CAIR, FBI at odds over hate crimes

Two recently released reports highlight the difference between the FBI's calculation of the number of religiously motivated hate crimes and that of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

In CAIR's annual report, "The Status of Muslim Civil Rights in the United States – 2007," the subtitle of which, "Presumption of Guilt," foreshadows the report's main theme, the Muslim lobby group claims the number of hate crimes committed against Muslims has risen each year since 1996. CAIR began keeping track of civil rights violations and hate crimes against Muslims that year because of what the report calls the "anti-Muslim backlash that followed the 1995 attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City."

According to that report, CAIR received 2,467 complaints of civil rights violations in 2006 – 25 percent more than it received in 2005. CAIR also said it received 167 allegations of anti-Muslim hate crimes, up more than 9 percent from last year's 153 complaints.

The report goes on to say that in 2006, "Several key polls indicated that the level of Islamophobia continues to rise today in American society."

But CAIR's report stands in stark contrast to a report released last month by the FBI. In that report, titled "Hate Crime Statistics, 2006," compiled from the input of more than 12,000 law enforcement agencies across the country, FBI figures show that the number of incidents of religious hate crime against Muslims plunged 68 percent since 2001.

According to the FBI report, the Justice Department defines hate crimes as "criminal offenses that are motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender's bias against race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity/national origin, or disability and are committed against persons, property, or society."

The FBI's methodology is also explained in its report.

CAIR's 42-page report, on the other hand, does not explain what the organization considers a hate crime. Although CAIR's report contains a "glossary of Islamic terms" – including Allah, Hajj, hijab, kufi and Ramadan – it does not include a definition of "hate crime."

CAIR did not respond to WND's e-mail or telephone requests for clarification of the organization's use of the term "hate crime" in its annual report.

Even though the CAIR report does not define a hate crime, it does provide a few examples of them, including this one: "September 20, 2006 – A copy of the Quran was found in a toilet at the library of Pace University in New York."

The report goes on to say, "Initially, (the) Pace University administration called the desecration 'vandalism,' but with the collaborative efforts of CAIR-NY, the Association of Muslim American Lawyers, the New York Police Department Hate Crimes Task Force ... and the Muslim Students Association at Pace, university administrators now recognize the incident as a hate crime."

According to published news reports, a 23-year-old former Pace student was arrested last summer and charged with felony hate crimes. The charges carry with them a possible sentence of up to four years in prison.

Critics point to a double standard: Burning an American flag is considered free speech, and the submersion of a Christian Crucifix in urine has not only been called art, but funded by U.S. taxpayers – and yet flushing a paperback copy of the Quran down a toilet is now a hate crime.

Contradicting CAIR's claim that U.S. Muslims are increasingly the target of hate-mongers, the annual FBI report on hate crime has for several years consistently shown that Jews are far more likely to be victims of religious hate crimes than Muslims. In 2006, according to the report, 65 percent of the victims of religious hate crimes were Jewish, while only 12 percent were Muslim.

Of the 6,832 incidents of religious hate crime committed between 2002 and 2006, some 4,627, or 68 percent, were committed against Jews, while 744, or 11 percent, were committed against Muslims.

According to FBI statistics going back to 2000, Jews are more than five times more likely than Muslims to be the victims of hate crimes.

The CAIR report does not mention hate crimes committed against any population group other than Muslims.

One factor that could account for some of the disparity in the number of hate crimes committed against members of the two groups would be a significant difference in the size of their populations. If, for instance, there were five times as many Jews as Muslims in the United States, a five-fold increase in the number of anti-Jewish hate crimes might be expected.

Accurate population figures for religious groups are hard to come by, especially since the U.S. Census Bureau is prohibited from asking respondents about their religion. But according to several recent estimates, including a 2007 survey, Jews in the United States of America number approximately 6 million.

CAIR claims the U.S. Muslim population numbers at least 6 million.

However, in May, Investor's Business Daily took CAIR to task on that figure based on a recently released and exhaustive study by the Pew Research Center, called "Muslim Americans: Middle Class and mostly Mainstream."

The Pew study, the methodology for which was also exhaustively explained, estimated the adult Muslim population in the United States to be 1.5 million, with a total Muslim population of 2.35 million, less than half the number claimed by CAIR, which has attacked the validity of the Pew study.

Just after the study was released, Investor's Business Daily called CAIR's estimate of 6 million American Muslims a "wildly inflated guess" based on "fuzzy math."

"Politicians in Washington are intimidated by the figure," the newspaper said, "which CAIR uses as a cudgel to help advance its Islamist agenda."

Politicians and business executives have for years caved in to pressure from CAIR, the newspaper said, because they feared the repercussions from the organization's millions of voters and consumers. But, the article concluded, the bloated population figure was "the Wahhabi lobby's big lie. CAIR couldn't deliver even 2 million voters if it tried. ... There is no big Muslim lobby, just CAIR's big, hollow PR machine."

Regardless of whose estimate is correct as to the number of Muslims in the U.S. – CAIR's 6 million or Pew's 2.35 million – they are not outnumbered five-to-one by Jews.

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