By Issues & Insights Editorial Board | September 10, 2026
Academic and author Gad Saad calls it “suicidal empathy.” Think of the term the next time some media hack lionizes New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a midwit influencer praises Hasan Piker, or another church is converted to a mosque that is a viper’s nest of anti-American Islamic fundamentalism if not also repository for weapons.
Obviously we failed to learn the lesson that our enemies so savagely wrote on the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania a quarter century ago.
America’s response to Sept. 11, 2001, was first the proliferation of those asinine “Coexist” bumper stickers and later a welcome mat to fanatics who won’t assimilate because their goal is overthrow the U.S., and the West, for Islam. The virtue-signalers who proudly put the Coexist stickers on their Subarus and Volvo station wagons missed a crucial point: One of the religions represented by symbols doesn’t want to coexist with the others. It aims to conquer.
This should be clear. But some are blinded by their suicidal empathy, their desperate desire to demonstrate their moral superiority. They’ve created a growing headache:
- Hamtramck, Michigan, has an all-Muslim city council and a Muslim mayor, the first in the U.S. to have a Muslim-American government. Seven in 10 residents are Muslim. Holbrook Avenue, one of city’s main streets, has been renamed Palestine Avenue, as have other cities where Muslims have acquired political power. Investigative reporter Paul Sperry says former Police Chief Jamiel Altaheri seems to have had a peculiar relationship with American law, telling officers that domestic violence should be “handled through mosques following the tenets of Sharia law, which does not proscribe wife-beating as a crime.”
- Our suicidal empathy has produced the likes of Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, who is running for the U.S. Senate in Michigan, and Hasan Piker, a terrorist sympathizer. The former is a socialist who spoke at an Islamic convention in Detroit this weekend after a video montage was played in which an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing declared that “America is going down.” Piker is a vulgar agitator who believes “America deserved 9/11.” The convention montage ended, reports the Washington Free Beacon, with the “infamous photo of El-Sayed fist-bumping Hasan Piker.” Piker has also said, according to some satirically, but it’s too on-brand for him to easily dismiss it as satire, that “we’re gonna keep bringing in immigrants to this country — on purpose — so they can f*** your sister and then maybe even your daughter. We’re going to destroy the white race.”
- Mamdani, who has been told by surviving family members to stay away from the 9/11 memorial service, “handed the ceremonial pen to his chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem.” Kassem just happens to have been a lawyer for “a convicted al Qaeda member whose brother-in-law was one of the hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 77, which struck the Pentagon on 9/11,” according to Fox News.
- Fifteen miles from Hamtramck is Dearborn, Michigan, whose Democratic mayor, says Sperry, “has called for the annihilation of Israel ‘from the river to the sea’ and said Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack was ‘inevitable.'”
- There’s also Paterson, New Jersey, which annually holds a Palestinian flag-raising ceremony, “during which,” Sperry further reports, “residents chant, ‘Free Free Palestine!'” and where the “Muslim-majority city council voted to change existing noise regulations to allow the city’s dozen mosques to blast out the Islamic call to prayer five times a day — from before dawn to after dusk.”
- A few U.S. airports bent the knee to Islamists and agreed to install foot-washing stations for them. Is this to make it easier on them the next time Muslim terrorists want to take down a skyscraper with a U.S. jetliner? Does no one recall that the 9/11 terrorists performed ritualistic hygiene before they boarded the doomed airliners?
- Our education blob has become so rotted by leftist ideas that activists who want to erase the truth about 9/11 have gained a foothold in the classroom. This is done partly out of fear, we have to assume, because there is great dread that someone somewhere might call teachers and administrators racists and bigots, even Islamophobes, for bringing up one of the most painful moments in the country’s history. And partly because, to the left, America is a global and cultural bully that got exactly what it had coming.
- Sperry tells us that “critics worry” the Sharia-compliant enclaves of Hamtramck, Dearborn and Paterson “are providing a theocratic blueprint for surrounding towns.” In some cases, “Islamic men have organized posses to patrol the streets and enforce Sharia law.” Yes, in the United States.
Islamists have no interest in American and Western values. They don’t want work along side them, to coexist within a pluralistic society, they want to destroy the values that have produced civilization. Those who want to hold to those values must be converted or purged.
It’s painfully evident that, with the zealous aid of the political left, the country is surrendering, one precinct at a time, to the barbarians who told us 25 years ago that we were a target. Yet America’s Democrats and progressives see Islamists as the oppressed and the West as the oppressor, and they activate their psychotic need to show how tolerant, understanding and noble they are. But in truth, they are useful idiots. Better for all if they were instead Islamophobes.
Issues & Insights was founded by seasoned journalists of the IBD Editorials page. Our mission is to provide timely, fact-based reporting and deeply informed analysis on the news of the day – without fear or favor.
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