Recently, during a Brookline, Massachusetts Town Meeting debate about commemorating Brookline residents who were killed on September 11, a speaker warned about the dangers of Islamophobia.

I agreed with him. After 9/11, many innocent Muslim Americans experienced suspicion, hostility, and discrimination. A decent society should oppose that. I witnessed some of that prejudice firsthand when a Muslim colleague with whom I had worked for years was falsely accused of threatening violence. He ultimately cleared his name, but only after spending time in jail and incurring enormous legal and personal costs. Experiences like his make it impossible for me to dismiss concerns about Islamophobia.

Yet as I listened, I found myself wondering why the ideology that motivated the attacks received so little attention.

Nearly 3,000 people were murdered on September 11 in a terrorist attack that shattered America’s sense of security and changed the course of the nation for decades. The omission struck me because I have begun to notice a similar pattern in public discussions.

Moreover, we rarely acknowledge the attacks that never occurred because law enforcement and intelligence agencies spent decades focused on preventing them. Millions of Americans have lived their lives in relative safety because thousands of people in law enforcement, intelligence, and national security made preventing such attacks their daily mission. That outcome was not inevitable. 

Again and again, I hear thoughtful people speak eloquently about prejudice against Muslims. I hear far less discussion of Islamist extremism.

This pattern became more visible to me after October 7.

Many people, including myself, rightly condemned anti-Muslim prejudice and expressed concern for Palestinian civilians. Many people on the left came to view the world through the lens of power, oppression, minority rights, and historical injustice. Yet I was struck by how often discussions focused on Israel’s actions while giving comparatively little attention to Hamas’s ideology, its open embrace of........

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