In the hours, days and weeks after the towers fell 11 years ago, an unusual feeling of unity and kindness prevailed across this country. We weren’t fighting over Florida’s faulty voting machines or pushing and shoving each other through subway turnstiles. We were just Americans trying to make sense of the worst moment our generation had ever seen.

Then, the bitterness — and a focal point. As the falling towers were seared into our collective memory, so was a face: Osama bin Laden, with his beard and his turban, his smug grin. We hated him, and rightfully so. But with that image in our minds, we began to see him everywhere. We suspected our Muslim neighbors, calling the police and reporting we’d seen Osama bin Laden at 7-Eleven. Eventually, we weren’t just Americans. We were Americans and Muslim-Americans.

While the nation at large went on collectively freaking out about shoe bombs and underwear bombs and turban bombs, Northeastern, for its part, moved past all that, remembering that fear, but not allowing it to own us. The 12 members of the NU community we lost that day remain the greatest loss we’ve ever felt at once. But we pulled together and never fell divided.

Now a group outside Northeastern is trying to change that. On Sept. 6, a group called “Americans for Peace and Tolerance” launched a Facebook page called “Exposing Islamic Extremism at Northeastern University.”

The group is advertising the page on Facebook, and many Northeastern students and alumni have commented. A quick look at the page is enough to shake confidence within the Northeastern community. Alumni applauding the page for doing Northeastern a service, frequent updates from administrators about supposed extremism at NU, multiple videos setting forth the group’s points. Did we really allow an extremist Imam, Abdullah Faaruuq, to push Islamic students towards violence against Americans on campus?

Well, what you can’t see on the page is the numerous comments in defense of Northeastern’s Islam community, condemning the group for spreading misinformation.

Two people I talked to, a student (Deniz Ozkaynak, who wrote about this topic in a letter to the editor this week) and an alumnus, both said they posted comments in defense of Northeastern questioning the group’s statements, and they were banned from posting on the page, their comments deleted.

John Griffith, who graduated from Northeastern in 2010, said the page confounded him when he saw it, because he knew Faaruuq at Northeastern, but not the man the video portrayed.

“He’s one of the most peaceful guys ever,” Griffith said. “The irony of the whole fan page and this whole thing is it’s a hate group toward muslims.”

I got in touch with Charles Jacobs, the founder of Americans for Peace and Tolerance, to try to get a better understanding of the group’s mission. He refused to answer questions about the group’s almost $250,000 in spending in 2010 and deflected questions about its inner workings.

“We are not the ones who support convicted terrorists or who promote the teachings of homophobic, wife beating, anti-Semites,” he wrote. Who, exactly, are the homophobic, wife-beating anti-Semites, and who is supporting them? As of press time, Jacobs hadn’t clarified.

He told me his group, which takes similar actions on campuses across the nation, focused on Northeastern after they were “contacted by both professors and students at NEU who were deeply concerned with what was happening on campus but felt they were ignored by the administration.”

Arthur Maserjian, president of NU Hillel, didn’t sound too concerned about the administration. In an email, Maserjian wrote: “We have full faith and trust in the administration and have no further comment.”

Instead, another group of students on campus is feeling threatened. The Islamic Society at Northeastern University (ISNU), is mentioned by name in the video. The group’s president, Aziz Al-Refai, says he’s worried that freshmen and others who aren’t familiar with Northeastern might be convinced that Northeastern is home to extremism by the video, which he says misrepresents the Islamic community on campus.

Members of ISNU said the video made them feel unsafe on campus because of the way it presented Islam.

The group isn’t circling the wagons, though. Al-Refai encourages members of the Northeastern community of all faiths and cultures to come to their weekly Halaqai, which he described as a “gathering of Islamic theological discussion” on Mondays at 6 p.m. in Sacred Space.

Americans for Peace and Tolerance consider themselves victorious; the university released the Imam from his volunteer position soon after the information in the video was published in an Aug. 24 op-ed in The Jewish Advocate.

But university officials say otherwise. The spiritual life office at Northeastern is going through a number of changes. At the top, Alex Kern recently replaced Shelli Jankowski-Smith, who resigned in June, as director of the office. He renamed the office The Center for Spirituality, Dialogue and Service, and is making a number of personnel changes. Under Kern’s leadership, the office severed its relationship with Imam Faaruuq and is advertising two unrelated jobs for program managers. University spokeswoman Renata Nyul said the Imam’s release was connected to the restructuring, not Americans for Peace and Tolerance.

“Northeastern recently reorganized its office of spiritual life to better serve our students and more closely align with our educational mission … Some of our previous spiritual advisors, including Abdullah Faaruuq, are no longer affiliated with the university.”

– Taylor Dobbs can be reached at [email protected]