by John Stevenson
In his December 6 Oval Office address, to update us on the war against the Islamic State (ISIS), President Obama admonished us against discrimination against American Muslims. He said we should not “push them away through suspicion and hate” and we should reject proposals that they “should somehow be treated differently.”
Setting the stage on December 3, his Attorney General Loretta Lynch said that her “greatest fear” is the “incredibly disturbing rise in anti-Muslim rhetoric” in America, and claimed that violence against Muslims is on the rise.
Well, what are the facts? The FBI’s “Uniform Crime Reports” track hate crimes based on race, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, and disability. For religion, here are the 2014 (latest available) statistics. Of the 1,140 religion-based hate crime victims, the most ---57 percent---were Jews. Muslims---16 percent.
For additional perspective, a “National Review” analysis yields that there was one anti-Jewish crime for every 11 thousand Jews, but one anti-Muslim crime for every 29 thousand Muslims. Again Jews, not Muslims, are the primary targets of hate crimes.
Now a flashback to 2001. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks against America, there was indeed a spike in anti-Muslim crimes. In that year, hate crimes against Muslim victims peaked at 26 percent of the total. But even then, the hate crimes against Jews were more than double, at 56 percent. And after 2001 the percentage of hate crimes against Muslims quickly declined, while those against Jews actually increased.
Similarly, we might expect a spike in anti-Muslim hate crimes in the wake of the slaughter of innocents in San Bernardino. Some will be highly publicized---like the Christmas day arson of a Houston mosque. But, if history is our guide, they will still be only a fraction of anti-Jewish hate crimes---which go relatively unnoticed by the administration and the media. And by-the-way, when the man arrested for the Houston mosque fire turned out to be a member of that very mosque, the media promptly lost interest in that “anti-Muslim hate crime.”
Clearly, the administration displays a bias for overstating the “problem” of anti-Muslim sentiment and so-called Islamophobia. At the same time, it understates the anti-Jewish sentiment and violence. “Understates” is being generous; actually, “ignores” is more correct.
So why does the Obama administration incessantly beat the drum of mistreatment of Muslims? Possibly for the same reason that the President continues to deny that the Islamic State (ISIS) is Islamic, refuses to utter the words “jihad” and “radical Islamic terrorism,” swapped out five high-level Guantanamo terrorists in exchange for deserter Bowe Bergdahl and, until December 2015, clung to the absurd position that the 2009 Fort Hood massacre by Nidal Hasan (self-proclaimed “Soldier of Allah”) was not terrorism at all but “workplace violence.”
And why, on the day after the San Bernardino terrorist attack, would the Attorney General declare that her greatest fear is anti-Muslim rhetoric? Now that jihadis have carried out a mass slaughter right here in California, it’s doubtful that many Americans share the Attorney General’s greatest fear.
