One of the more odd responses to President Obama speech about ISIL this weekend was the claim from Presidential hopeful Marco Rupio (R-FL) demanding to know where all the anti-Muslim hate was?
"Where is there widespread evidence that we have a problem in America with discrimination against Muslims?" Rubio asked Fox News' Bret Baier.
Well, the first place to look is the FBI Hate Crimes report which shows that generally that hate crimes against Muslim have been increasing over the last year or so.
Though the number of hate crimes fell in 2014 from the preceding year, anti-Muslim crimes rose, according to the FBI’s annual Hate Crime Statistics Report, which was released on Monday.
The FBI’s figures indicate that there were 5,928 hate crimes in 2013 and 5,479 in 2014. Most categories of hate crime, including anti-LGBT, anti-black, anti-Latino and anti-Jewish crimes, have dropped, according to the FBI numbers. But there was an uptick in anti-Muslim hate-crime incidents, from 135 in 2013 to 154 in 2014.
That is in addition to the tendency for the FBI to grossly under report the actual number of bias incidents that occur every year as noted by the SPLC.
The actual number of reported anti-Muslim hate crimes is small for a country the size of the United States, but the FBI statistics are known to be notoriously understated, in part because more than half of hate crimes are never reported to police. Two major Department of Justice (DOJ) studies have indicated that the real level of hate crimes in America is some 20 to 30 times higher than the numbers reported over the years by the FBI, which are simply compilations of state statistics.
If the FBI numbers are taken as only an indicator of larger trends, as seems reasonable given the DOJ studies, the real number of anti-Muslim hate crimes during 2011 may have been somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000.
But that’s doesn’t even address what’s happened this year, because it’s clearly getting worse.
In the wake of Paris and San Bernadino anti-Muslim hatred seems to be boiling over as Rubio joins Trump in his call to close mosques, further enabling the idea that persecuting Muslims in violation of the 1st Amendment and Civil Rights Act is perfectly “alright” we’ve seen that this week Muslim Rep Andre’ Carson (D-IN) received a death threat for which he blamed directly on the GOP.
“You are putting people — i.e. Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, and others — into the line of fire, exposing them to death threats, discrimination in the workplace, and assaults,” Carson told Tapper. “I just received a death threat yesterday in my own office, and it’s largely [due] to this toxic environment, and politicians are fanning the flames. To me, it’s unacceptable.”
This is in addition to Rep. Steve King claiming that Muslim Reps Carson and Keith Ellison would never “renounce Sharia Law” which is fairly ridiculous since both of them had to swear an oath of office to uphold the U.S. Constitution when they first entered congress and there’s no requirement under Islam to “swear to Sharia” in the first place.
Ellison pointed out how this is the same bigoted rhetoric we’re commonly hearing on the campaign trail.
“I just hope that we can try to reach higher ground,” Ellison told MSNBC host Chris Hayes. “When you’re spewing this kind of nonsense — things that that [Donald] Trump says, that Dr. [Ben] Carson says, but also [Marco] Rubio and [Ted] Cruz and even Jeb Bush have said — these things are divisive, they’re distracting, and they’re deceptive. I think good people need to stand up and reject them.”
It’s not that surprising that this bile is gradually seeping into the nation’s bloodstream.
For example there is this Tennessee pastor who proclaims “There’s no such thing as a ‘good Muslim’.” I guess this guy doesn’t count Kareem Abdul Jabbar or Muhammad Ali just like Donald Trump doesn’t.
Or back In October armed anti-Muslim protesters descended on an Arizona mosque stating “I want them the fuck out of my neighborhood.”
Or in Ahmed Muhammad’s former home of Irving, Texas where armed protesters are stalking a local mosque in a “show of force” and have publicly published the names and home addresses of all of the people who worship there.
A Google Map of anti-Muslim incidents since the Paris attacks from Thinkprogress, shows these are far from isolated incidents and that they seem to be quite widespread and growing just from this sampling:
Philadelphia, PA (12/6/2015) — A severed pig’s head was thrown at the door Al-Aqsa Islamic Society. According to footage of the incident captured on security cameras, a red pickup truck drove by the mosque twice, tossing out the pig’s head on the second pass. Local and federal authorities are investigating the incident as a possible hate crime.
Cincinnati, OH (11/15/15) — A pre-med student at the University of Cincinnati told reporters that she was called a terrorist and almost run over by a man while trying to cross the street. She said that as she left a Starbucks after a night of studying, a man began honking, cursing, and calling her a terrorist before gunning his car toward her. She said three bystanders pulled her onto the sidewalk before the vehicle could run her down. According to CAIR, she was the third Muslim in Cincinnati harassed that week.
Charlotte, NC (11/16/2015) — An Ethiopian Christian Uber driver told local media that a passenger mistook him for a Muslim and then attacked him, punching him while he was driving. The passenger threatened to strangle and shoot him “right in the face” before the driver stopped the car, honking the horn to attract attention.
Pittsburgh, PA (11/20/2015) — A cab driver reported that he picked up passenger, who proceeded to rant about Islam and ask the driver if he was Muslim. When they arrived at their destination, the passenger allegedly left to retrieve his wallet, only to return brandishing a rifle. The cab driver sped away, but the passenger reportedly fired two shots as he left — one of which shattered the back window, and another which struck the driver between his shoulder blades. He is currently recovering in the hospital.
But that isn’t nearly all. Mosques in Texas have been targeted and vandalized, others have been set on fire in Ontario, Canada.
A Muslim store owner was beaten by a New York man who claimed to be on a mission to “Kill All Muslims.”
Fatima Food Mart owner Sarker Haque told WPIX that the man came into his store on Saturday and began punching him.
“He punched me here,” Haque recalled, motioning toward an ice cream cooler. “I fell down here… I say, ‘What the hell you doing? What’s wrong with you?’ [The attacker] said, ‘I kill Muslims.'”
“He punched me as much as he can with his left hand,” the store owner added, choking back tears. “He grabbed me here. Then he punched me here.”
An enraged woman attack a Muslim family praying in the park saying that “Allah is Satan and you are all murderers.” Link to video.
“The people you tortured, they’re going to spend eternity in heaven,” says the woman, who was carrying a cup of coffee, a folded umbrella and a fanny pack. “You are very deceived by Satan. Your mind has been taken over — brainwashed — and you have nothing but hate, nothing but hate.”
It’s also true that people who have simply been mistaken for Muslims have taken the brunt of many attacks particularly Sikhs as Rep. Carson points out. In 2012 there was a shooting at a Wisconsin Sikh temple by a white supremacist named Wade Michael Page that killed five men and one woman.
Authorities have identified the alleged gunman in the deadly shooting at a Wisconsin Sikh temple as Wade Michael Page, an Army veteran who may have ties to white supremacist groups. NBCNews.com's Pete Williams reports
…..
Page, who served in the Army from April 1992 through October 1998, allegedly killed six people at the temple and wounded four, including a police officer, before he was shot and killed by police. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Page is the former leader of a neo-Nazi music group called End Apathy.
Anti-Muslim bigots have attempted to troll a Sikh basketball player by linking him to terrorism with great fail.
The joke features a picture of the man dribbling with the caption, “No one wants to guard Muhammad, he’s too explosive.” But fellow Texan and graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, Greg Worthington, posted to Facebook that he knows the player. He’s not Muslim or Arab, and his name is not Muhammad.
“His name is Darsh Singh and he’s a US citizen, born and bred. That jersey he’s wearing in this pic, it currently sits in a Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC because he made US history as the NCAA’s first turbaned Sikh American basketball player for Trinity University in my hometown of San Antonio,” Worthington wrote.
In Chicago just before the anniversary of 9-11 a Sikh man was beaten and sent to the Hospital with a fractured cheekbone for being a suspected Muslim, his attackers told him “Terrorist, go back to your country, Bin Laden!”
In June an 82-year-old Sikh man was bashed with a pipe for looking like “one of those people.”
A Sikh woman was required to show her breast pump before being allowed on a plane, because her fellow passenger thought she may be a terrorist.
It’s this tide of panic and hatred that clearly has fueled Trump’s rise to the top of the GOP pack this year but at what point can we expect this reaction to be tempered by some common sense and compassion? Even with nearly the entire country except for Trump’s biggest fans blasting him for his latest bigoted idea of banning any Muslims from entering the country, even if they’re U.S. Citizens already, you can still see his other suggestions being echoed by the likes of Rubio concerning mosque closing, or by Christie on the issue of warrantless surveillance.
When exactly will these guys realize they already dug themselves far below the rock bottom compassionless fear-mongering?