Hyperbole Rules in Muslim Debate

WITHOUT serious debate or examination, the Los Angeles City Council recently passed a resolution that opposes “Islamophobia” and “repudiates” random acts of violence against Muslims.

This admittedly ceremonial resolution apparently accepts the premise that residents of the city commit acts of hate against Muslims so often that it warrants an official resolution from city leaders condemning and repudiating these acts. Is this really the case?

According to the latest hate crime report from the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations, {snip} [h]ate crimes that targeted Muslims (3 percent) ranked slightly above those directed at Scientologists (1 percent). In fact, the commission found that attacks against Christians (8 percent) outnumbered attacks against Muslims.

In any case, the actual number of reported hate crimes based on religion is quite small. In a county that has more than 10 million highly diverse residents, only a total of 131 crimes based on religion took place in all of 2009. {snip}

Since only 3 percent of 131 hate crimes during 2009 was directed against Muslims, it’s difficult to understand why city leaders would pass a resolution that zeroes in on the category that has the next-to-lowest numbers recorded by the County’s Human Relations

It appears that the City Council simply took information provided by an advocacy group, one that’s hardly unbiased, and uncritically spat out a resolution opposing “Islamophobia” and “random acts of violence against Muslim-Americans.”

{snip}

Factually, there is no alarming number of attacks against Muslim-Americans. According to the FBI, the largest number of recorded hate crimes against Muslim-Americans took place in 2001. That year the number dramatically escalated from only 28 in 2000 to 481 in 2001–the year that young Muslim men drove planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field outside of Shanksville, Pa., murdering 3,000 innocent Americans in the name of Islam.

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