‘What terrifies me is if ISIS were to detonate a nuclear device and kill 50million Americans. Imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims?’

That tweet – posted with a twinkle in the eye by the late great comedian Norm Macdonald in December 2016 – might just be the most incisive piece of satire our still-young century has so far produced.

It had another good airing on social media over the weekend, as the world marked the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and mainstream-media outlets couldn’t help but Do The Norm Tweet, pivoting away from the apocalyptic Islamist atrocity itself to hand-wring about the ‘backlash’ supposedly suffered by Muslims in its wake:

‘After 9/11, Islamophobia shaped a generation of Muslim New Yorkers’, ran a headline in the New York Times. ‘We were viewed through the lens of terrorism’, a British Muslim interviewee told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. ‘Sadly there were questions about our faith and whether we share British values.’

You’d be forgiven for thinking 9/11 was a colossal act of ‘Islamophobic hate speech’ – a spicy viral YouTube video, perhaps – rather than the mass slaughter of Americans by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda for having the temerity to defy their radical Islamic ideology.

The liberal elites have been struggling to shake off this tic for a quarter of a century now. We saw it in Britain last year, when the 20th anniversary of the 7/7 London bombings was met with a preponderance of thinkpieces in which ‘Islamophobia’ was mentioned more than Islamism, if Islamism was mentioned at all.

To the extent liberal outlets feel comfortable talking about the attacks themselves, they can do so only by paying solemn tribute to those slain, as if they were the victims of a natural disaster or a national-security screw-up. The searing, pressing question of why they were murdered is one to be evaded at all costs.

This reflex is sadly not confined to the media. Zohran Mamdani, the Muslim American mayor of New York City, has been at it for years. In interviews he has recalled a teacher at his NYC school telling him, on the day of 9/11, this might mean him being bullied. He has also claimed his ‘aunt’ didn’t feel comfortable wearing her hijab on the subway in the aftermath of the attacks.

Horrible stuff, of course. But I dare say those who were blown up, burnt alive, ripped to pieces by steel and glass, should prey on our minds just a touch more than those who were called names in the playground or temporarily felt the need to forgo public transport.

When leftists aren’t deflecting to the domestic ‘backlash’, they are deflecting to the so-called War on Terror. Mamdani’s tweet commemorating the 20th anniversary paid tribute to the 3,000 New Yorkers who ‘died on 9/11’ – a curious choice of verb, as if they all keeled over from heart attacks – before switching focus to the ‘hundreds of thousands who died in the wars that followed’.

We all know what he was getting at with this crude bit of accounting, with this counting of body bags: that the US’s subsequent ‘crimes’ were, if anything, worse.

Yes, the War on Terror was a bloody folly. But to suggest any moral equivalence between America and its allies waging foolhardly foreign wars – fuelled by a righteous desire to crush transnational jihadism as well as utopian dreams of ‘nation building’ – and jihadists purposefully butchering civilians en masse is morally infantile at best.

At worst, it is apologism for Islamism. It suggests that Islamists’ efforts to slaughter their way to paradise, to subject all of humanity to their Islamo-totalitarian rule, is a bit of a nothing burger when contrasted with the supposed horrors of ‘American imperialism’.

It chimes with the depressingly common refrain heard on the left after 9/11. That the United States – if anything – had it coming. That al-Qaeda’s fascistic assault on this rugged, teeming metropolis was, in the words of the Guardian’s Seumas Milne, the Americans ‘reaping a dragons’ teeth harvest they themselves sowed’ – because of the ‘unabashed national egotism and arrogance’ of decades of US foreign policy.

Why do they persist in this despicable little dance? Progressives, certainly, struggled to compute 9/11. Those who had been pickled in cultural relativism, who had come to loathe the very civilisation that produced them, were suddenly confronted with the fact that there are much worse alternatives; that Western capitalist society, for all its faults, is infinitely superior to an ideology that loathes freedom and worships death. Better to change the subject than admit there might be something to America that is actually worth defending.

It seems a toxic brew of identity politics and postcolonial theory has melted leftists’ minds. They now view everything through their prefab hierarchy of victimhood, in which some groups – particularly Muslims – are forever the victims, even when they are the perpetrators. When layered on to geopolitics, it amounts to portraying even murderous jihadists as the noble savages of global affairs – robbed of agency, lashing out in tantrum-like anger against an overweening, imperialistic West.

This certainly seems to be the case with Mamdani, who was born in Uganda to Muslim Indian parents. While his more excitable critics insist he is some crypto-Islamist, or Muslim migrant subversive, his deflections over Islamism show he is actually depressingly well integrated into what is now elite American culture – a culture that is gripped by self-loathing on the one hand, and a deep racial / religious paternalism on the other.

The ‘won’t someone please think of the Muslims?’ reflex may well be absurd. Norm Macdonald could certainly see that. But it is also suicidal. It reflects a refusal to take Islamist barbarism seriously, to admit that Western life is under attack. Hopefully, it won’t take another 25 years for our ruling class to awake from this stupor.