American mosques — and American Muslims — are being targeted for hate like never before
20 August 2017By Christopher
Ingraham
On Saturday an "improvised explosive device" was detonated in a
Minneapolis-area mosque in what Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton denounced as a
"dastardly, cowardly" hate crime.
It's just the latest case in an ever-quickening escalation of anti-Islamic
incidents at mosques, according to data compiled by the Council on
American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). According to CAIR's figures, in the first
half of 2017 there were 85 such incidents. That's more than the total number
of incidents in any year between 2009 and 2015. And while 2016's numbers
aren't fully compiled yet, the six-month tally for 2017 is already greater
than the number of incidents in the first nine months of last year.
The incidents tracked by CAIR this year include 24 cases of property damage
and vandalism like the one at the Minnesota mosque. They also include 30 cases
of intimidation against mosques or the people who worship in them, and four
separate instances of alleged anti-Muslim bias in cases where a proposal to
build a mosque was rejected by local authorities.
More broadly, CAIR has found that instances of anti-Muslim bias, whether
connected to a mosque or not, are up sharply since Donald Trump announced his
candidacy for president in June 2015. In 2014, for instance, CAIR documented
1,341 cases of anti-Muslim bias and 38 anti-Muslim hate crimes. By 2016, those
numbers had ballooned to 2,213 and 260, respectively.
CAIR's figures comport with available FBI hate crime data, which showed a
surge in anti-Muslim crimes in 2015 (2016 data is not yet available).
"When Donald Trump became President of the United States on January 20, 2017,
he brought an unprecedented record of conditioning audiences to fear Muslims,"
CAIR wrote in a report earlier this year.
Trump had a long record of making inflammatory statements about Muslims and
Islam. Early in his campaign he floated the ideas of closing mosques and
creating a national database of Muslims. He called for "a total and complete
shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,"said that "Islam" harbors "a
tremendous hatred" for the United States, and accused Muslims of wanting "Sharia
law."
CAIR's research suggests that that rhetoric has consequences. Shortly after
Trump's election in November, for instance, mosques around the country
received letters threatening genocide, with several claiming that Trump will
do to Muslims what "Hitler did to the Jews." Muslim students at New York
University found the door to a prayer room vandalized with the word "Trump."
Trump, who has been quick to respond to attacks by Islamic extremists on
Twitter, has so far been circumspect about the mosque attack in Minnesota. The
White House told New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush that "the President has
been and is continuing to be updated and we are monitoring situation for now."
Muslims aren't the only group facing heightened discrimination in the Trump
era. Jews remain the religious group most likely targeted for hate crimes.
After years of decline, anti-Jewish crimes increased by nearly 10 percent
between 2014 and 2015, according to the FBI.
The months following the election brought a spate of anti-Semitic incidents
and attacks around the country, some referencing Trump directly. In February,
Trump responded to a reporter's question about these incidents by boasting
about the size of his electoral college victory and pointing out that his
daughter Ivanka's family is Jewish.
The FBI's hate crime statistics for 2016, which will give a comprehensive
picture of bias incidents in the election year, will be released later in
2017. But that won't answer the question of whether what we're seeing is a
temporary spike in bias incidents unleashed by the passions of the election
season, or, more disturbingly, a new normal in hate crime.
Christopher Ingraham writes about politics, drug policy and all things
data. He previously worked at the Brookings Institution and the Pew Research
Center. Follow @_cingraham
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