OK so let's take a stroll through some history..... https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1304385740063805440

Prior to 9/11, Islamophobia & anti-Arab sentiment was already rife in the US. One only need to see the depictions of Arabs and Muslims in American media and popular culture. Check out Jack Shaheen's important work on this

Obvious it is much deeper as well and Edward Said's Orientalism is the place to start for understanding the depth of Western bias toward the Arab and Muslim world. So there was already a cultural context but there was also a security state context as well.

Profiling, discrimination and targeted and discriminatory prosecution of Arabs and Muslims exited well before 9/11. Heck, I even remember when then Candidate George W Bush decried the use of secret evidence laws against Arab-Americans in a debate with Gore in Oct 2000!

Of course 9/11 took that cultural and security state context and put it on hyper-steroids. There was an immediate backlash. Arabs, Muslims and people perceived to be were attacked, harassed, intimidated and even killed. Houses of worship were attacked and burnt.

And the Arab & Muslim community was not spared the wounds of the 9/11 attacks. Many lost family and friends among the initial victims and first responders and others who survived carry the trauma of that day with them forever on top of dealing with an Islamophobic society.

And as the Security State was being rearranged in the aftermath, Arab & Muslim communities were in the cross-hairs. The INS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, used to be in the Labor and then Justice Departments but now immigration and immigrants would be securitized

New entities to handle immigration were created, we know them now as USCIS, CBP and, of course, ICE, which is still running amok, under the newly created Department of Homeland Security.

Databases and registries were created, including ones for "certain non-citizens" guess which?

Non-citizens males 16 and above from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria, Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Eritrea, Lebanon, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Kuwait...

Had to register in the NSEERS database. No-fly lists also ballooned out of control. But the government didn't just create this discriminatory lists, they mined them for repressive purposes.

Ever heard of Operation Frontline? Well it was an inter-agency operation by the Bush Admin ahead of the 2004 election. Supposedly aimed at "detecting, deterring and disrupting" terrorism among immigrant communities.

Thousands of investigations we launched and carried out by ICE an others. They mined several post-9/11 databases to go on raids. Many deportations resulted and families torn apart.

Despite making up a small fraction of immigrants, immigrants from Muslim countries were 1,280 times more likely to be targeted by this operation. Guess how many National Security related arrests resulted from all of this?

Who said Zero? Did you say Zero? Well, you are right. Rampant racial profiling result in nothing but intimidation, fear, the destruction of families and the furtherance of Islamophobia. https://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/End-counterproductive-racial-profiling-3183673.php

Oh, and then there was that little thing called the Global War on Terror, which is still on going by the way! We invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, we killed countless civilians, we set up unconstitutional prison camps, we tortured people. This only metastasized over the years.

The jingoism and flag rallying during the time these wars were launched and continued created a horrific climate of Islamophobia that repressed dissent in the Arab and Muslim community and beyond.

And while the post-9/11 response began under Bush, these wars were continued and expanded under Obama. And let's not forget the Islamophobia ginned up during this period laid the groundwork for the birtherist response to Obama himself.

And we all know what grew out of the BIRTHERISM, right?

We'll get back to Trump in a bit but I just remembered that time back in the summer of 2008 when Rachel Ray was in a Dunkin Donuts commercial wearing a black and white paisley scarf and Dunkin had to pull the add because some right-wing nut jobs said the scarf promoted terrorism.

That summer leading into the election featured the mass distribution of an anti-Muslim DVD aimed at ginning up Islamphobia and fear of Barack Hussein Obama in swing states.

That DVD, titled Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West, featured a who's who of Islamophobes and 28 million copies! were distributed through many newspapers across the country in swing states

A few newspapers refused to distribute it, including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and the Detroit Free Press. But the paper of record, the NYT, helped get them far and wide.

It was really during this time that the racism and islamophobia that had always been present in American culture came to be a heavily defining factor in Republican politics and identity as it assumed an adversarial role toward Barack Obama.

You saw it very clearly throughout the Obama era and was more pronounced during the election year in 2012. The campaign period led to a spike in Islamophobic attacks.

In just one week in August of 2012 at least eight places of worship associated with Middle Easterners or South Asians were targeted in the United States.

Six people were murdered at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. A mosque in Joplin, Mo., was burned to the ground. Mosques were targeted in Rhode Island, So Cal, Okl City and at two sites in Illinois. In Dearborn, Mich., an Arab-American church was targeted with vandalism.

I remember in Illinois the two mosques that were targeted came after comments made by a Republican congressman at a townhall just a few miles away.

"One thing I'm sure of is that there are people in this country — there is a radical strain of Islam in this country — it's not just over there — trying to kill Americans every week.....

It is a real threat, and it is a threat that is much more at home now than it was after 9/11....It's here. It's in Elk Grove. It's in Addison. It's in Elgin. It's here."

This was the Republican party that Romneyism failed to ride to successfully to the White House and the party he left behind for a successor who ended up being Donald Trump to build on.

Trump sailed into power on a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment and Islamophobia which grew significantly in the post-9/11 era.

Americans did not react "pretty calmly" after 9/11. We entrenched Islamophobia, racism & nativism. We reorganized our security state letting it run amok with profiling & discrimination.

And all of this became so enmeshed in our politics that it led to the election of Donald F-ing Trump, a White Supremacist demagogue who is taking our country to new embarrassing lows every day.

So yeah, pretty calm is not what I would call the American reaction to 9/11

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