Islamophobia America Rise Hate Crimes Against Muslims Proves What Politicians
25 July 2017By Brian Levin
Hate crimes against Muslims have been on the rise. The murder of two
samaritans for aiding two young women who were facing a barrage of anti-Muslim
slurs on a Portland, Oregon, train is among the latest examples of brazen acts
of anti-Islamic hatred.
Earlier in 2017, a mosque in Victoria, Texas, was burned to the ground by an
alleged anti-Muslim bigot. And just last year, members of a small extremist
group called The Crusaders plotted a bombing “bloodbath” at a residential
housing complex for Somali-Muslim immigrants in Garden City, Kansas.
I have analyzed hate crime for two decades at California State University-San
Bernardino’s Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. And I have found that
the rhetoric politicians use after terrorist attacks is correlated closely to
sharp increases and decreases in hate crimes.
Hate crimes post 9/11
Since 1992 (following the promulgation of the Hate Crime Statistics Act of
1990), the FBI has annually tabulated hate-crime data voluntarily submitted
from state and territorial reporting agencies. A hate crime is defined as "a
criminal offense motivated by either race, ethnicity, religion, disability,
sexual orientation, gender or gender identity."
According to the FBI’s data, hate crimes against Muslims that were reported to
police surged immediately following the terror attacks of 9/11. There were 481
crimes reported against Muslims in 2001, up from 28 the year before. However,
from 2002 until 2014, the number of anti-Muslim crimes receded to a numerical
range between 105 to 160 annually. That number was still several times higher
than the pre-9/11 levels.
It should be noted that other government data, such as the Bureau of Justice
Statistics, which relies on almost 200,000 residential crime surveys as
opposed to police reports, show severe official undercounting of hate crimes.
Those studies, based on respondents’ answers to researchers, indicate a far
higher annual average of hate crime—250,000 nationally—with over half stating
that they never reported such offenses to police.
FBI data show that in 2015 there were 257 hate crimes against Muslims—the
highest level since 2001 and a surge of 67 percent over the previous year.
As I noted in a prepared statement before the Senate Judiciary Committee in
May 2017, this was the second-highest number of anti-Muslim hate crimes since
FBI record-keeping began in 1992. Not only did anti-Muslim crime cases rise
numerically in 2015, they also grew as a percentage of all hate crime. They
now account for 4.4 percent of all reported hate crime, even though Muslims
are estimated to be only 1 percent of the population.
When do the spikes happen?
At our center, we analyzed even more recent disturbing trends related to hate
crimes. Based on the latest available police data for 2016 from 25 of the
nation’s largest cities and counties, we found a 6 percent increase in all
hate crimes, with over half of the places at a multiyear high. In particular,
hate crimes against Muslims had increased in six of the seven places that
provided more detailed breakdowns.
We also observed a spike in such crime following certain events.
In 2015, for example, we found 45 incidents of anti-Muslim crime in the United
States in the four weeks following the November 13 Paris terror attack.
Just under half of these occurred after December 2, when the San Bernardino
terror attack took place. Of those, 15 took place in the five days following
then-candidate Donald Trump’s proposal of December 7, seeking to indefinitely
ban all Muslims from entering the United States.
In contrast, as I observed in my prepared statement before the Senate
Judiciary Committee, after an initial sharp spike following the 9/11 attacks,
sociologist James Nolan and I found that there was a drop in hate crimes after
President George W. Bush delivered a speech promoting tolerance on Sept. 17,
2001.
Other groups, too, have found similar spikes in anti-Muslim hatred. The
Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), for example, noted that from the month of
the presidential election through Dec. 12, 2016, there was a spike in hate
“incidents” against many minority groups. The SPLC found that the third most
frequently targeted group after immigrants and African-Americans were Muslims.
And just this month, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim
advocacy group, reported 72 instances of “harassment” and 69 hate crimes that
had occurred between April and June 2017.
Fear of Muslims
Prejudicial stereotypes that broadly paint Muslims in a negative light are
quite pervasive.
From 2002 to 2014, the number of respondents who stated that Islam was more
likely to encourage violence doubled from 25 percent to 50 percent, according
to Pew research. A June 2016 Reuters/Ipsos online poll found that 37 percent
of Americans had a somewhat or very unfavorable view of Islam, topped only by
antipathy for atheism, at 38 percent.
The latest polls also show how Muslims are feared and distrusted as a group in
America. While most Americans do not believe that Muslims living in the U.S.
support extremism, these views vary widely by age, level of education and
partisan affiliation: Almost half of those 65 and older believe that Muslims
in America support extremism, whereas only few college-educated adults do so.
Interestingly, current polls also show that when people personally know
someone who is a Muslim, the bias is much less. This confirms what psychology
scholar Gordon Allport concludes in his seminal book The Nature of Prejudice:
that meaningful contact with those who are different is crucial for reducing
hatred.
The ConversationIndeed, before we can truly say “love thy neighbor(s),” we
need to know and understand them.
Brian Levin is professor, department of criminal justice, and director at the
Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism, California State University San
Bernardino.
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