-By Warner Todd Huston
Now that Donald Trump has been elected to the White House, you can be sure that the media will suddenly realize that homelessness is rampant, unemployment is a major problem, the economy is bad, and America is evil again. And to prove the contention, the media is already talking about how there has been a “massive rise” in “hate crimes” against Muslims. And it’s all Trump’s fault. But don’t believe these lies.
The latest guffaw worthy claim that America is suddenly gone all racist against Muslims was floated by the Associated Press on Monday, almost a week after President Elect Donald Trump stunned the media by winning the election.
The wild-eyed, spittle-specked claim was then echoed by such sources as CNN, The New York Times, ABC News, and a host of others decrying the “surge” or the “hike” or the fears of a “massive” rise in hate crimes against Muslims.
But it is all based on lies, folks. Don’t believe a word of it.
So, let’s look at the AP’s version of this nonsense, shall we?
For its November 14 article, the AP decided to essentially misuse the FBI’s reporting on hate crimes to float in an alarming headline reading:”Hate crimes against Muslims up by 67 percent in 2015.”
Oh, and the AP wants you to know it’s all Trump’s fault.
Now look how alarming this first paragraph is as given to us by the AP…
“Reported hate crimes against Muslims rose in 2015 to their highest levels since those seen in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, according to FBI statistics released Monday.”
With this opening sentence, one might think that thousands of cases of hate crimes have been reported against Muslims across this mean, rotten ‘ol country.
If so, the second and third paragraphs doesn’t reassure much.
Civil rights groups had been raising concerns about an anti-Muslim backlash in the U.S. even before the terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California, late in the year. The reporting period covers calendar year 2015, but comes at a time of heightened tensions following last week’s presidential election.
There have been reports of racist and anti-religious instances since Tuesday that have sparked outrage, including students at one school who chanted “white power” and a videotaped assault in Chicago that showed black men beating a white man as onlookers screamed, “You voted Trump!” In 2008, after Barack Obama was elected as the nation’s first black president, there were also suspected cases of alleged hate crimes tied to the election.
Ah, you see what they did there. It’s all Trump’s fault, right?
But then AP gets past its partisan and overheated rhetoric to tell us the actual numbers reported by the FBI. And it turns out that the grand total of so-called “hate crimes” against Muslims reported for 2015 was… drum roll, please… 257 incidents.
That’s right in a nation of over 300 million Americans a whopping 257 people claimed to have been victimized because they are Muslims.
Two hundred. Fifty. Seven.
That isn’t even a measurable percentage of the population. In fact, it’s not just an immeasurable number of the U.S. population it’s not even a measurable number of the 2.75 million member U.S. Muslim population!
Granted the AP is right that the 2015 statistic is a rise of some 67 percent over the 154 Muslims attacked for their religion in 2014. But so what? This number is statistically meaningless either way.
Furthermore, the “crimes” the FBI reported weren’t all violent crimes. Some were graffiti related, others were personal harassment charges, and many were low-end crimes that don’t amount to anything as bad as harm or even death occurring to a Muslim. The AP fails to note that the crimes reported are not all violent.
The AP, though, was looking for sensation, not facts. Let’s face it, when one uses percentages instead of reporting actual numbers, it can always sound worse than it is. After all if one person is hurt in 2014 because he was a Muslim yet three were attacked in 2015 that is a 200 percent increase! And it sure sounds worse to say a “200 percent increase” than to say the number went from one victim to three victims.
The AP does one other disservice with its report on this purported rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes. By not really pointing out that the FBI noted that hate crimes against Jews is many, many times more than those against Muslims, it gives weight to the attacks on Muslims but discounts the much larger number of attacks on Jews.
To be sure, the AP does note the following at the very end of its piece: “Jews and Jewish institutions remain the most frequent target of religious-based hate crimes, representing 53 percent of all those reported. Crimes against Jews increased about 9 percent.”
Still, this sentence doesn’t do the truth any service. While there were 257 crimes against Muslims in 2015, the FBI noted that there were a much larger 664 crimes against Jewish people in the U.S. during the same year. So, in fact, this story about the “alarming rate” of anti-Muslim hate crimes is actually dwarfed by the hate crimes against Jews.
Of course, even at that rate, the 664 hate-crimes against Jews is still practically nil when measured against our population of 318 million people.
So, all we really have in these new reports calling America a racist nation is an alarming headline, puffed up percentage-based statistics instead of hard numbers, and lies in place of solid, logical, and truthful reporting.
Another thing the AP and the rest of the old media establishment are working so hard to ignore is that many of the so-called anti-Muslim hate crimes against Muslims end up being hoaxes. Just in the last few weeks we saw a female Muslim from Louisiana claim she was assaulted, called names, and had her hijab ripped off her head by Trump supporters. Later she admitted she lied about the whole thing. Police are now weighing charges against her.
Then there was the recent case of the fake hate crime reported by The Islamic Center of Fort Pierce in Florida which claimed one of its members was attacked for being Muslim. It was learned shortly after that no such attack ever occurred. The Islamic Center of Fort Pierce was the same Islamic group that the Pulse nightclub killer frequented.
In another case, two teenaged Muslims in New York City claimed they were beaten by a white guy because they were Muslim. It later turned out that the white guy caught them sexually harassing his girlfriend and deservedly smacked them around because of their actions.
There are dozens of stories like these, stories of Muslims making shocking claims of anti-Muslim hate crimes that end up being hoaxes.
On the other hand, one never hears stories of hoax attacks on Jews.
Imagine that.
____________
“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Follow Warner Todd Huston on:
Twitter
Facebook
Tumblr
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as Constitution.com, CanadaFreePress.com, BizPac Review, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.
NOTE: If you want to comment, for some reason our Facebook comments section takes a bit of time to load. It’ll pop up soon. Thanks