Are Anti-Muslim Incidents on the Rise in the US?

(Aug. 26) -- The stabbing of a Muslim cab driver in New York City was just the latest case: Three apparently religiously motivated incidents in the past week have some worried about a growing trend of violent "Islamophobia" -- prejudice against Muslims -- in the U.S.

"It's absolutely clear that anti-Muslim bigotry is going through the roof," Ibrahim Hooper, the national communications director for the Council of American Islamic Relations, told Surge Desk. In the past several days, anyway, examples of what CAIR terms "growing anti-Muslim bigotry" have certainly, and unfortunately, proliferated. Here's the rundown:

1. Stabbing
On Tuesday evening, after asking his cab driver if he was a Muslim, Michael Enright, a drunken 21-year-old New York film student, stabbed the man in the face, neck and arms. He was later arrested and charged with attempted second-degree murder, which was classified as a hate crime.

2. Vandalism
On Tuesday, the Madera Islamic Center in Madera, Calif., was targeted by vandals who smashed a window with a brick and left two signs on the property, one of which read, "No temple for the God of terrorism at Ground Zero." it has also been classified as a hate crime.

3. Desecration
On Wednesday, another intoxicated New Yorker barged into a Queens mosque and urinated on a number of prayer rugs before being arrested.

These latest examples come, of course, against the backdrop of the controversy surrounding the construction of an Islamic center and prayer room just blocks from the site of the 9/11 terror attacks in lower Manhattan. They also follow a few other alleged bias crimes committed across the country earlier this year, including a May 10 pipe bomb incident at a Jacksonville, Fla., mosque and the July 28 vandalism and arson at a Texas mosque.

"We've tracked a constant upward trend in bias incidents in the U.S. since 1995," Hooper noted.

Figures on hate crimes compiled by the FBI, however, only stretch back as recently as 2008, a year when anti-Jewish bias crimes in the U.S. were reported four times more frequently than anti-Muslim ones.

Intriguingly, just before the Michael Enright story broke, a wealth of articles were published examining the treatment of Muslims in America recently. Time magazine's cover story posted online last week, for instance, asks "Does America Have a Muslim Problem?" For some, the answer is a definite no.

Neoconservative author Jonah Goldberg, for example, posted a piece at the Los Angeles Times website on Tuesday in which he riffs off the 2008 FBI data to argue that "the 70% of Americans who oppose what amounts to an Islamic Niketown two blocks from ground zero are the real victims of a climate of hate, and anti-Muslim backlash is mostly a myth."

Similarly, far-right journalist Ryan Mauro published a piece on the same day, provocatively titled "Fake Hate Crimes: An Islamist Weapon," in which he alleges that "while real anti-Muslim hate crimes deserve the harshest of condemnation, claims about anti-Muslim hate crimes always should be taken with a grain of salt."

Yet as the ostensibly nonpartisan group Human Rights First observed in 2008 upon the release of FBI anti-Muslim hate crime statistics:

Because hate crime against Muslims frequently contains a combination of racist and anti-religious sentiment, anti-Muslim hate crimes are not always registered as such. Instead, they may be registered as "racist," "xenophobic," or under other similar categories

In addition, Hooper stresses a distinction between crimes specifically designated hate crimes and overall occurrences of bias against Muslims throughout America, both of which he categorizes as evidence of the growing anti-Muslim trend. "You cannot miss the daily occurrences of anti-Muslim attacks on talk radio, cable television and on the Internet," Hooper said. "And the silence over acts of Muslim hate is deafening."

Whether one sides with Horowitz and his ilk or Hooper and Human Rights First when it comes to the level and reportage of hate crimes, the overall sentiment of Americans is quite clear: A new CBS New poll finds that just 24 percent of U.S. residents surveyed held a "favorable" view of Islam.