The Next Time CAIR Screams Discrimination...

Power Line links to a

ludicrous news story comes from Agence France-Presse: an article titled "US Muslims plagued by discrimination after 9/11 attacks."

The AFP piece alleges that:

Discrimination and harassment by law enforcement have come to plague American Muslims in the years since the terrorist attacks of September 11.

There have been suspicious looks, slurs, physical attacks, extra screening at airports and arrests on groundless charges.

And it seems to be getting worse.

"Suspicious" does seem to be the operative word when it comes to these claims.

The FBI tracks such attacks under the label of 'hate crime'. What exactly is a 'hate crime'? :

A hate crime, also known as a bias crime, is a criminal offense committed against a person, property, or society that is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin.

The FBI breakdown of the hate crime attacks in 2004 based on anti-religious bias, shows that the Jews are far and away the majority victim of religion-based hate attacks.

Bias motivation	Incidents	Offenses	Victims	Known offenders
Anti-Jewish	954	1,003	1,076	330
Anti-Catholic	57	57	68	37
Anti-Protestant	38	43	48	28
Anti-Islamic	156	193	201	124
Anti-Other Religion	128	140	147	68
Anti-Multiple Religions, Group	35	37	39	14
Anti-Atheism/Agnosticism/etc.	6	7	7	3
Total religion:	1,374	1,480	1,586	604

As Daniel Pipes notes, Jews constitute 69% of the victims of such attacks, while Moslems constitute 11%.

Clearly, the fact that the threat to Jews is greater is not helped by CAIR itself (some of whose board members have been convicted of having connections to terrorist groups) when in August it hosted a forum for Mearsheimer and Walt on the influence of the 'Israel Lobby'.

But Daniel Pipes goes a step further. He examines an annual report put out by CAIR entitled Unequal Protection: The Status of Muslim Civil Rights in the United States 2005 which the media used as the basis at the time to come out with headlines about the dramatic rise in anti-Moslem hate crime.

Only one problem, according to Pipes:

We examined in detail some "examples of anti-Muslim hate crime reports received by CAIR in 2004," on p. 43, plus some "samples" on p. 53 and discovered a pattern of sloppiness, exaggeration, and distortion:

1. CAIR cites the July 9, 2004 case of apparent arson at a Muslim-owned grocery store in Everett, Washington. But investigators quickly determined that Mirza Akram, the store's operator, staged the arson to avoid meeting his scheduled payments and to collect on an insurance policy. Although Akram's antics were long ago exposed as a fraud, CAIR continues to list this case as an anti-Muslim hate crime.

2. CAIR also states that "a Muslim-owned market was burned down in Texas" on August 6, 2004. But already a month later, the owner was arrested for having set fire to his own business. Why does CAIR include this incident in its report?

3. CAIR lists the March 2005 lawsuit filed by the Salmi family for the firebombing of their family van as one example of a hate crime report it received in 2004. However, the crime named in the lawsuit occurred in March 2003, was already reported by CAIR in 2003, and should not have been tabulated again in the 2004 report.

4. CAIR reports that "a home-made bomb exploded outside of the Champions Mosque in the Houston suburb of Spring, Texas," staking its claim on eyewitness reports that on July 4, 2004, "two white males" were seen placing the bomb. We inquired about the incident and found that Spring's sheriff department could not locate any police files about an explosion. Further inquiries to the mosque and an e-mail to CAIR both went unanswered. There is scant evidence that any crime even occurred.

5. CAIR notes that "investigators in Massachusetts are still investigating a potential hate-motivated arson against the Al-Baqi Islamic Center in Springfield." However the case was long ago ruled a simple robbery, news that even CAIR's own website has posted. The Associated Press reported on January 21, 2005, that prosecutors determined the fire was set by teen-age boys "who broke into the Al-Baqi mosque to steal money and candy, then set the fire to cover their tracks." The boys, they clarified, "weren't motivated by hatred toward Muslims."

6. CAIR describes what happened to a Muslim family in Tucson, Arizona: "bullet shots pierced their home as they ate dinner in October 2004" and two months later their truck was smashed and vandalized. But the only evidence that either incident was motivated by hate of Muslims is the Dehdashti family itself, not the police. Detective Frank Rovi of Pima County Sheriff's Department, who handled the shooting investigation, said that according to the neighbors, the desert area by the Dehdashti house was often used for target practice. Neither incident was classified as a hate crime and both cases were closed by February 2005, long before the CAIR report went to press. [emphasis added]
   

Of twenty "anti-Muslim hate crimes" in 2004 that CAIR describes, at least six are invalid – and further research could likely find problems with the other fourteen instances.

Pipes goes on to give further examples.

In a follow-up post, Pipes notes that NPR did a segment on the problems with the methodology used by different groups in general to track and report bias attacks. The audio of the report is available from the NPR site. The reporter, Mike Pesca, notes that

any bias incident, from a Muslim being yelled at from a passing car, to a Muslim being profiled on a plane, can wind up in CAIR's report.

Pipes also has a post that refers to 2 posts by Michelle Malkin back in 2003--Myth of the Muslim hate crime epidemic and More Muslim hate crime myths about false accounts of hate crimes against Moslems.

The plague that the AFP report refers to is actually a plague of falsely attributed hate crimes that CAIR does not admit--let alone denounce--even after the deceit is revealed. According to The American Thinker last month:

To date, so far as I can tell, not only has CAIR not apologized for falsely accusing non-Muslims of hatred and bias in the respective communities where these hate crime hoaxes occurred, but the press releases on CAIR’s website go uncorrected even after the truth is revealed. For instance, a press release related to a staged hate crime in McAllen, Texas still appears today without any correction or update whatsoever, even though multiple media outlets, including even the New York Times, had debunked the incident as a hate crime hoax perpetrated by the “victim” almost two years ago.

The staging of hate crimes continues in July 2006--as the same article from The American Thinker describes in detail.

Besides the issue of hate crimes being staged, CAIR itself has dabbled in the kind of fake photography that would make Reuters proud. As reported in Jihad Watch on September 15 of last year, hijabs were photoshopped onto 2 women--and a man--at an interfaith vigel.

Photoshopped Photo	Actual Photo

CAIR does know how to keep itself busy.

Technorati Tag: CAIR and Islamophobia and ReutersGate.