Muslims in
America: The Backlash Industry
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The
anti-Muslim backlash that U.S. mainstream media and NGOs have been
warning about for years has yet to materialize.
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Addressing the 10th Anniversary celebration of an Islamic advocacy
group, Attorney General Loretta Lynch became the latest governmental
official to warn of an impending anti-Muslim backlash. In the December 3rd
speech, which echoed the admonitions of her predecessor
Eric Holder, she took it a step further by vowing
to prosecute those who speak or write about Islam in a way that she does
not approve.
She described her "greatest fear" as "the incredibly
disturbing rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric" and vowed to prosecute speech
that "edges towards violence." Lynch's hyperbole is in line with
fears of an ever-imminent anti-Muslim backlash that much of the media has
been warning about since the afternoon of September 11, 2001. Of course the
backlash never came.
The Attorney General's not-so-veiled assault on free speech and common
sense ignores the real assault while instead conjuring up hyperventilated
fantasies. In fact, American society has been incredibly tolerant of both
Muslims and even Islamists – so much so that rather than focusing on the
growing evidence of violent Islamists living among them, the majority of
Americans seem more concerned about discomfiting their Muslim neighbors or
being labeled Islamophobes. Consider the Redlands, California neighbors
of the latest Islamist terrorists who were suspicious of the goings on in
the Farook/Malik household but kept it to themselves, fearing the backlash
that would befall them were they to be accused of "racial
profiling" for speaking up.
American society has been incredibly
tolerant of Muslims and even Islamists.
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The history of the looming anti-Muslim backlash that never arrives is
instructive. Logically, the original post-9/11 anti-Muslim backlash should
have been the largest and most ferocious of the various backlashes, and
indeed George W. Bush, members of his administration and members of
Congress frequently warned Americans not to blame all Muslims for the acts
committed by Al-Qaeda.
Even an anti-Israel
leftist like Rachel Corrie Award recipient
Delinda C. Hanley recognizes that there was no post-9/11 backlash. Writing
in the Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs, Hanley gushed:
"As a result of the effective campaign undertaken by America's
leaders, non-governmental organizations and the media, a backlash that, in
many nations, might have turned into a bloodbath was averted and, indeed,
transformed into a celebration of diversity."
The group known as Human Rights Watch
however tells a different tale. It documents
in the same era a series of attacks amounting to "a nationwide wave of
hate crimes against persons and institutions believed to be Arab or
Muslim." The numbers are notable either for the "ferocity and
extent" as HRW puts it, or for the remarkable calm they convey
compared to the predicted carnage. For instance the 17-fold increase in
anti-Muslim incidents sounds more alarming than the fact that there were 28
such events in 2000 compared with 481 in 2001.
It gets more interesting when one reads that these numbers include
behavior ranging from "verbal taunts to employment discrimination to
airport profiling to hate crimes." Since no actual numbers are listed
for specific "crimes" one might suspect that there are far more
verbal taunts than hate crimes among the 481.
Only two people have committed
murders attributable to post-9/11 anti-Muslim backlash.
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One rarely-cited statistic that deflates HRW's story is the number two:
only two people committed murder attributed to the post-9/11 backlash: Frank
Roque and Mark
Stroman. Roque is the Arizona man who killed Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh
gas station owner, and Stroman is the Texas man who killed Vasudev Patel, a
non-Muslim Indian gas station attendant, and Waqar Hasan. In a nation of
over 300 million people, only two became murderers after 9/11 as a result
of their anti-Muslim rage.
After Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, M.D. went on a shooting spree at Fort
Hood, US Army General George Casey told
CNN that he was "concerned that this increased speculation could cause
a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers." Worse yet, on NBC
after having acknowledged Hasan's attack as a "tragedy" Casey
added "if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that's
worse."
After the ISIS attacks in Paris on November 13, the media was awash with
breathless prognostications about the imminent anti-Muslims backlash: The
Atlantic,
NPR, The
New York Times, The
Washington Post, Al
Jazeera, The
Huffington Post, and many
more.
Most Muslim advocacy groups (like CAIR and MPAC) are the prime movers of
the backlash myth. In fact, the Attorney General's cautionary speech was
given to a group called Muslim
Advocates, which describes itself as a "national legal advocacy
and educational organization." Her comforting words (to the Muslim
audience) and admonition (to everyone else) might have been drawn from the
Muslim Advocate's "study" titled "Anti-Muslim
Bigotry Rises Alongside Hateful Rhetoric" which, as of this
writing, lists 32 events comprising the post-San Bernardino backlash. Many
of these purported backlash events are anecdotal. Most of the
"assaults" are verbal. Four involve violence against Muslims or
people perceived to be Muslims.
So while the left continues with its infantilizing condescension towards
the American public, it ignores the FBI's own hate crime statistics
which tell a different tale: 60.3 percent of all hate crimes in the U.S.
are perpetrated against Jews while 13.7 percent are committed against
Muslims. The anti-Muslim backlash is a chimera. If the Department of
Justice gets its way, the real backlash will befall anyone questioning the
received wisdom of the Obama administration and its media supporters.
A.J. Caschetta is a senior lecturer at the Rochester
Institute of Technology and a Shillman-Ginsburg fellow at the Middle East
Forum.
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