Trump presidency spells bad news for the community.
As feared by the community, the hate-filled rhetoric by the Trump campaign and now his presidency, spells bad news for the Muslim community in the US: there’s been a 67 percent jump in offenses against Muslims in 2015, according to the annual report released by the FBI, on Monday.
Even before the news came out today, media had reported plenty of instances of “resurgence of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric, most notably in Trump’s presidential campaign, correlated with a flurry of reports of assailants ripping off headscarves, spray-painting slurs on mosques, and harassing or even beating Muslims in the street,” reported the News & Observer.
“We saw this coming, and we’ve always thought that it was worse than has been reported,” said Paul Galloway, executive director of the American Muslim Advisory Council, a statewide advocacy group in Tennessee, reported McClatchy News.
The anti-Muslim offenses were part of a nearly 7 percent increase overall in hate crime incidents, according to the FBI’s statistics, which many activists consider underreported because not all jurisdictions record bias-related offenses and there’s a relatively high bar of proof for getting such a classification. The FBI recorded 5,818 incidents in 2015 – 59 percent were related to race or ethnicity, 20 percent were related to religious bias and nearly 18 percent were related to sexual orientation.
The FBI’s breakdown of offenses showed two main types – intimidation and simple assault, each around 40 percent – though there were also several more violent crimes, including 18 murders and 13 rapes. Of the more than 5,000 offenders, the FBI says, 48 percent were white, 24 percent were black and 16 percent were of unknown racial background. The report listed 122 victims who were attacked because of gender identification bias, including at least 76 transgender victims.
This was the 25th anniversary of the bureau’s Uniform Crime Report, an annual compilation of hate crimes as reported by law enforcement agencies from across the nation. While researchers view it as a useful tool in tracking the patterns of hate-motivated crimes, it’s by no means perfect – this year, for example, the number of participating agencies dropped by nearly 500 and, of those, most reported zero hate crimes, noted Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, reported McClatchy.
Levin took note of the uptick in anti-Muslim incidents, which he attributed to a period of “heightened anti-Islamic prejudice, increased Salafist Jihadist terror attacks and political vitriol.” In 2014, the FBI recorded 154 crimes; there were 257 in 2015.
Galloway, of the Muslim council in Tennessee, said his optimistic side hopes that the higher figures stem from more victims deciding to come forward and better law enforcement training on handling such cases. Still, he said, it’s hard not to succumb to fear when there’s been an undeniable increase in threats against Muslims.
While the number of anti-Muslim attacks is rapidly increasing, Jews still remain the most targeted religious group in the FBI report, with anti-Jewish crimes accounting for 52 percent of offenses motivated by religious bias. As for the statistics on racially motivated attacks: 1,745 were anti-black, 613 were anti-white and 299 were anti-Hispanic.