Religion reporter reflects on hate persisting after 9/11 attacks

The reporter had just dropped her two little boys, ages six and three, at school when the car radio brought word of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center and then the second. She drove to a lookout on a mountain above her New Jersey town and watched the towers burn fourteen miles to the east. Fighter jets flew over her house in the hours that followed. Bridges and tunnels closed. She stayed connected on a home dial-up connection for one hundred fifty hours straight while her sons kept to their usual play and bedtime stories. That Friday she took them back up the mountain instead of their regular treat. Candles burned on a stone semicircle at the lookout. Letters and posters covered the rocks with words of grief, rage, and hope. The boys asked why the candles were lit and what had happened in New York. She told them bad guys had knocked down the buildings and that the family was safe. At the time she worked as an editor at Beliefnet, a website focused on religion, politics, and spirituality. In the weeks after the attacks the site published pieces that offered context on Islam, including statements from Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh along with official Muslim condemnations. President George W. Bush stood inside a Washington mosque and said Islam is peace. Those efforts did not stop anti-Muslim statements from prominent voices. A former president of the Southern Baptist Convention called the Prophet Muhammad a demon-possessed pedophile and the denomination leadership backed the remark. Commentator Ann Coulter suggested invading Muslim countries to convert them and later said Muslims should take up a hobby other than slaughtering infidels. Evangelist Franklin Graham called Islam a very evil and wicked religion. Over the next two decades attacks struck American Muslims first and then reached Sikhs, Jews, Latinos, LGBTQ people, and Black Americans. In 2012 a self-described white supremacist killed six worshippers at a Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. In 2015 another killed nine people during Bible study at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. In 2018 a gunman killed eleven at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. Communities responded by preserving bullet holes, building memorials with private funds, and posting inscriptions such as We Are One. National attention went to the 9/11 memorial and museum, yet the string of later hate crimes never received the same coordinated national accounting. In 2025 the Council on American-Islamic Relations logged 8,683 anti-Muslim complaints and the Anti-Defamation League counted 6,274 antisemitic incidents.