Attacking Innocents — Americans, Jews or Muslims — Is Wrong – Inside Sources

This Sept. 11 marks 25 years since 2,977 people from at least 90 countries were murdered. This year, the evening of Sept. 11 also marks the beginning of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, known in Jewish liturgy as Yom HaZikaron, the Day of Remembrance.

After the attacks, America received sympathy from countries around the world, but few were as empathetic as Israel, which was then enduring a horrific suicide bombing campaign known as the second intifada. Israel built a memorial in Jerusalem to honor and remember the Americans lost on 9/11, with each victim’s name inscribed on it — the only 9/11 memorial outside the United States with that feature. A piece of the fallen Twin Towers is embedded in the memorial.

America is a country founded on the proposition that all people “are created equal.” Yet our history also shows that national trauma can curdle into prejudice against entire communities. After Sept. 11, too many Americans fell short of our founding ideals. FBI numbers show anti-Muslim hate crimes jumped from 28 in 2000 to 481 in 2001.

Six days after the attacks, President George W. Bush stood in a mosque in Washington and told the country that “the face of terror is not the true faith of Islam.” His message was simple: You don’t put an entire group of innocent people on trial for a crime committed by specific individuals.

Twenty-five years later, a far more offensive demand is being made of the Jewish community by people who would recognize the bias instantly if it were aimed anywhere else. Jews are not the co-religionists of the attackers, but their victims. The majority of Jews are Zionists: They believe the Jewish people should have a sovereign state of their own.

This is the overwhelming consensus within our population, held by supporters of both major political parties, including plenty who sharply criticize the current Israeli government. Disagreeing with Israeli government policy is legitimate; no one does it more than Israelis themselves. By contrast, making someone feel unwelcome or unsafe because of their nationality, ethnicity, creed or political views is hateful.

And yet, on American campuses, that line is being crossed daily. Nearly half of non-Jewish students saw or experienced anti-Jewish behavior in the past year, and campus lawyers say reported antisemitism is still near record levels.

The Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, were Israel’s 9/11. About 1,200 innocent people were killed, and more than 250 were taken hostage, including 12 Americans. Proportionally, that would be 40,000 dead and 8,500 hostages in a country the size of the United States. Citizens of more than 40 countries and many faiths were slaughtered in what has been called the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

Instead of receiving the world’s sympathy, Jews came under attack before Israel began to respond. While the blood of 378 people murdered at a music festival, most of them young, was still soaking into the sand, demonstrators in Western cities held rallies that celebrated the attack.

Today, antisemitism has surged across America and the Western world. In the three months after Oct. 7, the Anti-Defamation League recorded a 361 percent increase in antisemitic incidents over the like period a year earlier. The danger has not passed. Nearly half of young American Jews — 47 percent — reported being personally targeted by antisemitism, in person or online, in 2025. In the United Kingdom, antisemitism rose by a fifth in early 2026, on top of already record numbers.

It is wrong today to attack Jews on the basis of their identity, just as it was wrong to target innocent American Muslims in 2001 for the same reason.

In Jewish tradition, on Rosh Hashanah, the judgment of our lives and our fate in the coming year hangs in the balance. This year, as the shofar sounds on the same day America pauses to remember its dead, let us remember what we owe all the victims of terror and commit to ending the antisemitism that dishonors their memory.