At RealClearPolicy Robert Cherry performs a public service by digging into the FBI’s statistics and doing some welcome analysis:
While the anti-Muslim hate crime rate rose substantially in 2015, it remained well below rates of anti-Jewish and anti-gay crimes. Also note how low the anti-Muslim hate crime rate was in 2014 relative to these two other groups. The most dramatic change from 2002 to 2015 was the drop in the anti-black hate crime rate.
[…]
Furthermore, it is a mistake to associate hate crimes exclusively with white Americans who are the target group for alleged right-wing incitement. FBI statistics do not isolate the racial distribution of the perpetrators of assaults against Muslims. However, the FBI does identify the racial distribution for all hate crime assaults. In 2015, 53.2, 28.7 and 9.2 percent of hate crimes were committed by white, black, and multi-racial individuals, respectively.
Most striking, however, is the dramatic 60 percent decline in anti-black hate crimes over the last decade. These data counter the narrative, promoted by writers such as The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, who laments: “To be black in a white supremacist society is to live in constant fear of disembodiment.â€
What is more, before 2015, anti-Jewish hate-crimes and assault rates were higher than anti-Muslim or anti-black rates. The implication? We should not be so quick to associate the spike in anti-Muslim hate crimes with widespread Islamophobia just as we should not associate high anti-Jewish hate crime rates with widespread anti-Semitism.
That’s an important point that I think is too little recognized. The evidence for widespread anti-Semitism or widespread Islamophobia of an intensity sufficient to rise to violence is scanty.
What does seem to be happening is that although as a society we’re becoming more tolerant there are nonetheless a small number of individuals, the intensity of whose hatred is increasing. It might be politically satisfying to trumpet that small number of individuals as evidence of a hate-filled society but that isn’t really supported by the facts.
I agree that many on the left have leapt to the conclusion that anti-Muslim hate crimes are a growing threat. I have been incredibly frustrated by the far left’s mirroring of the far right’s disregard for facts and preference for outrage. Facts first, then analysis, then conclusion, then a continuing process of re-examination of the facts and the analysis. That’s the way it’s supposed to go.
There was a case recently of a woman who claimed her hijab was yanked off to accompanying anti-Muslim slurs. I glanced over the story and told my wife I thought the odds were 90% that it was bullshit. It smelled all wrong. Turned out in fact to be bullshit. Just like most of the scare stories about immigrants, or the scare stories of ‘wilding’ in Central Park, or the scare stories of straight guys pretending to be trans so they could rape women in bathrooms.
We could really use a reduction in the overall bullshit content of American life. In fact, if you could cut the bullshit in half you’d have a much less angry, much more united country.
People are getting more tolerant in general? Isn’t the rancor between
Hispanics and blacks in California so great the prison systems are segregated?
Not any more. That changed a couple of years ago.
You know what blacks and Hispanics in California prisons have in common? Unlike most Americans, they’re criminals.