 2025 campaign, Mamdani visited the mosque, posted a smiling photo with him, and called him “one of the nation’s foremost Muslim leaders and a pillar of the Bed-Stuy community.”
Wahhaj appeared on the Justice Department’s list of unindicted co-conspirators in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case. He was never charged. He testified as a character witness for Omar Abdel-Rahman, the “Blind Sheikh,” who was convicted of seditious conspiracy in the plot to bomb New York landmarks after the 1993 attack.
Then there is Ramzi Kassem, who is Mamdani’s chief counsel. He is a CUNY law professor who previously represented Ahmed al-Darbi, an al-Qaeda operative convicted in the 2002 bombing of a French oil tanker. Al-Darbi’s sister was married to Khalid al-Mihdhar, one of the hijackers on the plane that struck the Pentagon on 9/11.
After Mamdani signed 9/11 remembrance executive orders in September 2026, he had the ceremonial pen passed to Kassem, which 9/11 families cited as an insult.
Of course, there is also Hasan Piker. He said “America deserved 9/11” and he has a photo of the WTC attacks in his podcast space. Mamdani associated with him and had an interviewed with him; after backlash he called the 9/11 remark “objectionable and reprehensible.”
Families organizing the petition to keep Mamdani away from the 25th-anniversary ceremony listed Piker alongside Wahhaj and Kassem as evidence that the mayor platforms or hires people who minimize the attacks or have defended jihadist defendants.
So, NPR can play dumb all it wants, but those complaining about Mamdani are not some uneducated rubes who are grabbing pitchforks at the first mention of the word "Islam."
Islamism is by far the most prevalent ideology of violent terrorists around the world. Since the 1979 Iranian revolution, the Middle East has been the leading exporter of terrorism around the globe.
Whether or not you believe that most Muslims are peaceful or moderate in the Western context, it is not "irrational" to question why Muslims want to move in droves to the United States.
After all, if the Islamic religion dictates a patriarchal, religiously intolerant, anti-gay, illiberal society ruled by Muslim clerics, why would Muslims want to go to free nations influenced by Judeo-Christian culture with democratic institutions and liberal societies that preach religious tolerance?
Furthermore, why are so-called "liberals" inviting people with such illiberal views into the United States and white-knighting them to the American public?
Muslim-majority nations around the globe are some of the world leaders in human rights abuses. So, when there is mass immigration to the United States by supporters of sharia law, like Democrat Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, then opposition to their immigration here is not due to xenophobic ignorance. It is wanting to preserve a society where there aren't human rights abuses.
The cause isn't helped when the Islamophobia narrative was always contrived out of whole cloth and driven by flimsy "hate crimes" data.
Under the Hate Crime Statistics Act and FBI UCR / NIBRS practice, a hate crime is an ordinary criminal offense — assault, murder, vandalism, arson, intimidation, etc. — that was motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias against a "protected characteristic." (Being a human being should be the only "protected characteristic," but I digress.)
"The FBI’s annual tally of hate crimes against Muslims spiked in 2001, rising to 481 that year, up from 28 in 2000," Pew Research says. "Since then, it has fluctuated widely, from a low of 95 in 2021 to a high of 307 in 2016. But it has never returned to pre-9/11 levels."
Let's put aside that we're talking about a few hundred reported cases of annual "hate crimes" nationally in a country with 330 million people. There are 3.5 million to 4.5 million Muslims in the United States.
We're talking about a statistical rounding error, not a significant phenomenon. And so, when you rule out the activists' anecdotes about free speech they don't like, the phenomenon disappears.
Pew Research is also participating in this narrative that the correlation between Islam and political violence is a figment of Americans' imagination. It is not.
"By some measures, public attitudes toward Islam have become more negative than they were immediately after the 9/11 attacks," the publication recently stated. "In March 2002, just six months after the al-Qaida attacks, 25% of U.S. adults said the Islamic religion is more likely than other religions to encourage violence. In 11 subsequent polls, that figure has never been lower than 38%, and in the past decade it has hovered between 45% and 52%. Early this year, about half of U.S. adults surveyed (51%) said Islam encourages violence more than other religions do."
Islamism is the leading driver of violent terrorism in the world. It is not particularly close.
The Global Terrorism Index 2026, produced by the Institute for Economics & Peace from the same incident universe as the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database, is the standard annual measure used by governments and the UN system.
In 2025 it recorded 5,582 terrorism deaths and 2,944 attacks worldwide. The four deadliest organizations were all Islamist — Islamic State and its affiliates, JNIM, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, and al-Shabaab — and together they accounted for 3,869 deaths, or 70 percent of the global total.
That dominance is recent in historical terms. From the 1970s through the early 1990s, global terrorism was driven mainly by secular left-wing groups and nationalist or separatist movements: European and Latin American Marxist organizations, Irish and Basque separatists, Palestinian nationalist factions, and similar campaigns.
Across GTD-based comparisons, Islamist attacks have higher odds of producing fatalities than left-wing or right-wing attacks. Since about 2013, Islamism has been the leading driver of terrorism deaths worldwide.
Those are facts. They are not a part of a “right-wing narrative.”
On 9/11, Americans need to know the facts about what happened. They need to appreciate the history of that perfidious day.
What Americans don't need are victim merchants contriving narratives out of whole cloth to make the tragic event about them.
