Seventeen Years Later Maybe They Don’t Hate Us as Much

The moderate Muslims speak up.
by Michael Isenberg.

Four years ago, I posted a September 11 column titled, “Thirteen Years Later They Still Hate Us.” In it I presented a sampling of tweets from the Middle East about the 2001 attacks. “I was curious what they were saying in the Arab world,” I wrote,

so I went to Twitter and searched on “September 11” in Arabic. I expected to find a mixed bag—some tweets celebrating the attack and expressing solidarity with Osama bin Laden, others condemning it and expressing solidarity with America. So it surprised me that what I found was overwhelmingly the former: anti-American, pro-terrorist, and pro-hatred…I really did set out to write a balanced piece and make today a day about healing, but all I found on Twitter was extremism. We keep hearing about moderate Muslims, but they weren't speaking up today.

I decided to repeat the exercise this afternoon and see what showed up. There was still plenty of hostility toward America—

—but I also found no shortage of tweets like these:

Here was a response to another user who had just gotten out of Twitter jail and wanted to know if he had missed anything:

Tongue in cheek, perhaps inappropriately so, but the writer did put the 2001 terrorist attack in New York on a par with 1979 terrorist attack in Mecca.

Several people wanted to make sure we didn’t misinterpret any celebrations we might see in the Muslim world today.

Finally, a sentiment we can all subscribe to:

It was very encouraging to see these tweets, a welcome change from four years ago, and I hope a harbinger of more to come.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com