My last post discussed post-9/11 hate crimes against American Sikhs, many of whom were targeted because they were thought to be Muslim. It’s no surprise, then, that American Muslims too have experienced a wave of hate crimes directed at their own community.
In the year after September 11, anti-Muslim hate crimes rose by a staggering 1,600 percent. While they decreased and remained fairly low (but still disconcerting) between 2002 and 2009, they rose by a sharp 50% in 2010 (160 reported crimes up from 107.)
Sadly, the FBI statistics are almost certainly a low estimate of the total crimes, because many go unreported or unprosecuted. Working in an Islamic civil rights and advocacy organization last summer, I combed through pages and pages of bias incident reports and read countless articles from small, local news outlets reporting on incidents ranging from vandalism, to threatening notes, to bullying in schools.
Some may find a jump in anti-Muslim crime in 2010, almost a full decade after September 11, puzzling. But it actually makes perfect sense. 2010 was “a year marked by the incendiary rhetoric of Islam-bashing politicians and activists, especially over the so-called ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ in New York City.”
This rhetoric hasn’t let up since 2010, a point I won’t elaborate on more here because I’ve written extensively on it before. (See “Sharia: A Fabricated Threat,” “Thoughts on King’s ‘radicalization’ hearings,” and “The Oslo Opportunity: Parts 3 and 4.” If interested in reading a paper on anti-Muslim discourse that I wrote for a course at Georgetown, I’m happy to send it to you.)
Though statistics on anti-Muslim hate crimes for 2011 and 2012 are not yet available, the dozens and dozens of individual cases I’ve read about over the past two years indicate that the numbers will likely be just as grim as they were in 2010.
After the attack on the Sikh gurdwara on August 5th, a shooting likely motivated by anti-Muslim sentiment, anti-Muslim bias attacks skyrocketed. Over the course of eight days, 11 major attacks were reported across the country. Mosques were sprayed with paint balls and rubber bullets, hit with lemons, eggs, and pigs’ legs. The home of a Muslim family, and a mosque, were fire-bombed with Molotov cocktails. The grave of a prominent Arab leader was desecrated with the words “raghaed” (sic) and “killer, and the headstones of other Muslims were also graffitied. And a mosque in Joplin, Miss. was burned to the ground (and this was the second time in about a month it had been targeted in arson.) And these are only incidents that have occurred in the last few weeks.
cemeteryDid perpetrators have some sort of sick notion that the success of one attack (in Wisconsin) legitimized more? Who knows. Was the spike in attacks intentional, given that they occurred during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan? Maybe.
Quoted in a Salon article, Ahmad Rehab of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in Chicago asks:
How long are we going to go pretending like there is no relationship between this acquiescence of hatred and politics and the inclination of violence on the ground? …You cannot demonize a community and then be surprised when they’re under attack.
Many of the aforementioned attacks took place in Illinois, shortly after a notoriously Islamophobic congressman, Joe Walsh, alleged at a town hall meeting:
that “radical Islam” had made a home in the suburbs of Chicago; that “it’s in Elk Grove, it’s in Addison, it’s in Elgin. It’s here”; and that radical Muslims are “trying to kill Americans every week.” Walsh’s warnings were met with applause. (Salon)
Sadly, Walsh is only one of many politicians, media personalities, and “activists” spewing this crap. In many parts of America and in many sectors of the media, this kind of talk is mainstream and goes unchallenged.
But this wave of attacks—this trend sparked by “acceptable” anti-Muslim rhetoric—hardly ever gets media attention outside of local community where it takes place. It’s a national problem that isn’t being treated as such.
Though it received attention among Muslim activists and some interfaith leaders, the arson at the mosque in Joplin, Miss. was not covered like the Sikh tragedy was. Most Americans were probably unaware of it. True, no one died as a result of the arson. But it is one frightening example of anti-Muslim hate that, like the Sikh shooting, must be treated as an opportunity to illuminate and address the roots and implications of racism and xenophobia in our country. I wish more human rights and faith organizations had stepped up, like they did with the shooting at the Sikh gurdwara, issuing press statements about the mosque attack (and this trend of hate crimes I’ve discussed,) not only to rightfully condemn it, but also to push the issue into the national spotlight.
In a New York Times op-ed entitled, “If the Sikh temple had been a mosque,” Samuel Freedman writes about how anti-Muslim hate is (disturbingly) more expected—and maybe even more acceptable—to many Americans.
The mistaken-identity narrative carries with it an unspoken, even unexamined premise. It implies that somehow the public would have — even should have — reacted differently had Mr. Page turned his gun on Muslims attending a mosque. It suggests that such a crime would be more explicable, more easily rationalized, less worthy of moral outrage.
“Islamophobia has become so mainstream in this country that Americans have been trained to expect violence against Muslims — not excuse it, but expect it,” said Reza Aslan, an Iranian-American writer and scholar on religion. “And that’s happened because you have an Islamophobia industry in this country devoted to making Americans think there’s an enemy within.”
Convinced by the media that Muslims are violent and threatening, some white Americans may see threats and violence committed against Muslims as a logical response.
A sad and sick example of this logic was illustrated by someone who commented on one of my YouTube videos. Calling Muslims “scum” and claiming that “one day we will be throwing their muslim (sic) butts out of America,” he told me to stop “betraying” my “own people and country.” I visited his YouTube account, where I found his public list of his “Favorite” videos. One of them was called “Top ten mosques to bomb.” It showed photos of large, beautiful mosques around the world, and then a big mushroom cloud would appear in their places. This man was advocating violence against Muslims, so (wrongly) convinced that they were a danger to him. This man had become the barbarian that he claimed to be fighting.
The trend of rising anti-Muslim hate crimes in America is one that can’t be ignored. When the public sees the concrete (and horrific) effects of anti-Muslim rhetoric, the Islamophobic language that is so mainstream will become quickly become unacceptable.
Tomorrow’s post, the final in the series, will discuss the threat of white supremacist hate groups in America.
JORDAN DENARI DUFFNER 