"America deserved 9/11," taken on its own and without additional context, sounds to me like it's saying that every one of those dead people deserved to die solely because they were within US borders at the time (because I think this is getting lost on many people, hundreds of the deaths weren't American).

Would you say this about phrases like "Atlanta deserved Sherman" or "Germany deserved to be bombed in WW2"? A great many innocent people died in both of those. If you think those are different, is it because they happened a long time ago or because they didn't involve a non-state actor? I personally don't see any difference between our style of 9/11 posting and the Sherman-posting that can be found outside our website.

It also reinforces their implicit definition of who an "American" is, when people talk about how the ensuing Islamophobia showed what America really was, by equating being born in the United States with being anti-Muslim, which I feel erases all the native-born Muslims in the US that have been here for years and generations.

That also ignores that there actually were lots of Americans who spoke against the fervor sweeping the country. Musicians used their platforms to criticize how the Bush Admin was using the tragedy. Comedians and talk show hosts lost their sponsors and backers

The unfortunate reality is that those people are politically irrelevant. Nothing they said, did, or voted for mattered in the slightest for America's actions. There were abolitionists in the Confederacy and anti-war Germans in Nazi Germany but when we talk about these states we usually ignore them. We just talk about the states and what they did.

I was literally brought to an anti-war picket line as a kindergartener in '03 so that my mom would have enough evidence for me to be a conscientious objector in 20 years

Your mom's pretty bad-ass.

Like, considering how many people in this thread are also probably American themselves, it's silly at best and counterproductive at worst to make "America deserved 9/11" anyone's actual public opinion.

You're right, it would be a deranged opinion to express in public. We're not in public though we're in a leftists space. "America deserved 9/11" is a thing we say to distinguish ourselves from the normal people that think 9/11 was the greatest tragedy in the entire world. It's also very difficult to make another short phrase that expresses our opinion on 9/11. Communication crushes nuance, you can refer to somebody that you've known for a few months as your "friend" and you could refer to somebody that you've known from high school in the same way. There's a massive gulf in how close you are but you the same word is used for both.