Excerpt:
Eight years to the day later, what are the cultural effects of 9/11? The first out of the starting gate and still leading the pack was the reflexive liberal instinct to throw protective arms around Islam and Muslims. The dust hadn't settled from the trade towers before it was pronounced from sea to shining sea that Islam was a religion of peace, and that Islamophobia was sure to run rampant in the streets, a sin we were all warned to guard against.
But like global warming, which has as yet failed to materialize in spite of so much fervent belief in its coming, Islamophobia never actually took root. In 2006 there were 8,000 hate crimes reported to the FBI in the United States, up 8% from 2005. By far the most were directed against blacks (2,640). Next in frequency were anti-Semitic crimes (967, up from 848 in 2005) - and that was before Bernie Madoff made the news. Gay males suffered 747 hate-motivated crimes, and - here a steep downward plunge - a mere 156 incidents involved Islamophobia (up from 128 in 2005).
In fact, Muslims represented the group least likely to be subjected to hate crimes, and the uptick from 2005 cannot be said to be linked with 9/11, for surely 2002 would have been the high water mark for Islam-based aggression. In any case, 156 acts of hatred - few if any life-threatening - is so nugatory in a country of 300 million people as to be statistically irrelevant. (I don't have Canadian statistics handy, but I am confident that if Islamophobic hate crimes stood out in any way from hate crimes against Jews or gays, our liberal media would have jumped all over them.)