Excerpt:
One of the standard tropes of mainstream-media discourse in the post-9/11 era is that American Muslims have been subjected to a backlash in which they have been subjected to discrimination and hate crimes. Though there was little or no actual statistical evidence of bias attacks or any sort of official discrimination, this notion that America is a hostile place for Muslims helped change the nature of the debate over the proposed Ground Zero Islamic Center and mosque that dominated the airwaves this past summer. Publications such as Time magazine asked, "Does America Have a Muslim Problem?" in August despite the fact that they could provide nothing but anecdotal evidence for their assumption that the answer to their query was an undoubted "yes."
Though the success of this claim of Muslim victimhood was largely the result of successful propagandizing by groups such as the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), which is dedicated to promoting the idea that the United States is a foe of Islam, it has become a commonplace assumption that a post-9/11 anti-Muslim backlash was real and that anti-Muslim attacks in this country are a widespread and persistent phenomena. It is this assumption that was the foundation for the belief that a Ground Zero mosque dedicated to reminding Americans not to think ill of Muslims was not only appropriate but also necessary.