You didn’t hear about anti-Muslim sentiment because it was not generally reported by the media, who were pretty anti-Muslim themselves at the time. I know that I felt even less safe speaking about this kind of thing offline than online.

For example, a Muslim friend of mine and her young son were stalked in a university book store shortly after 9/11 by a very large and angry young man who shouted racial epithets at them. Know what others in the bookstore did about it? Absolutely nothing. Another friend (not Muslim) saw some young Arab men who were accosted by airport security for…speaking Arabic. Oh. The horror. Whatever were they thinking, speaking their own native language in an airport?

And, you know, there’s Gitmo. And rendition. Who needs to drum up mobs when the population you are harassing knows that any of its more-outspoken members can be quietly arrested and whisked off with no legal recourse? I’m sure *that* made American Muslims feel absolutely safe and confident in their own government.

As an historian in medieval Islam and crosscultural issues, I was very alarmed by 9/11. When you’ve studied how *exactly* the same pattern played out 600 years ago in Spain, it’s a lot harder to float down that big African barge with everybody else. Muslims and Jews were harassed there for over a century before the first pogroms started in the 1370s. Before I went to Africa in 1991, I had no idea that American society was anti-Muslim. When I got back in ’94, after living two years in a Muslim village, I was shocked by the intensity of the casual, unconscious prejudice, even bigotry. So, it didn’t exactly start with 9/11. It just got exponentially worse that day. Why else would we be stupid enough to subsequently invade a country run by a secular dictator on a pretext that, on the flimsiest of examinations, was dodgy to the point where we couldn’t get the UN wholeheartedly behind us?

Until pretty recently, I was fairly circumspect about whom I talked to about this subject, since speaking to the wrong person about it invariably started an anti-Muslim rant. Even as late as last October, it was still fashionable to shout down anyone who might be sympathetic to Muslims, either on or offline (if I hear one more complacently patronizing white male pat me on the head and assure me how wonderfully egalitarian the West is compared to those nasty woman-hating Muslims, I may give in to the Maenad deep down in every woman and slap that person silly). I would compare the immediate post-9/11 atmosphere in the U.S. to the McCarthy era (it was somewhat calmer in Britain where I was at the time. At least until the London bombings and they started shooting Hispanic guys for trying to make a train while wearing coats in warm weather). They didn’t exactly have big anti-communist riots, then, either, but everyone even remotely involved in it would agree that time was scary as hell. They didn’t call the McCarthy trials “witch-hunts” for nothing.

It does not take as much as you may think to spark these things off. Just a few weeks ago, I read a news item where Mossad was warning people about using Facebook because it might be used to recruit terrorists. Seriously? What, are we going to shut down *all* independent online discourse because it *might* be a venue for terrorists? If we are going to go back to that, then maybe we should just give up and look in the mirror, Pogo, because the enemy, he would be us.

I don’t doubt that such expressions of anger existed and were later
disavowed by their speakers, or that they were wholly spontaneous; I
would ask how many actual *acts* of retribution against Muslims they
actually produced — and by this I mean individual, spontaneous, “ground-
level” crimes against Muslim citizens directly, not the subsequent
military campaigns aimed at removing the Taliban and then the Hussein
regime. There may have been a few, but they were far fewer than one
would expect from the scope of the hostility expressed via the ‘Net. *I*
certainly don’t remember reading about any anti-Muslim riots, or lynching
of individual Muslims, in any American city in the last months of 2001.

The Internet as a communications medium is certainly faster and more
penetrating than any analog, but it also remains oddly ephemeral and
unstable, perhaps precisely *because* it is so easy to accumulate numbers
of voices that in any other medium would reflect significant public
sentiment. But nobody has ever said of e-mails that “for every e-mail
you get there are 100 people who felt the same way but didn’t write”.
People already know exactly how easy it is for fringe ideas to propagate
by sheer volume and repetition on the ‘Net, which is why anything coming
off the ‘Net is still suspect, Twitter not excluded.

This may change in future as the ‘Net evolves. But technology is also
inextricably linked to the culture that discovers and popularizes it,
and the Twitter-crowd just doesn’t seem the sort to go up in spontaneous
civil fury from a few messages. It’s just too easy to get half a dozen
contradictory messages half a minute later.