Are Muslims Being Victimized In America Today?

Robert Spencer

"Attacks on the American Muslim community and on Islam rose to an unprecedented level in 2010." So claimed Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), in an end-of-the-year fund-raising appeal. The hard-Left TPMMuckraker site claimed that in 2010, "America saw perhaps its worst outbreak of Islamophobia since the attacks." The secretary general of the 56-state Organization of the Islamic Conference, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, asserted recently that "Islam and Muslims are under serious attack, and Islamophobia is growing and becoming more rampant and dangerous by the day."

But is it true? One might get the impression from all this that Muslims were huddled in their homes, cowering in the darkness as roving bands of Islamophobes marauded outside, throttling any hapless Believers who dared to stray outside. Meanwhile, rogue judges, sputtering with hate, sentence Muslims to onerous stretches in the pen for the mildest of offenses, and law enforcement officials harass and intimidate law-abiding, patriotic citizens for the crime of sporting what Juan Williams piquantly referred to as "Muslim garb."

One would think that on the streets of Toledo and Des Moines, Muslims are being grabbed on their way to mosque, forced to choke down pork chops wrapped in Koranic verses, and then sent on their way -- only to find their mosque firebombed and hordes of angry Christians ringing its charred foundation, chanting obscene limericks making fun of Muhammad.

And so CAIR persuades their right-thinking multiculturalist easy marks to open their wallets for Hamas and its benign American face in the interest of beating back the benighted hordes of knuckle-dragging, racist, flag-waving Islamophobes. But of course, nothing like that is happening -- except when Muslims do such things to Christians and their churches in places like Pakistan, Indonesia, Iraq and Egypt. That anything remotely resembling the epidemic Muslim persecution of Christians is happening to Muslims in America is a sheer fantasy out of the fever swamps of the Left.

Reality is different.

Muslims are not being victimized in significant numbers in America today. Any attack on an innocent person is contemptible and to be condemned utterly; unfortunately for CAIR, however, Jews in America today are far more likely than Muslims to be victimized in hate attacks -- and yet there is no hand-wringing, no official statements of outrage and solidarity, no seminars or webinars or earnest talking-head discussions about the rise in anti-Semitism.

According to the most recent available records in Los Angeles, Jews were the victims of 88% of hate attacks; Muslims were victims 3% of the time. In records for New York state released on New Year's Eve, there were 251 hate attacks against Jews in 2009, compared to 11 such attacks against Muslims. Of course, those statistics are from 2009, not 2010, the year CAIR claims has seen a sharp increase in hate attacks against Muslims, but it is unlikely that the statistics will bear out this claim when they do become available. CAIR's annual hate crimes report generally contains more claims of Muslims being insulted than physically attacked, and an embarrassing number of the latter claims over the years have turned out to be fabrications -- that is, if the folks at CAIR were capable of being embarrassed by their own dishonest attempts to mislead and manipulate the American people.

CAIR knows well that victimhood is big business: Insofar as CAIR can convince the public and law enforcement officials that Muslims are being mistreated in America, CAIR can claim protected victim status for Muslims, and use that to deflect unwanted scrutiny and any honest examination of how jihadists use Islamic texts and teachings to justify violence and supremacism. That's most likely why the claims of pandemic "Islamophobia" have become so common from CAIR and its allies and dupes. They want and need hate crimes against Muslims, because they can use them as weapons to intimidate people into remaining silent about the jihad threat.

It is false that attacks on the American Muslim community have risen significantly; it is true, however, that jihad attacks by members of the American Muslim community have risen significantly. That should be enough to end Islamic advocacy groups' spurious victimhood posturing, self-pity, and demands for special accommodation. But it won't be.

Mr. Spencer is director of Jihad Watch and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The Truth About Muhammad (both from Regnery—a Human Events sister company) and most recently coauthor of Pamela Geller’s The Post-American Presidency (Simon & Schuster).