Behind CAIR’s Hate Crimes Report
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David Skinner, Weekly Standard, May 6
This week the Council on American-Islamic Relations released its annual report “The Status of Muslim Civil Rights in the United States 2004.” Newspapers (the Washington Post in particular) dutifully gave prominent play to CAIR’s claim that hate crimes against Muslims increased 70 percent in 2003. Little skepticism, however, was applied to CAIR’s shoddy information-gathering or its politicized interpretation of the “data.”
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Media credulousness is perhaps the strongest evidence that American society is wallowing in gentleness. When someone claims to have been wounded, journalists (the great Victorian Gentleman in Tom Wolfe’s classic formulation) don’t question the witness. Even when the witness clearly has an axe to grind, as CAIR does. Yet common sense begs us to look askance at the evidence gathered by CAIR, which relies entirely on self-reporting.
CAIR’s form for reporting an bias incident is available online. Although the instructions emphasize contacting the police first, and suggest enclosing official supporting documentation, it’s not even clear how one would do so. The annual report seldom references such documentation. Which is not surprising, given how CAIR’s information-gathering process works: If someone merely emails CAIR with a message to the effect that they were the victim of bias, another “hate crime” is tallied, no matter its seriousness or credibility.
It’s almost humorous what tiny offenses pass as worthy of complaint in the CAIR report. That a student at the University of Houston “saw flyers and posters with false and degrading statements about the Qur’an and the prophet Muhammad” is apparently a civil rights matter. That a College Republican at Roger Williams in Rhode Island wrote in a student publication that “a true Muslim is taught to slay infidels” is treated with similar gravity.
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Finally, some of CAIR’s complaints don’t even pass the laugh test: “A mother called CAIR California to report that on March 14th a school coach barred her daughter from participation in the badminton team because she wears a hijab.” Never mind the sourcing problem—it doesn’t take great powers of imagination to foresee “hijab” problems cropping up in high school sports programs. The most unintentionally funny—and weirdly sad—incident in the entire report is contained in a Newsday article included in the appendix: “A Muslim woman shopping in a Brooklyn toy store was assaulted by a man who slurred Arabs and flung a Mr. Potato Head at her, police said yesterday. The suspect’s father later said his son apparently acted out of grief because a friend in Israel had been killed by a suicide bomber in Israel.”
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(Posted on May 12, 2005)