But time has done little to dispel the deep mistrust some Americans feel toward Muslims, believing they are sympathetic to terrorists and have not done enough to root out radicalism in their communities.

Muslim leaders have ramped up outreach to show they’re as American as anyone else, but have been unable to shake the specter of terrorism. That mistrust has played out across national and local levels in racial profiling, congressional hearings on radicalism in Islam and virulent opposition to the building of mosques.

North Jersey has a large Muslim community with deep local roots and some members serving in public office. But Muslims here have hardly been immune from tensions over Islam in America.

“Sept. 11 was a major rude awakening. All of a sudden our religion was hijacked by someone who flies into buildings,” said Mohamed El Filali, the outreach coordinator for the Islamic Center of Passaic County in Paterson.

New Jersey was inextricably linked to the disaster, having lost so many of its residents to the attacks and later learning that a few hijackers made a temporary home in Paterson. Suspicion and fear were rampant in the aftermath.

Tensions surfaced sharply with a North Bergen Muslim cleric’s proposal to develop the Park51 mosque near Ground Zero. Richard Zuendt, a member of the Bergen County Republican Organization and co-founder of ConservativeNewJersey.com, said the mosque plan showed that Muslim-Americans were not understanding or tolerant of their neighbors, a sentiment shared by other Americans who protested the project.

“They don’t feel the way we do,” said Zuendt, of Garfield. “They don’t feel our hurt. If they felt our hurt, they would not want to open a mosque two blocks from Ground Zero.”

Muslim-Americans across North Jersey said the “us versus them” scenario was unfair and that their civil liberties as Americans suffered when their homes and non-profits were raided, when their houses of worship got extra land-use scrutiny, or when they were subject to tougher questioning when they came up for public-service jobs.

In a recent high-profile case, critics assailed Governor Christie’s appointment of Clifton lawyer Sohail Mohammed, an Indian-American Muslim, as a state Superior Court judge. During his confirmation hearing in June, Mohammed was grilled by lawmakers on topics like his Muslim affiliations and beliefs on Shariah law, or Islamic religious law, and the Palestinian political party Hamas.

State Sen. Gerald Cardinale, R-Demarest, who vigorously questioned Mohammed, said he had the right to assess how people’s beliefs might affect their work.

“The majority of Muslims pose no threat,” Cardinale said in a recent interview. “What I believe is that most of them are as fearful of the extremist minority as we are and our goal should be to overcome the extremist minority tendencies.”

Cardinale said those Muslim extremists want to “destroy American culture” and impose Shariah law, which he said makes women into cattle or slaves. But Muslims say critics are using terms like Shariah to inspire fear, while spreading misinformation about what those terms actually mean.

Muslims interviewed about Sept. 11 said they were resentful of what they called guilt by association. Kashif Chaudhry of New Milford, a Muslim youth leader, said Muslims were being subject to the same kind of prejudices that other religions and ethnic groups had faced in the past in the U.S.

“The perception that the whole community was terrorists or terrorist sympathizers — we hoped that would go away with time,” said Chaudhry.

Why now, 10 years after the terrorist attacks, does anti-Islam rhetoric seem to be more heated than ever? Some say it is because well-organized and well-funded individuals and groups use websites, blogs and other media to drive anti-Islamic agendas.

“These groups are really organized and have done a fairly good job in bringing forth fear that people may have had subconsciously,” said Salaheddin Mustafa, a Clifton resident who heads the North Jersey chapter of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee.

The tone of the criticism has been harsh and sometimes hateful, say Muslims, and it has seeped into the mainstream, espoused by news personalities, politicians and self-appointed experts on the Islamic world. Muslims say the bashing has become so accepted that when critics of President Obama wanted to smear him they claimed falsely that he was a Muslim.

Some of Zuendt’s blog posts on Islam at ConservativeNewJersey.com have used individual examples of violence by Muslims as examples of what is wrong with Islam, and has referred to Islam as a “barbaric cult.” He stood by his writings in a recent interview, saying he believed that Muslims kill people who leave the religion, cut off the hands of thieves and blame women for rape — actions Muslims view as stereotypes.

Mostly, he was concerned they were not loyal to the U.S. “The Muslim leadership has not stepped forward and pledged their allegiance to their country versus their religion,” Zuendt said.

Zuendt’s blogs might put him at an extreme end of conservative ideology. But the notion, which Zuendt promotes, that Muslims warrant special scrutiny seems to resonate with many Americans.

A USA Today/Gallup poll conducted this year concluded that 52 percent of Americans supported a congressional investigation into American-Muslim radicalism led by Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. Meanwhile, a Quinnipiac University poll measuring New York City residents’ views of the proposal to build the Park51 mosque found that 52 percent opposed it.

The blogs, media and organizations critical of Islam have grown more prevalent over the past several years and appear to be impacting public opinion. A 2010 Pew Research Center Poll found that 30 percent of Americans had a favorable view of Islam in 2010; five years earlier that figure was 41 percent.

One of the frequent criticisms is that Muslims did not condemn terrorism following Sept. 11. But some Muslims question why they should apologize for radicals who have nothing to do with them, while arguing that Muslim religious leaders have vocally condemned the violence.

“We’ve been doing it,” said Mustafa. “Our voices just aren’t loud enough to counter what is clearly an organized effort on the other side.”

Chaudhry said Muslims should have had a stronger voice in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, but were afraid to speak out. That has changed as Muslims have amplified outreach efforts and started organizations to promote peace, he said. And like others, he complained that the most extreme voices in the religion are the ones that get aired in the media.

“People like the Taliban do claim they’re Muslims and do have extremist ideology,” Chaudhry said. “But those aren’t even 1 or 2 percent of the whole population of, like, 2 billion.”