On the morning news this morning I heard a representative of the Council on American-Islamic Relations complaining about the organization’s perennial topic: Islamophobia. The part that I didn’t understand is why we’re not just telling CAIR that Muslims are more likely to be struck by lightning than they are to killed or injured by an anti-Muslim hate crime—according to the FBI the number of hate crimes against Muslims every year is fewer than 200. Indeed, they’re more likely to be killed or injured by radical Islamists than they are by Islamophobes. That should make them feel better.
Keep in mind: a) CAIR is an off-shoot of the Muslim Brotherhood; b) they’re not good guys; c) they’re funded by foreign governments. Their constant whinging about Islamophobia tells the world that a practically non-existent problem is a lot more serious than it actually as. They’re part of the problem.
Jiu jitsu.
I think we should tell them they are very, very unlikely to be killed, so they shouldn’t panic over that. However, it seems odd to have that as your only end point. Having your car keyed, losing your job, having your kids ostracized, getting beaten up, your mosque gets trashed or you aren’t allowed to build one, slow service wherever you go, etc, are things that would make life difficult, but wouldn’t show up on the homicide metric. (Which, BTW, would largely be things Muslim terrorists couldn’t do very well.) Maybe every instance of this has been reported as a hate crime and stuff like that only happens 200 times a year in the US, but I doubt that very much. On blogs written by Muslims, it sound like it happens more often, but then they are probably biased.
So, in short, this is America. We aren’t going to kill you, just hurt you financially and sometimes make your lives miserable. (Since the Japanese sequestration has been mentioned this week, should the Japanese be OK with being placed in concentration camps since we weren’t actually killing them?)
Steve
Oh my god, I didn’t know slow service was a hate crime! Try being white in a black neighborhood – the service is glacial in pace. That’s a strong motivation to spend an extra 30 minutes of drive time to go to a white or Hispanic neighborhood to shop even if you only need a couple of things.
I once walked out of a Wal-Mart grocery store after standing in line for 15 minutes, even though I was only ever the second person in line and the person in front of me only had about 20 items. I knew the service sucked, didn’t know it was a racially motivated hate crime.
Cool, I’ve been micro-aggrieved!
Dave isn’t citing a homicide metric. In 2014, there were 178 offenses reported by federal and state law enforcement that were at least partially motivated by anti-Muslim sentiment:
64 = Intimidation
45 = Destruction or Damage to Property/Vandalism
36 = Simple Assault
20 = Aggravated Assault
7 = Robbery, burglary, larceny or theft
1 = Arson
5 = Other Crimes against property or society
See Table 4
That’s right. There were no homicides classified as hate crimes perpetrated against Muslims for the most recent year for which we have information.
@PD Shaw
You conveniently do not include: pouty faces, sticking out tongues, or giving Christmas presents. If you are a Muslim at a Christmas party and somebody gives you a Christmas gift, that is a micro-aggression, and it would cause “a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy” in getting “really angry because of this and that.”
This is altogether different from a Tea Party rally which “was absolutely indiscriminate. It wasn’t to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorize people.”
Besides, President Obama has stated at least three times there is a problem, and every good little Progressive knows, what the Bellman tells you three times is true.
So much for nuance.
Steve