Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman reckons post-9/11 America was a simpler time, when George W. Bush did his best to “calm prejudice” and nothing too bad happened to American Muslims. He was swiftly torn apart on Twitter.
The New York Times columnist commemorated the 19th anniversary of the most deadly attack on US soil in spectacular fashion. In a tweet on Friday morning, he claimed that “overall, Americans took 9/11 pretty calmly,” that “there wasn’t a mass outbreak of anti-Muslim sentiment and violence,” and that then-president Bush “tried to calm prejudice, not feed it.”
Overall, Americans took 9/11 pretty calmly. Notably, there wasn’t a mass outbreak of anti-Muslim sentiment and violence, which could all too easily have happened. And while GW Bush was a terrible president, to his credit he tried to calm prejudice, not feed it 2/
Krugman was swiftly ridiculed. Commenters reminded the esteemed economist that anti-Muslim prejudice actually skyrocketed after 9/11, with FBI data showing a more than tenfold increase in hate crimes over the preceding year. Others reminded him of wholesale roundups of Muslims, which saw hundreds jailed following tips to an FBI hotline, and according to one lawsuit against the federal government, physically abused in prison.
pic.twitter.com/xpdYK7lMdO
Americans called the FBI on their Muslim neighbors, the FBI rounded up Brown men indiscriminately, White thugs physically assaulted Sikhs and Muslims, gov’t implemented mass surveillance, wars were started, black sites opened – all done very fucking calmly. Because we are “good”
Bush too was far from the voice of reason Krugman remembers him as. The Republican leader presided over an international program of detention and interrogation, which saw terror suspects snatched from the streets, subjected to medieval-style torture, and detained without trial for years. Many of these detainees were never charged with crimes and some died as innocent men in the eyes of the law.
Paul Krugman & his family weren’t abducted off European streets and kidnapped (“rendered”) to Syria and Egypt to be tortured, nor locked away in illegal CIA black sites off the grid of human rights monitoring, nor shipped to an island prison for 20 years, but this still happened. pic.twitter.com/vdO7S7h1Mf
Bush launched two massively destructive Middle Eastern wars on the back of 9/11, wars that two decades later the US is trying to extricate itself from. Krugman did at least call these wars “disastrous,” but said nothing on Bush’s activities at home.
Domestically, Bush expanded surveillance, including the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program that illegally collected phone and internet data on millions of Americans. Even when warrants were acquired, Muslim-American activists, officials and professors were targeted by Bush’s spying apparatus. Commenters on Twitter reminded Krugman of these inconvenient facts.
Paul Krugman and his family weren’t subjected to the illegal domestic surveillance programs secretly implemented by Bush, Cheney & their team of monstrous neocons (catch them now on MSNBC!) but it still happened.The liberal whitewashing/revisions of the Bush years is repulsive. pic.twitter.com/tfmLDPgYJE
This revisionist nonsense is a slap in the face of American Muslims and Muslims around the world killed and maimed and left destitute by collective punishment sanctioned by the American people.Paul Krugman is a liberal and with liberals like these, who needs conservatives. https://t.co/ELhL4DyLiM
bloody hell, if ramping up the racist surveillance state and launching the Iraq War is ‘taking it calmly’ I’d hate to see them fly off the handle! https://t.co/bx2ZIXbDd2
Krugman has a history of inflaming online anger. Only a week ago he took a jog in New York City and posted pictures to ridicule the notion that the city was in the midst of a crime wave, as President Donald Trump and others have suggested. Actual crime statistics tell another story, with murders and shootings both up since last year, and commenters mocked Krugman’s claim that stories of “urban anarchy are almost entirely fantasy.”
Back in January, he embarrassed himself by announcing he had found “child pornography” on his computer, suggesting he was targeted by scammers, something he claimed had also happened previously.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
