Anti-Muslim sentiment flared as chilling images from Australian media showed people, believed to be hostages, with their hands pressed against the glass of the Lindt Chocolate Cafe in Sydney’s central business district,” CNN reported Dec. 15. “They were holding up a black flag with Arabic writing on it reading, ‘There is no God but God and Mohammad is the prophet of God.’ ”

During a 16-hour siege, Man Haron Monis, 50, an Iranian who’d been granted political asylum in Australia in 1996, murdered two of the 17 hostages he took.

The Taliban attacked a school in Peshawar, Pakistan, Dec. 16, killing 145, most of them children. In France, “lone wolves” like Mr. Monis killed one and injured 27 in attacks in Tours, Dijon and Nantes. Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who murdered two New York City police officers Dec. 20, was a convert to Islam associated with a jihadist group.

During the siege in Sydney, Rachael Jacobs, a lecturer in education at Australia Catholic University in Brisbane, described an encounter with a young Muslim woman sitting next to her on a commuter train. The woman had tears in her eyes as she removed her head scarf, evidently out of fear it might make her a target, Ms. Jacobs wrote.

“I ran after her at the train station,” Ms. Jacobs wrote on her Facebook page. “I said, ‘Put it back on, I’ll walk with you.’ She started to cry and hugged me for about a minute, then walked off alone.”

Though no one had accosted the woman, Ms. Jacobs drew praise from liberals around the world for her courageous stand against anti-Islamic bigotry.

Which never happened. She never spoke with the woman, who might not have been a Muslim, Ms. Jacobs admitted in an article she wrote for the Brisbane Times.

Even though she’d made up virtually all of her story, it was important because it launched “a pre-emptive strike against racism and bigotry,” Ms. Jacobs said.

After nearly every atrocity committed by Islamist terrorists, liberals express fear of a backlash against innocent Muslims. To date, the backlash — like Ms. Jacobs’ heroism – is largely a figment of their imaginations. Ordinary Westerners distinguish between the few Muslims who are trying to kill us and the many who aren’t.

It isn’t just innocent Muslims for whom prominent liberals express concern. The news media devoted more attention last month to recycled charges the CIA “tortured” al-Qaida leaders than to the terror attacks mentioned above.

Almost all of the charges of “torture” in the report issued by Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee Dec. 9 had been aired before the 2008 election. The foremost example cited was waterboarding.

Grandstanding journalists have volunteered to be waterboarded to prove it is “torture,” which indicates it isn’t. No journalist has ever volunteered to have his fingernails pulled out or electric shocks administered to his genitals.

What the CIA did wasn’t torture, the Obama Justice Department said. When an amendment was offered in 2006 to define waterboarding as torture, the Senate didn’t pass it.

“This is about rewriting the narrative of history,” said Richard Engel, chief foreign correspondent for NBC News. “(Democrats) knew what was going on at the time and in many cases were quite happy with the intelligence they were getting.”

But NBC News anchor Brian Williams apparently sees no distinction between waterboarding — applied to three terrorists and to more than 70,000 U.S. military personnel as part of SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) training — and the rack, thumbscrew or iron maiden.

“How are we better than our enemies morally in light of what we all read about today?” Mr. Williams asked former CIA Director Michael Hayden. For starters, Brian, we don’t behead children who don’t share our religious views. We don’t blow up little girls because they go to school.

Tough measures must be taken to protect innocents from the moral monsters who do. Ordinary Americans understand this. But the distinction is lost on many liberals who — despite the lack of evidence for it — smear their fellow citizens as knuckle-dragging Neanderthals.