We researched, verified and documented each case. My office began to receive reports from Arab Americans across the country of threats, harassment, and acts of discrimination. This was just what happened to my family. My daughter and a nephew also received threats, as did my brother John, whose office received two bomb threats. We will slit your throat and kill your children.” It was the first of many. A caller to our office left a message stating, “Jim, you towel head, all Arabs must die. Only a few hours after the planes hit the World Trade Centre, I received my first death threat. My office logged 800 pieces of hate mail and phone messages in just the first few days following 9/11. In the aftermath of the attacks, acts of hatred and death threats were frequent and frightening. Because we must never forget the damage done to my community and to our nation’s institutions by Bush administration policies, I need to set the record straight. He cherry-picked statistics in an effort to show how anti-Muslim hate crimes paled in comparison with anti-Black hate crimes.īecause of who he is and the potential impact of what he writes, I cannot let Krugman’s whitewashing of the post-9/11 period go unchallenged. Instead of being chastened, the next day Krugman doubled down in yet another series of tweets still trying to make his case that the backlash wasn’t as severe as it might have been. Krugman’s brazen dismissal of the painful aftermath of the attacks on the Arab and Muslim communities was so hurtful and offensive that I, and many others, felt obliged to respond. But life returned to normal fairly fast.” True, for a while people were afraid to fly: My wife and I took a lovely trip to the US Virgin Islands a couple of months later, because air fares and hotel rooms were so cheap. “Daily behaviour wasn’t drastically affected. And while GW Bush was a terrible president, to his credit he tried to calm prejudice, not feed it.” Notably, there wasn’t a mass outbreak of anti-Muslim sentiment and violence, which all too easily happened. “Overall, Americans took 9/11 pretty calmly. In a series of tweets, Krugman wrote the following: I am now compelled to write because of the brazenly insensitive and cavalier comments about 9/11 posted by Paul Krugman, a respected Nobel prize-winning New York Times opinion columnist. Instead, I made do with a few tweets recalling the events and emotions of the day. This year, I didn’t write a column about 9/11. They not only define those days, they also tell an important story about America. I don’t ever want us to forget all of these emotions. We also ultimately came to feel gratitude as so many of our fellow citizens came to our defence and protected us. But within hours after the attacks, we were forced to experience fear and isolation when the backlash began - fear because we received threats, and isolation because we were pulled away from the collective grief we were sharing as Americans and forced to look over our shoulders to protect ourselves and families. We were angry at the murderers who had committed these heinous acts. We were shaken by stories of the innocents who lost their lives. We were horrified by the devastation and enormous loss of life. In a piece I wrote within days of the attack in 2001, I noted how Arab Americans were overcome by a flood of conflicting emotions. I believe that it is important we never forget how we felt on that day and the days that followed. On the 13th anniversary of the attacks, here’s a look back at some of the most memorable photographs.I often write an article on the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks reflecting on the impact that tragedy had on my country and my community. The photographs from 9/11 and its aftermath remain some of the most iconic images in modern history and were published by countless media outlets, blogs and newspapers shortly after the Twin Towers toppled to the ground. 11, 2001 that captured the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. These describe just a few of the images from Sept. 4, 2001, the Bush administration had not decided whether Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda operation was a "big deal." ReutersĪ man covered in so much dust he looks as if he stepped out of a 1930s black-and-white photograph a passenger jet gliding just above the New York City skyline and headed straight for the World Trade Center a massive fissure in the side of the Pentagon. leaders and intelligence agencies failed for many years to grasp the gravity of the threat posed by radical Islamists and suffered from a collective "failure of imagination," the commission investigating the Sept. The World Trade Center burns after being hit by a plane in New York in this file photo on September 11, 2001.
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