-By Warner Todd Huston
Apparently there is an awful lot of “anti-Muslim hate” going on in this post 9/11 America. At least that’s what the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) gravely tells us each and every day.
Just look at all this anti-Islamic bigotry going on out there:
In May, CAIR demanded that the GOP refudiate all that “racist,” anti-Muslim hatred a’goin’ on out there. (OK, they said “repudiate,” but, well, you know) In July CAIR demanded that the FBI explain why it dared to hire terror expert Robert Spencer to advise it on matters of terrorism. In October CAIR — a group that exists to find anti-Islamic bigotry under every rock — was surprised to find in a study it created that there is an awful lot of anti-Islamic animosity going on in the U.S.A. today. Mere days ago CAIR was furious that Muslims were getting “hate messages” in Oklahoma.
Why, it’s a sure thing that Muslims are being attacked by evil Americans from coast to coast… right? I mean, CAIR couldn’t just be blowing smoke up our collective… nation, could it?
It’s so bad here that Muslims in America even assembled a bunch of useful idiots from other religious communities to gather together to denounce all the anti-Islamic hate going on around us. Certainly with all this we must agree that there has to be all sorts of crimes against Muslims in the U.S.A., right?
But is that true? Is CAIR and its sycophants correct that hate crimes against Muslims are on the rise in America today? As it turns out CAIR’s claims are little else but self-serving nonsense, indeed.
To prove that CAIR is full of it we can point once again to the FBI’s statistics on hate crimes, as I’ve done in past articles (just last month, for instance). The 2009 hate crime statistics just released by the FBI puts a big dent in CAIR’s histrionics.
Now, the FBI reports crimes as reported, not crimes as proven with perpetrators convicted and in all of 2009 the FBI found a whopping total of 107 hate crimes against Muslims reported.
That’s right 107.
Now, if there was so much hate against Muslims going on in America, how does CAIR explain this low, low number of actual hate crimes against them? In light of the FBI’s stats it is hard to take CAIR’s claim seriously. If hatred against Muslims was so wide spread in the U.S., why is there no corresponding rise in hate crime statistics? And the 2009 report isn’t an outlier year, either. In 2008 (see table 1) we find an equally whopping 105 anti-Muslim hate crimes reported.
There is no way to escape the conclusion that there really isn’t much anti-Islamic hate crime in the U.S. even after 9/11. In fact, there is many times more anti-Jewish hate crime happening in the U.S. than anti-Muslim hate crime. The FBI notes 931 hate crimes against Jews in 2009, for instance.
There is another inescapable conclusion we can make, here, too. CAIR is pushing an agenda and that agenda is built on misrepresenting the climate of tolerance in America today.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.
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