USA Today claims Muslims fear ‘a new backlash’ as 25th anniversary of 9/11 jihad attacks approaches

I told you this was going to happen. This note at the end of this weepy creepy USA Today piece is telling: “The reporters’ roles covering First Amendment issues at the USA TODAY Network is made possible by a collaboration among Freedom Forum, Journalism Funding Partners and the USA TODAY Network. Freedom Forum does not provide editorial input.” That is essentially an admission that those groups paid to have this piece featured in USA Today. Go to Freedom Forum’s website and you’ll see that it is a leftist organization focused on Trump’s alleged enormities; this alleged free-speech organization never said a word about the very real and thoroughgoing censorship of foes of jihad violence and Sharia oppression.

“25 years after 9/11, many Muslims fear a new backlash,” by BrieAnna J. Frank, Cate Charron, Angele Latham, Stephany Matat, and Taylor Seely, USA Today, September 6, 2026:

The morning of Sept. 11, 2001, began like any other day. Sabinah Mohyuddin was getting her kids ready for school in Clarksville, Tennessee, while her husband, a cancer physician, was still asleep….

Then Mohyuddin, a Muslim, learned the hijakers also followed Islam.

“It fell on me like a heavy weight,” she said. “What did this mean for the Muslim community? What did this mean for me?”

Not a word, you’ll notice, about the martial and violent passages in the Qur’an, or 1,400 years of jihad violence, or about the jihad attacks around the world today. USA Today leads us to believe that the Islamic identity of the attackers was entirely incidental to their attacks, and that Islam is completely harmless and non-threatening.

Now, 25 years after the attacks, Muslims across the country are asking the same question as they experience  rising Islamophobia and concerns about their First Amendment right to religious freedom.

Over 40% of U.S. adults believe Muslims are less patriotic than other Americans and that Muslim Americans are having a negative impact on the country, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in May.

The stigmatization, often amplified by politicians, has affected everything from immigration statuses to due process rights and everyday religious practices. Muslim leaders and community members, in turn, told the USA TODAY Network they’re left fighting to defend their faith and warning the nation that its founding principles are at stake….

Note the sleight of hand here. We have gotten not the slightest hint that Islam is political, and are told that our right to religious freedom is at stake. Yet the religious practices of Muslims are not what makes Islam controversial.

“I think there’s a lot of propaganda pushed against Muslims, which leads to an unsafe environment,” Khan said.

Abutaa fears that won’t change anytime soon.

“We’re going to see, at least unfortunately the way the waves are going, more anti-Muslim rhetoric than ever before,” Abutaa said. “It’ll probably be worse than post-9/11, especially with the demonization of Muslims in America being the new McCarthyism.”…

The ones who are really being demonized here, as always, are the critics of Islam and foes of jihad violence and Sharia oppression. They’re portrayed as irrational bigots, without the slightest hint that there might be any genuine problem to which they’re responding.

A fight for the right to wear a hijab in a booking photograph has also come to the forefront. There have been at least seven lawsuits over the matter since 2024, according to Religion News Service.

Among them is a complaint by four Muslim women in Arizona who sued multiple police departments and Arizona State University after male officers removed their hijabs while arresting them at pro-Palestinian campus protests in 2024.

The women alleged the officers violated their First Amendment rights by denying their request for religious accommodations, such as removing their hijabs only in front of female officers. An Arizona district court judge dismissed several of their claims, though one against the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office remains.

Jabaieh was one of those women, telling the USA TODAY Network she was in jail for 26 hours without the covering she’d worn since she was in high school.

“You wouldn’t want somebody to take off your shirt,” Jabaieh said. “I felt stripped, and I felt exposed. I felt scared. I felt humiliated. I felt small.”

She called wearing the hijab “something that was deeply personal between me and my religion that was taken out of my control.”

Why are all these pious Muslim women getting arrested? Why does USA Today pass over in silence the fact that women are getting imprisoned and killed for not wearing the hijab in Iran? Why is USA Today silent about how Muslim women are threatened and worse for not wearing it?

The incident echoed other interactions she’s had throughout her life related to her faith, including a man asking her as a teenager whether she was married.

“I was like, ‘Oh, no sir, I’m 15,'” Jabaieh recalled telling him. “He was like, ‘Yeah, but your people do that, right? Like Muslims, y’all get married at six, eight, nine?'”

No mention of Muhammad’s marriage to Aisha and how he is the “excellent example,” or of why child marriage is rampant in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Despite the challenges for American Muslims, there are “silver linings in what’s been a pretty dark cloud for the last 25 years,” according to Arsalan Iftikhar, a human rights lawyer and author of books including “Fear of a Muslim Planet: Global Islamophobia in the New World Order.”…

Dark cloud? Muslims have been streaming into the U.S. in large numbers since 9/11. Why are they coming to this alleged “Islamophobic” hellhole?

Mohyuddin, too, has gotten involved.

She and other Muslim leaders in Tennessee organized protests and pushback to a 2011 state bill that initially sought to make it a felony to follow Sharia law. The bill was rewritten as a provision allowing the governor to determine that a group provided “material support” to terrorists – without providing evidence to the public – and passed.

Shortly after, she became a founding board member of the American Muslim Advisory Council and now serves as its executive director. The Nashville-based organization challenges Islamophobic legislation and works to combat Muslim stereotypes.

“In hard times, what gives me hope is seeing more of the community willing to exert their rights, and willing to organize and speak up,” she said. “Even despite all of the attempts to silence us.”

Who is attempting to silence the American Muslim Advisory Council, or Muslims in general? Absolutely no one. There are some people and groups calling attention to the fact that Sharia is political, supremacist, expansionist and violent, and not as benign as Mohyuddin and her comrades claim. She is free to deal with the substance of our arguments, but instead contents herself with calling us names and attempting to silence us. Freedom Forum remains uninterested in that.