9/11 continues fuelling anti-Muslim sentiments 19 years later

A French journalist at Le Figaro associated the 9/11 terrorist attack with an innocuous video of a food-blogger, simply because she was wearing the hijab. Making such inflammatory comments has a double impact. The first is on the life of the blogger, who was targeted by abusers online, and the second on the life of Muslim communities that continue being stigmatised and discriminated against.

Anticipating the start of the new university year, the French food blogger Imane Boune released a video offering tips on cheap recipes for students, produced and tweeted by the French network BFMTV. Soon after, the video was retweeted by Judith Waintraub, a journalist at the right-wing newspaper Le Figaro, who commented two words: “11 September”.

The fact that the blogger was wearing a hijab and that the video was posted by BFMTV on the 11th of September, was enough for the journalist to draw a connection with the 9/11 attacks by the Islamist terrorist group Al-Qaeda.

In doing so, Judith Waintraub equated the headscarf, and the religion of about 5 million people in France, with terrorism.

Such an inflammatory comment puts Muslims communities in danger of being discriminated against and stigmatised, as it reinforces the stereotype that Muslims advocate terrorism.

The most visible and immediate impact of this anti-Muslim tweet was a storm of hate that poured into Imane Boune’s notifications. The food blogger received so much abuse online that she deleted her Twitter account to take a break from social media.

Waintraub’s tweet flared up a debate on the headscarf that has been polarising France for decades. While some people online applauded the journalist’s remark and made further comments against Muslims, others pointed that the tweet was racist and shameful.

The Le Figaro journalist herself became the target of hate on Twitter, receiving insults and death threats.

Minister for the City, Nadia Hai, criticised Waintraub’s tweet as “sad and unworthy”, but also condemned the threats received by the journalist.

Unlike Hai, prominent French political figures, including Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, came to the defence of the journalist without acknowledging the anti-Muslim comment and without mentioning that the food-blogger was also subject to online hate.

While online abuse should always be condemned, we should also recognise that not all online hate is the same. In this case a woman offering cooking tips was attacked due to her religious beliefs, and choice of attire, while the other spoke from a position of power to bolster hatred against a religious minority.

The impact of 9/11 on anti-Muslim hate is well documented and notorious. In the years immediately following the attacks, anti-Muslim hate crime massively increased across the US and Europe, and powerful cultural narratives emerged that entrenched associations between Islam and violence. The fact that, 19 years later, the date can still be weaponised to stigmatise a food blogger in a headscarf, is evidence of how powerful those narratives remain.