Jihad Watch reader Cindy has alerted me to this story in the Bandar Beacon, aka the Washington Post, and comments: “Mind you, the article is not about how Muslims are increasingly harrassing us — this is CAIR complaining that there has been a sharp rise in anti-Muslim attacks both on the street and on the Internet. Not that they named names…Too bad I’m not a statistician, otherwise I might be tempted to believe that reported incidents of harrassment would increase in direct proportion to the attacks upon the West by Muslims. Call me a cynic.”
On CAIR’s trumped-up hate crimes, see this piece by Daniel Pipes and Sharon Chadha.
“Anti-Muslim Harassment Complaints Jump 30 Percent,” from the Post:
Complaints of anti-Muslim harassment, violence and discriminatory treatment registered with a national Muslim civil rights group jumped 30 percent in 2005 from the previous year, the group said today in releasing its annual report.
The 1,972 complaints made to the Council on American-Islamic Relations are the most the group has received since it began the annual reports following anti-Muslim incidents after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. The group said it actually received 2,300 reports but deemed some of them illegitimate.
The number of complaints has continually risen since 1995, but began spiking significantly in 2003, the report said. CAIR officials said the jump between 2004 and 2005 seems to be due to “a rise in anti-Muslim rhetoric fed by the Internet and also on talk radio,” group spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said at a news conference. “You can’t turn on the radio without hearing negative, bigoted comments about Islam.”…
The highest number of complaints fall into the “due process” category, said CAIR Legal Director Arsalan Iftikhar; those include complaints such as racial profiling and unreasonable arrest or interrogation. Second are complaints of religious accommodation being denied and third are complaints of employment discrimination, according to the report.
CAIR officials pushed at the conference for law enforcement authorities to investigate complaints thoroughly. Federal officials “do a very good job,” at investigating whether crimes such as arson or assault have a religious bias, but “you get more resistance at the local level.”
However, the group said some post-Sept. 11 policy initiatives — including the “infamous” Patriot Act, as the group described the law in announcing the report on its Web site — have unfairly focused on Muslims. “Muslims take the brunt of it,” Hooper said.
Unfortunately, Ibrahim, Al-Qaeda and other groups have also unfairly focused on Muslims in their recruitment efforts. Oddly enough, Al-Qaeda doesn’t have too many Presbyterian members.
In an effort to combat ignorance about the faith, CAIR began offering free copies of the Koran and copies of a PBS documentary about the prophet Muhammad earlier this year after deadly rioting about the Danish cartoon controversy. The group said that 30,000 copies of the Koran and 14,500 copies of the documentary have been requested.
Of course, it’s always all because of ignorance. If only we were enlightened, we wouldn’t notice all the jihad violence all over the world every day.