The sole example that everyone’s favorite hard-Left Mother offers for this wild claim is an attack on a black man, but “journalist” Jen Phillips cancels out that example by noting that the idiot yahoos who confronted him took him to be a Muslim, which is why they were confronting him. So in other words, this wasn’t a “racist” incident at all, or an example of “Islamophobia” leading to an increase in hate crimes against other groups.
Why make this claim at all? Perhaps because actual incidents like the one described, of jerks acting like jerks toward Muslims, are so rare. Hate crimes against Muslims are so rare (see here, here and here) that Hamas-linked CAIR has to trump them up to maintain the media myth of Muslims as victims.
But even that act wears thin after awhile, so here Mother Jones offers a new tack: hate crimes against other groups are really the fault of “Islamophobia”! So Muslims are victims after all, despite all evidence to the contrary! Watch for this to filter out soon enough into the more respectable and less obviously unhinged Leftist mainstream media.
“Does Islamophobia Increase Hate Crimes for Others?,” by Jen Phillips in Mother Jones, January 20:
[…] Despite these misconceptions, and the increase in blatantly anti-Muslim campaign ads, actual crimes targeting Muslims haven’t gotten worse in the past few years: they’ve just gotten more press. The jump in anti-Muslim attacks is real, but it happened 9 years ago. According to the most recent FBI data, before 9/11 there was an average of 30 anti-Islam hate crimes a year. Right after 9/11, that number jumped 1600%, but now the yearly average is reliably 100 to 150 attacks per year. That’s still more than three times the pre-9/11 average, but there are far more hate crimes against African-Americans (about 2,500/year) and Jews (around 950). The numbers of crimes against black people and Jews have also remained remarkably (some would say disappointingly) stable since 2003.
Though relatively stable, hate crimes against African-Americans rise and fall at very similar rates as crimes against Muslims, while crimes against Jews or Catholics do not. So it stands to reason, I think, that if this trend continues, increased anti-Muslim attacks would be reflected in a corresponding increase in crimes against black people, either by fostering a climate of hate or by people associating African-Americans with Islam. Who can forget this incident, when folks protesting the Park51 Islamic community center mistook an African-American WTC construction worker for a Muslim and quickly made him a focal point? Someone in the crowd tells him, “Run away, coward” and another yells “Muhammad’s a pig! Muhammad’s a pig!” The object of their attention, a union carpenter named Kenny, had some constructive advice for the anti-Muslim protesters. “Y’all [expletive] don’t know my opinion about [expletive],” he said. “Someone want to know about me? Ask me about me.”