Hate crimes
against perceived Muslims, which jumped up 50% in 2010 largely as a result of
anti-Muslim propagandizing, remained at relatively high levels last year,
according to 2011 hate crime statistics released by the FBI.
The bureau
reported that there were 157 reported anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2011, down
slightly from the 160 recorded in 2010. The 2011 crimes occurred during a period
when Islam-bashing propaganda, which initially took off in 2010, continued
apace.
Rhetoric from
conservatives aimed at inspiring fear about Muslims in the U.S. and sharia law
accompanied last year’s high numbers, with a shooting at a Sikh temple in
Wisconsin by a white supremacist in August. Sikhs follow a separate faith from
Muslims, but the two are often conflated and hate crimes against both groups
have risen in tandem in the past.
Earlier this
month, vandals left a slain pig in front of a mosque near Houston, TX. “I think
it borders being a hate crime at least from our prospective,” said Council on
American-Islamic Relations’s Mustafaa Carroll, referring to the fact that
Muslims do not eat pork and consider pigs an unclean
animal.
The FBI’s hate
crime statistics are also better at revealing the direction and severity of
trends rather than actual numbers, which they tend to vastly understate. A
report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2005 determined that the actual
amount of hate crimes in the country range from 19 to 31 times higher than the
FBI’s numbers.
As Potok put it:
“Some 56% of hate crimes are never reported to police and more than half of
those that are mischaracterized as non-hate crimes. Think
Progress
One in five hate
crimes reported in the U.S. in 2011 were due to religious bias, most of them
stemming from anti-Jewish and anti-Islamic prejudice, while almost half of such
crimes were racially-motivated, the FBI has said in its new
data. In 2011, U.S.
law enforcement agencies reported 6,222 hate crime incidents involving 7,254
offenses, according to the Hate Crime Statistics, 2011. These incidents
included offenses like vandalism, intimidation, assault, rape and murder, the
FBI said. Of the 6,222
reported hate crimes, 6,216 were single-bias incidents, 46.9% were racially
motivated, 19.8% were motivated by religious bias, 11.6 stemmed from
ethnicity-national origin bias, and 0.9 % were prompted by disability bias, the
FBI said in its annual hate crime statistics report for the year 2011.
Of these
offenses 72% were motivated by anti-black bias, 16.7% stemmed from anti-white
bias, 4.8 % resulted from anti-Asian/Pacific Islander bias, 4.7% were a result
of bias against groups of individuals consisting of more than one race and 1.9%
were motivated by bias against Native Indians. Hate crimes
motivated by religious bias accounted for 1,318 offenses reported by law
enforcement. Hindustan Times
AHT/HJ
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