Muslim-American community advocates recorded a surge in reports of Islamophobic incidents this year amid what some say is the government’s sanctioning of xenophobia directed at their community. Despite this uptick in bigotry, there’s been an unprecedented number of Muslim Americans running for office in the upcoming mid-term elections—a sign, some say, of a so-called blue wave.
Self-reported instances among Muslim Americans of experiencing bias skyrocketed by 83 percent from the first to the second quarter of the year, according to a reportreleased late last week by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a national advocacy group. Hate crimes were up 21 percent. The organization received a total 431 reports of incidents involving an identifiable anti-Muslim bias from April to June; in the first three months of the year, there were 235 such reports.
There are a great many reasons why the number of reports rise and fall—sometimes discriminatory treatment becomes commonplace enough for people to see it as par for the course, Zainab Arain, CAIR’s research and advocacy coordinator, tells Pacific Standard. But she says the quarter-on-quarter difference seen in the first half of 2018 is remarkable.
“There’s just this general, pervasive atmosphere of anti-Muslim hate, especially when we have government agencies putting it forward,” Arain says.
Arain spoke specifically of the surprise Supreme Court decision last month to uphold President Donald Trump‘s travel ban affecting five Muslim-majority nations. Arain says that third-quarter Islamophobic incident reports from just after the court decision may reveal whether it emboldened the perpetrators of grassroots hate crimes and prejudice against Americans of Muslim faith.
For Arain and many other observers, America’s experience with Islamophobia is a barometer for broader trends in American xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment.
“A lot of the rise in anti-Muslim bigotry is also related to the rise in public displays of white supremacy and white nationalism,” Arain says, adding that anti-Muslim groups have frequently “coordinated with white nationalist militias to host anti-Muslim rallies across the country.”
But on Monday, the Associated Press reported that Muslim Americans were running for office in record numbers, with an initial group of some 90 candidates nationwide, pared down in primaries to about 50—still a higher number than ever before, according to the AP.
“What’s happened, we’ve seen, is a general political awakening of sorts within the American-Muslim community,” Arain says. “There’s a greater urgency to organize and to increase not only civic participation but political participation in the system and to really make the issues of our communities heard in a a sustainable, systematic way.”
That’s why San Diego schoolteacher and community organizer Fayaz Nawabi chose to run for city council.
“The Trump administration has played a role in the rise of Islamophobic incidents because this is the first time the sitting president has encouraged Islamophobia,” Nawabi says. “The Trump administration has also played a role in the rise of American-Muslim candidates that are running, because the American-Muslim community is tired of being targeted by this administration.”
But Trump can’t take all the credit for the groundswell of Muslim Americans running for office.
Fayaz Nawabi.
(Photo: Courtesy of Fayaz Nawabi)
Nawabi, hailed by the Washington Post as part of a “blue Muslim wave,” stepped out of the race in April due to health concerns. But he continues to advocate for Americans—and not just Muslims. He spoke to Pacific Standard just after meeting with a fellow Muslim-American community leader on hunger strike as part of a demonstration at the local San Diego Immigration and Customs Enforcement office. “This is just one example of the kind of intersectional work between the American-Muslim community and the immigrant rights community that has become a reality since the inception of this administration,” he says of his friend’s Abolish ICE hunger strike.
Like Arain, Nawabi believes that “xenophobia can be directly linked to Islamophobia.” Arain says that a number of CAIR local chapters across the nation cooperate with non-Muslim groups—particularly immigrant rights and civil liberty groups and that she would be interested in seeing a joint effort to use Islamophobic incident reports combined with other organizations’ reports to create a working barometer for the ebb and flow of xenophobia in America.
Islamophobia itself affects a broad spectrum of Americans. The CAIR report on the recent surge in Islamophobic events notes that, while people of Middle Eastern and North African origin were most commonly targeted for anti-Muslim harassment, Islamophobia affects Americans of all ethnic backgrounds, including African and South Asian Americans. Many non-Muslim Americans have also historically fallen victim to Islamophobic hate crimes.
Muslim-American community leaders like Arain and Nawabi have continued to express belief in and the necessity of actively engaging with the democratic system, despite apparent setback’s like the Supreme Court decision on Trump’s travel ban.
Just after the ruling, Laboni Hoq, the Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Los Angeles advocacy group’s litigation director, maintained faith in the country’s legal system. “Courts still matter,” Hoq told Pacific Standard at the time. “If you look at the courts that first heard the Muslim ban challenges, they mostly ruled against it. We need to do the work at the local level, so first these programs don’t get instituted.”
Marwa Rifahie, a civil rights attorney with CAIR’s Los Angeles office, underlined after the ruling her belief in the potential of November’s mid-term elections. “Congress still has the potential of being reshaped. There are still different balances of power at play,” she said.
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https://njaah.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/NJAAH-logo.jpg00sitehttps://njaah.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/NJAAH-logo.jpgsite2018-12-01 15:10:582018-12-01 15:10:58MUSLIM AMERICANS SEE A MAJOR SPIKE IN HATE CRIMES—AND POLITICAL PARTICIPATION
JASPER — Former Texas prosecutor Guy James Gray keeps a 20-year-old CD in his desk that documents with graphic photos one of the most vicious hate crimes in history – the day James Byrd Jr. was beaten, stripped naked, tied to the back of a truck by three men from the Ku Klux Klan and dragged down a dirt road until he was dead and decapitated.
“When you handle a case like that and get inside the mind of a real racist, a white supremacist racist, and you see how dangerous those people are to the fabric of our society, you just become more sensitive to racial issues,” Gray said.
In 2009, Byrd became one of the namesakes for The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, a federal law expanding hate crime legislation to include crimes motivated by gender, sexual orientation, gender identity and disability.
But just 100 hate crimes — including 10 in Texas — have been pursued by federal prosecutors between January 2010 and July 2018, according to a News21 analysis of court documents. Half of those cases across the country — and half of those in Texas — involved racially motivated violence against black Americans, more than any other group.
The numbers do not include hundreds of other cases prosecuted in local and state courts. No single agency tracks those arrests or cases, although incidents are supposed to be reported to the FBI by state and local police. Since 1995, black Americans have been the victims of 66 percent of all racially motivated hate crimes, according to FBI data collected from local law enforcement agencies.
“You still see it all over, in all the cities and in the rural places, it’s still with us,” said Gray, who is now an attorney in Kerrville.
While black Americans have long been targets of hate, advocacy groups and victims told News21 the 2016 presidential campaign and the election of President Donald Trump may have encouraged more people to express their intolerance toward black Americans.
“When this president campaigned, it was a campaign of division and bigotry,” said Richard Rose, president of the Atlanta branch of the NAACP. “And so, those people who believe in discrimination of any kind gravitated to that campaign. After the election, they feel emboldened to act out these statements that have racial overtones in them.”
Christina Crowder was driving down the interstate in Houston with her two biracial daughters in the backseat last year when a car pulled up next to her and the driver opened his windows. He started shouting phrases like “go back to [expletive] Africa” and “Trump should build a wall for you n****rs,” then began to swerve toward her, she said.
“I’ve been living in Houston for my whole life and I hadn’t experienced things like that,” Crowder said. “There are different looks that even my children get since Trump became president.”
From the historically unwelcoming American South to cities across America, federal hate crimes against black Americans in recent years have ranged from brutal beatings and violent killings to burning churches, firebombing homes and outspoken threats of harm.
“It has always been that way,” said Booker T. Hunter, 89, the founder and president of the NAACP in Jasper for the past 40 years. “The history of (Byrd’s) death, people never, never gonna forget about it. We really haven’t healed from that since. It’s still going on.”
Targeted in most violent crimes
For those 50 federal hate crimes targeting black Americans, News21 reviewed hundreds of court documents and indictments to determine just how often perpetrators were prosecuted under federal hate crimes statutes. Many perpetrators had affiliations with white supremacist groups or invoked “white power” during acts of violence and verbal harassment.
During a Bible study meeting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, three years ago, a young white supremacist shot and killed nine black parishioners. Dylann Roof was convicted on 33 federal hate crime charges and sentenced to death for the attack.
In Dubuque, Iowa, that same year, charges were brought against a white man with a swastika tattoo who assaulted a black American man and repeatedly kicked and jumped on his head until he was unconscious, according to federal court records.
In June 2011, a group of white teenagers drove around Jackson, Mississippi, harassing black Americans. They found 48-year-old James Craig Anderson in a motel parking lot and attacked him, shouting “white power.”
Security footage shows that when Anderson tried to stand up after the attack, they ran him over with a pickup truck and killed him. Three were convicted of one count of conspiracy and one count of violating the Shepard-Byrd Act.
State Sen. Barbara Blackmon, a Democrat from Mississippi, said Anderson’s killing made her “wonder just how far we’ve come.”
“I am aware of that James Byrd incident, and each time something like that occurs, whether it’s in Mississippi or in any place across this country, if you are a student of history, if you have any kind of conscience, then those kinds of horrific things should make you feel very uncomfortable,” Blackmon said.
Intolerance against black Americans has existed since they were forced into slavery, targeted for racial lynchings and denied equal rights. Despite the passage of hate crime legislation and civil rights protections, black Americans disproportionately face acts of intimidation, extremist rhetoric and life-threatening violence.
She said the country has “not yet overcome that history.”
Louvon Harris holds a photo of her brother, James Byrd Jr., at her home in Cypress, Texas. James was murdered in 1998 by three white men, and since then, Louvon has campaigned for hate crime laws in Texas and the rest of the country.
Danny Smitherman/News21
Reliving history of hate
In early 2016, Jordan Williams found the n-word written twice in black permanent marker on the wall outside his apartment in Denton.
“My parents experienced this in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and we talked about how we could be judged for the color of our skin,” he said. “All these years later, they took it really hard to hear what happened to me. I don’t think they expected it to happen to me.”
Although black Americans are targeted in hate crimes more than any other group, according to available data from the FBI, only about 2 percent of total hate crimes are reported to the bureau, according to the NAACP. That means no one really knows how many times black Americans have been victims of hate.
“Even the data that we have can be misleading, and it’s useful for seeing trends maybe from year to year, assuming that nothing changes in terms of our reporting and how we report,” said Kevin Buckler, a criminal justice professor at the University of Houston. “But I don’t know if it’s a true indication of the number of criminal events that are motivated by hatred.”
Dena Marks, the senior associate director for The Southwest Regional office of the Anti-Defamation League, said political tensions in America are prompting people to publicly act on or express their hate and biases. She said she has seen an increase in hate crime victims and incidents at the ADL in Houston.
“Hate is always there under the surface, but sometimes people hate more openly,” Marks said. “We still have a long, long way to go. Since the Civil Rights movement, I think we’ve come a little ways since then because of laws, but I don’t think as people, we’re much farther along.”
A 2018 report by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, found that hate crimes reported to police in the 10 largest cities in America increased by 12.5 percent in 2017, marking the fourth consecutive annual rise in a row and the highest spike in more than a decade. In 2017, anti-black crimes were among the most common in the nation’s 10 largest cities, according to the study.
On a June morning this year Debra Davis, a black woman in Clio, Michigan, and her ex-husband woke up to find racial slurs spray-painted on her family’s 2011 Chevrolet Silverado, including the n-word and “white power.”
“I don’t think that the people that perpetuate crimes against black people has changed,” Davis said. “The only thing that’s changed is you have a person in the White House that accepts you saying that’s how you feel.”
U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has said Trump’s administration and the Justice Department are “committed to reducing violent crime and making America safe.”
“As you know, hate crimes are violent crimes. No person should have to fear being violently attacked because of who they are and what they believe, or how they worship,” Sessions said at last year’s Hate Crimes Summit in Washington, D.C. “So I pledge to you: As long as I am Attorney General, the Department of Justice will continue to protect the civil rights of all Americans – and we will not tolerate targeting of any community in our country.”
Since 1995, black Americans have been targeted in 34.6 percent of all hate crimes reported to the FBI, despite making up only about 13.2 percent of the country’s population. Furthermore, only about 12 percent of the nation’s police departments reported any hate crimes to the FBI in 2015 and 2016.
A News21 analysis of the hate crimes reported to the FBI from 2012 to 2016 determined that, on average, 16.6 million black Americans, or 39.5 percent of the country’s black population, lived in a county that reported no anti-black hate crimes in a given year.
Many victims told News21 that authorities were skeptical of their claims, and they needed to record hateful incidents for police to believe them and prosecutors to pursue hate crime charges.
Geoffrey Preudhomme, a student at Radford University in Virginia, spent an hour cowering behind his bedroom door in February, while his roommate repeatedly shouted the n-word, banged on his door and threatened to slit his throat. He said people wouldn’t have believed him if he hadn’t filmed the incident.
“In today’s America, you have to be ready to film and document it, it’s not just with brutality but in order to change the system we have to expose all versions of racism,” he said. “I was threatened for the first time in my life in a place where I live, home — where you are supposed to feel the safest.”
Radford University released a statement condemning the language used in the video and investigated the case, but Preudhomme’s roommate was allowed to remain a student.
“Every election cycle there is an increase in intolerance and racial hatred,” said Steve Spreitzer, CEO of the Michigan Roundtable for Diversity and Inclusion. “This last presidential election cycle it seemed to be at a higher level. But the difference is, it’s not stopped. Even though this person got elected, they are still speaking hate with great hatred and inspiring people to be hateful.”
At the national NAACP conference in July, Leon W. Russell, chairman of the NAACP Board of Directors, said xenophobia, the fear of others, has surged in the past two years.
“White supremacy is being espoused by people who have served and are serving in some of the most important positions in the nation and once again,” Russell said. “The White House has become a sanctuary for vile thoughts, hate and fear. Ominously, we seem to be facing the gloom of the dark days we thought were past.”
In July 2015, about 15 members of a group called Respect the Flag went on a two-day joy ride across Paulding and Douglas Counties in Georgia with a handful of pickup trucks decked out with Confederate flags.
On that day, Melissa Alford happened to be hosting an outdoor party for her 6-year-old grandson. When the group showed up shouting threats and racist slurs while pointing a loaded shotgun at the crowd, she said she could only focus on getting the kids safely inside.
“When I seen that shotgun, all I could do is yell in the yard, ‘Get the kids! Get the kids!’ Because we had a bouncy house full of kids,” she added. “When I said that, one of the guys yelled, ‘We will shoot them kids, too.’”
Georgia doesn’t have a state hate crime law. But two members of Respect the Flag received increased sentences when they were convicted of an additional charge of “participation in criminal street gang activity” after two others agreed to testify for the prosecution as part of their plea agreements.
“Their actions were motivated by racial prejudice, which in its view, in the view of the Court, aggravates their punishment,” Judge William McClain said during the pair’s sentencing.
Despite Georgia’s lack of hate crime legislation, McClain said, “It’s prudent for the court to consider the motivation of persons when committing a crime when they’re convicted and face sentence.”
Melissa Alford stands in her yard, where members of a Confederate pride group terrorized a family birthday party she hosted in 2015.
Megan Ross/News21
Historically targeted by hate groups
Racial intolerance against black Americans has persisted for decades. Burning crosses and public lynchings were common practice by the KKK, and the organization has been using these tactics and more to intimidate black Americans for over a century.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, an advocacy group that tracks hate and bigotry toward marginalized communities, has documented 72 known KKK active chapters in major cities across the country. The KKK has seen a decline in overall membership, according to the SPLC. The number of KKK chapters dropped from 130 to 72 last year.
According to an original Klan oath from 1995 obtained by News21, KKK members pledge their allegiance to “the Aryan Race” and sign an oath to challenge “the enemies of my race and my nation no matter how high and powerful.” They “pledge swift and merciless justice when in the fullness of the day of reckoning shall arrive.”
Thomas Pou, the current imperial wizard of the “Original Knights of America, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan,” insists the Klan is not rooted in hate. He said the KKK has an unfair negative connotation and many crimes have been attributed to Klansmen that weren’t committed by members of the Klan.
“If you join the Klan because you hate anyone whether it’s blacks, Hispanics, Jews, Orientals, even homosexuals or race mixers, you’re joining for the wrong reasons,” said Pou, who wears his Klan cloak whenever publicly discussing the group to hide his identity. “Hatred does nothing. We’re not in it to hate anybody. We’re in it to look after our own.”
The Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism found white supremacists and far-right extremists accounted for 59 percent of all hate and extremist-related fatalities in 2017, an increase of 20 percent from 2016, according to an ADL report released this year.
Pou, 57, has been a member of the Klan nearly all his life; he joined in the late 1970s when he saw a classified advertisement for the group in a magazine. Pou’s account of the KKK is contradicted by reports of racially motivated crimes, including Byrd’s case, in which the murderers were reported to be Klansmen.
Daryl Davis, a well-known blues musician, said he regularly engages in relationships with KKK members, hoping to convince them to look at black people in a different light. He said he wanted to understand people who thought “their skin color gave them superiority over someone else.”
He said more than 200 KKK members have given up their robes after his conversations pushed them to rethink their life-long ideology. Davis has collected about 45 KKK robes and he said many question why he keeps them.
“It is history,” Davis said. “The good, the bad, the ugly, the shameful, it’s all American history, and we don’t destroy history, we try to learn from it.”
Hate groups have rebranded in recent years to appeal to a younger audience by creating a stronger online presence and limiting the use of controversial extremist symbolism, according to an SPLC report titled “2017: The Year in Hate and Extremism.”
One group committed to that rebranding is the National Socialist Movement (NSM). Headquartered in Detroit, it is one of the largest and most prominent neo-Nazi groups in the country, led by its commander, Jeff Schoep.
Schoep said the white race is dying and needs to be preserved. He compared it to the endangered whale population and likened his efforts to those of environmental activists working to protect the whale species.
“Any time whites say they want something for white people and standing up for white interests, no matter how watered down it is or how radical it is … it’s always called hate. It’s always called bigotry or racism,” Schoep said.
The movement has held rallies across the nation to protest ideas that challenge that ethnostate, including immigration, hiring quotas and miscegenation.
“I am not motivated by hate on this or anything I do with the organization. I love my country and my people. Hate group, hate crime, those are often buzzwords that are used to get people to have a knee-jerk reaction to disliking us. That is essentially what that is,” said Harry Hughes, the public relations director for the NSM. “Nobody goes around and calls Black Lives Matter a hate group.”
At the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, leaders in both the KKK and the NSM delivered speeches evoking chants of “White Lives Matter” and “Go the [expletive] back to Africa.” The rally later turned violent and Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old counterprotestor, was struck and killed by a white nationalist who deliberately drove his car into a crowd of counterprotestors.
“We think it is definitely linked to a lot of the rhetoric that we’re seeing coming from the White House and throughout the campaign disparaging minorities and people from minority countries,” said Kofi Annan, the president of the Fairfax County, Virginia chapter of the NAACP. “It’s really been feeding into a lot of the hatred that people feel it is now OK for them to repeat and act on and we see that manifest itself in Charlottesville and in schools and with our kids.”
‘We have a long way to go’
It’s been 20 years since James Byrd Jr.’s death, but people in Jasper told News21 that not much has changed. His grave now is protected by an iron fence because it’s been desecrated twice. Byrd’s sister Louvon Harris, now 60, and the president of the Byrd Foundation for Racial Healing, said people need to remember what happened.
“When I was going to school, in history I heard about the lynching and things like that, but I never thought I would live one in reality of 1998,” Harris said.
Billy Rowles was the sheriff in Jasper when Byrd’s dismembered body was found on Huff Creek Road. He said he saw a trail of what looked like burnt rubber.
“Once we got to look and you realize that it wasn’t rubber that was in the road,” he said. “It was flesh and blood and a part of a human being, that this long trail that we followed for a couple miles was actually part of a human being.”
The body was Byrd’s. Stripped of his clothes and chained by his ankles to the bumper of the pickup truck, Byrd’s skin was burned off his body as he was dragged three miles down the dirt road.
The men, who were members of the Ku Klux Klan, dragged him until his body split apart and dumped his severed torso in front of a black American cemetery, returned home and washed the truck.
Three men were convicted in the murder of Byrd. Lawrence Russell Brewer was executed in 2011, the first time in Texas a white person had been executed for killing a black man. John William King is now on death row and the third man, Shawn Allen Berry, was sentenced to life in prison. Berry was driving the truck that dragged Byrd.
“The real problem was getting an all-white jury to convict a white man for killing a black man in east Texas,” said prosecutor Gray. “I made a mistake. I let one guy get on the jury that I should have cut, and that one guy was the reason he [Berry] got life instead of the death penalty.”
When the jury went off to deliberate, Gray said he overheard that juror say, “what’s all the ruckus, it’s just a crack-head [n-word].” Berry will be eligible for parole in 20 years.
“You have a freedom to speak your peace, but you don’t have the freedom to kill because people don’t agree with what you’re speaking of,” Byrd’s sister said. “America is divided now. We have a long way to go.”
News21 reporters Brooks Hepp, Megan Ross, Lenny Martinez Dominguez and Justin Parham contributed to this article. This report is part of a project on Hate in America produced by the Carnegie-Knight News21 initiative, a national investigative reporting project by college journalism students and recent graduates from across the country.
Disclosure: The University of Houston has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune. A complete list of Tribune donors and sponsors can be viewed here.
The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
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Ms. Weiss is an editor and writer in the Times Opinion section. Nov. 29, 2018
Far-right marchers passed by the Reichstag in Berlin this month on the 80th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom against Jews.CreditOmer Messinger/EPA, via Shutterstock
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Far-right marchers passed by the Reichstag in Berlin this month on the 80th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom against Jews. CreditCreditOmer Messinger/EPA, via Shutterstock
For most people, they are lovely cities where you might happily take a holiday. But for the world’s Jews, they are something else, too. They are place names of hate.
Paris for us doesn’t mean just baguettes and Brie but also this year’s murder of a Holocaust survivor in her apartment in the 11th arrondissement and the 2015 siege of a kosher supermarket during which four people were killed. Toulouse is the place where in 2012 three Jewish children and a teacher were murdered at school.
Malmo doesn’t call to mind the Swedish coast so much as fire bombs planted outside a Jewish burial chapel. Copenhagen? Copenhagen is where a 37-year-old Jewish economist and voluntary security guard was gunned down as he was guarding a bat mitzvah at the city’s main synagogue in 2015. (The notion that synagogues require armed guards has long since stopped making us flinch.)
Brussels is where in 2014 four people were murdered at the Jewish museum. Berlin is a dateline we associate with news of people getting pummeled or harassed, for the sin of wearing a kippah or speaking Hebrew.
And this is to say nothing of the nonviolent attacks, which are impossible to keep up with. The desecration of cemeteries. Swastikas painted on synagogues and schools. Calling Jews “apes and pigs” at anti-Israel rallies.
On Tuesday, a CNN poll about the state of anti-Semitismin Europe startled many Americans — and confirmed what Jews who have been paying attention already knew about the Continent.
Not 74 years since the Holocaust ended, a third of respondents said they knew only a little or nothing at all about it.
The poll, which surveyed more than 7,000 people across Austria, France, Germany, Britain, Hungary, Poland and Sweden, didn’t only discover ignorance. It exposed bigotry.
Nearly a quarter of the respondents said Jews have too much influence in conflict and wars. More than a quarter believe that Jews have too much influence in business and finance. Nearly one in five believe that most anti-Semitism is a response to the behavior of Jews. Roughly a third say Jews use the Holocaust to advance their own goals. Just 54 percent say Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state.
It’s no wonder that to be a Jew in Europe today is to live your life in the closet.
Many religious Jews in Paris and Berlin wear baseball hats instead of kippot in public. Nearly half of Dutch Jews say they are afraid to identify publicly as Jewish. Every French Jew I’ve ever met who can afford it has bought an apartment in Israel or Montreal.
How did Europe reach this pass?
In many ways, it never left it. Anti-Semitism has been a fact of European life for more than 2,000 years. The postwar generation who lived with the shame of the Holocaust is dying out. Their children and grandchildren are less abashed when it comes to the old prejudices.
In her forthcoming book, “Anti-Semitism: Here and Now,” the scholar Deborah Lipstadt discusses a 2013 study of overtly anti-Semitic letters, emails and faxes received over the previous decade by the Israeli embassy in Berlin and the Central Council of Jews in Germany. The study found that 60 percent of the messages “came from educated, middle-class Germans, including lawyers, scholars, doctors, priests, professors, and university and secondary school students.” Even more remarkable, most of the letter writers provided their names and addresses.
Bigotry extends to the ballot box. The Alternative für Deutschland, led by a man who dismissed the Nazis as a mere “speck of bird poop” in Germany’s otherwise glorious history, is now the country’s third-largest party. The National Front in France, founded by a man who called the gas chambers a “detail in the history of World War II,” got 33.9 percent of the vote in the last presidential runoff elections. The Freedom Party in Austria, founded by ex-Nazis, is now part of the governing coalition. Then there is the rise of Law and Justice in Poland and Golden Dawn in Greece — developments cheered by those countries’ Jew haters.
But the story of European anti-Semitism isn’t simply a case of the resurgence of the neo-fascist right.
A large number of physically violent acts committed against Jews in Europe are perpetrated by radical Muslims. The incidents at the top of this article were not carried out by far-right goons but by Islamists, most of them young and some of them immigrants.
Now add a third ingredient to this toxic brew: the fashionable anti-Semitism of the far left that masquerades as anti-Zionism and anti-racism.
No political leader in Europe embodies that sentiment more than Britain’s Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. He paid respects at the memorial of the Palestinian perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. He objected to the destruction of a street mural depicting despotic hooknosed Jewish bankers. He participated for over a decade in the activities of a group called Deir Yassin Remembered, which was led by a Holocaust denier. He publicly defended a virulently anti-Semitic vicar named Stephen Sizer. He invited an Islamist preacher who believes Jews use gentile blood for religious reasons to tea at Parliament. And so on.
And yet he adamantly denies being an anti-Semite, on the grounds that he has devoted his life to “exposing racism in any form.”
Anti-Semitism, though, isn’t just a brand of bigotry. It’s a conspiracy theory in which Jews play the starring role in spreading evil in the world. While racists see themselves as proudly punching down, anti-Semites perceive themselves as punching up.
The Israeli writer Yossi Klein Halevi put it elegantly: “What anti-Semitism does is turn the Jews — the Jew — into the symbol of whatever a given civilization defines as its most loathsome qualities.” When you look through this dark lens, you can understand how, under Communism, the Jews were the capitalists. How under Nazism, the Jews were the race contaminators. And how for Mr. Corbyn and his ilk on the left, Israel, the Jew among the nations, is the last bastion of white, racist colonialism.
European Jews must now contend with this three-headed dragon: Physical fear of violent assault, often by young Muslim men, which leads many Jews to hide evidence of their religious identity. Moral fear of ideological vilification, mainly by the far left, which causes at least some Jews to downplay their sympathies for Israel. And political fear of resurgent fascism, which can cause some cognitive dissonance since at least some of Europe’s neo-fascists profess sympathy for Israel while expressing open hostility to Muslims.
Now these three strains of hate are beginning to show up on this side of the Atlantic.
The biggest threat is on the far right. This is the anti-Semitism of “Jews will not replace us” marchers in Charlottesville, Va., and the killer at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh who ranted against globalists and the “kike infestation.” It is the anti-Semitism of Representative Steve King of Iowa and of alt-right Reddit boards and some of Donald Trump’s supporters.
Islamism is far less of a threat in the United States than in Europe — we do not, contrary to what the president would have you believe, have caravans of terrorists crossing our border. Still, a Muslim-American who expressed hatred of Israelshot six people, killing one of them, at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, in 2006. Four Muslim men were arrested in a plot to bomb two Bronx synagogues in 2009. A Muslim convert was thwarted by the F.B.I. in his plan to blow up a Florida synagogue in 2016. Just last week, Mohamed Mohamed Abdi, a Somalian immigrant, shouted anti-Semitic slurs while trying to run down with his car people leaving a Los Angeles synagogue.
Finally there is the hatred from the left, which comes cloaked in the language of progressive values. This includes the perhaps unwitting anti-Semitism of college professors who refuse to write letters of recommendation for students wanting to study abroad in Israel or who seek to suspend study-abroad programs to Israel entirely, without thinking of sanctioning, say, China or Russia. Or turning a blind eye to unconscionable comments like one from Minnesota’s new congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who tweeted in 2012“Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel” — because she is breaking ground as a Muslim woman of color.
For reasons historic, aesthetic and political, we Jews are most attuned to the anti-Semitism of the far right — and we find the most sympathy among our progressive allies when these are our attackers. But when Jews point out the other two kinds, we are often dismissed as sensitive or hysterical, or as mistaking legitimate criticism of Israel for something darker.
This is nonsense. The same was said of the Jews in Europe when they sounded the alarm bells. Look where they are now.
Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) is a staff editor and writer for the opinion section.
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I’d like to share a passage from Milton Mayer’s 1955 book “They Thought They Were Free”. This passage explores exactly how the German people transitioned from frustrated citizens in 1933 to full-blown Nazis in 1945. Here’s the thing: changes like that don’t happen overnight, it takes quite a long time. The issue is that the change is so gradual, and each time things get ‘worse’ it’s in small enough increments that people are not compelled to take action until it’s too late. I urge people to look at the similarities between this passage and what is happening in the US right now. This isn’t to say that Donald Trump is the next Hitler or anything, it’s simply meant to draw attention to how far a people can slip when they let each ‘small issue’ go unpunished. The passage:
“…Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?-Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty. Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’
And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have….
But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked-if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in-your nation, your people-is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.”
-Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945
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The mission of the Bias Crime Unit, located within the New Jersey Division of Criminal Justice, is the statewide coordination of efforts to eliminate crimes motivated by prejudice against others based on race, color, religion, sexual orientation, gender, disability or ethnicity.
The Bias Crime Guide is designed to provide our citizens with useful and pertinent information to assist them in identifying, fighting, and eliminating Bias and Hate Crimes in the State of New Jersey.
Only through the committed, collaborative efforts of all concerned will we be able to create a society free of bias and prejudice.
A person is guilty of a bias intimidation crime under New Jersey law if he commits, attempts to commit, conspires with another to commit, or threatens the immediate commission of an offense with the purpose to intimidate an individual or group of individuals because of race, color, religion, gender, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, or ethnicity.
Such an offense also constitutes a bias intimidation crime if the manner in which the offense is committed causes the victim to reasonably believe either:
that the offense was committed with a purpose to intimidate the victim because of race, color, religion, gender, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, or ethnicity; or
that the victim or his property was selected to be the target because of race, color, religion, gender, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, or ethnicity.
These offenses are a distinctive category and are more likely to involve a heightened assault and injury level or serial attacks of escalating severity. There are often multiple assailants and the victims generally do not know their offenders. As a result of these offenses, there is often a spiral of community violence and extended psychological trauma for victims.
The Underlying Causes of Bias & Hate Crimes
The continuing demographic change in the United States as the population becomes more diverse.
The continuing shift to a service economy and the economic uncertainties that provides a source of conflict between groups.
Prevalence of negative stereotypes in our culture, as well as an atmosphere of intolerance in politics and public debate.
Racial division among our youth and in schools, the persistence and continued vitality of hate groups, and continued violence by minorities against members of their own race.
Lack of hope among some ethnic groups.
Who Are Often Victims?
The skin color black represents the group most frequently victimized by bias crimes.
The Jewish religion represents the religious group crimes.
The gay and lesbian community.
Immigrants and all other ethnic groups
Types of Bias / Hate Crimes:
Harassment
Terroristic Threats
Criminal Mischief
Assault
Arson
Homicide
Information Needed When Reporting a Hate Crime
The name and address of the victim
The time and place where the crime occurred
The type of crime committed.
The description and license plate number of vehicle involved in crime.
A description of the perpetrator – i.e., race, sex, height, weight, scars, tattoos, hair color and style, clothing and jewelry. Provide the name or street name if known.
Laws Protecting People Against Bias or Hate Crimes
Since 1979, nearly every State in the United States has enacted some form of bias crime statute. The most common statues are penalty enhancement and criminal civil rights statues. Other types of statues include institutional vandalism laws, cross-burning statutes, anti-masking laws and laws prohibiting interference with religious worship.
Penalty Enhancements Statutes
These statutes increase the penalty for existing criminal offenses when a victim is targeted, based in whole or in part on the perception or beliefs of the actor, because of race, color, religion, gender, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, or ethnicity of that person, owner or occupant of that property, regardless of whether or not the perpetrator’s belief was correct.
Civil Rights & Ethnic Intimidation Statutes
Unlike the penalty enhancements, these statutes do not require the charging of an underlying offense, such as an assault. However, prosecutors still have the option of charging additional offenses, such as assault, when applicable.
Institutional Vandalism Statutes
These statutes prohibit vandalism and other willful property damage to churches, synagogues and cemeteries. These laws have been enacted in approximately 40 states.
How to Report a Bias/Hate Crime
Always Dial 911 To Report A Crime In Progress!If you need to report an emergency situation, dial 9-1-1!
To report a Bias Crime, or if you believe you are a target of bias crime, REPORT IT! Contact the Union County Prosecutor’s Bias Crime Unit at 1-800-527-4500. You can also call the State Bias Crime Unit at 1-800-277-BIAS (2427).
Mosques were vandalized, women in hijabs were harassed and travelers were singled out for scrutiny at airports because of their faith amid a 17 percent spike in anti-Muslim bias incidents last year, according to a report released Monday by the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
The new report, titled “Targeted,” blames the Trump administration’s travel bans for fueling the problem. Nationwide, there were 2,599 anti-Muslim incidents reported to CAIR; 464 involved federal agencies targeting Muslims in incidents linked to federal travel bans, the report says.
“This increase in anti-Muslim incidents by the federal government is an almost unprecedented level of government hostility toward an American religious minority,” Soofia Tahir, fund development director at CAIR’s New Jersey chapter, said during a press conference at its South Plainfield office. “This in and of itself goes against our shared American values of religious freedom.”
The courts struck down the president’s first two travel bans, and a lawsuit over a third, revised version of the ban will be heard Wednesday by the U.S. Supreme Court. Trump has said the ban is needed for national security reasons.
Across the United States, the top five reported kinds of anti-Muslim bias incidents were harassment (14 percent), inappropriate targeting by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (13 percent), hate crimes (12 percent), inappropriate targeting by the FBI (10 percent) and employment discrimination (9 percent).
It was the first time that U.S. Customs and Border Patrol ranked within the top five types of anti-Muslim bias incidents, according to the report. A spokesperson responded in an email that the agency “does not discriminate on the entry of foreign nationals to the United States based on religion, race, ethnicity or sexual orientation.”
“CBP officers process more than a million travelers a day at U.S. Ports of Entry and are thoroughly trained to enforce U.S. laws and regulations fairly and uniformly,” the spokesperson added.
In total, CAIR received 5,650 reports of potential bias cases in 2017, but verified slightly less than half as bias incidents based on religion, ethnicity or national origin.
The rhetoric of the administration was also contributing to the problem, fueling incidents of bullying and hate, said Jay Rehman, a staff attorney at CAIR-NJ.
“The unconstitutional Muslim bans have succeeded in demonizing Muslims and making society more hostile to American Muslim families and to their children,” he said.
While reported incidents rose across most of the country, they dropped in the Garden State from 69 in 2016 to 57 last year. Sues said most incidents go unreported, so it was hard to draw conclusions from the decline. He urged people to report bias incidents to police and to CAIR New Jersey’s Civil Rights Department.
But overall, he said, there were fewer bias incidents and hate crimes in New Jersey compared with other states. That’s in part because of the state’s progressive politics, but also because New Jersey has a well-established Muslim population where many people know them as neighbors, teachers and professionals, Sues said.
“A lot of people have Muslim neighbors and don’t fear Muslims as much,” he said.
An estimated 250,000 New Jersey residents are Muslim, or about 3 percent of the total population, according to CAIR.
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Prosecutors have used their power to pack jails and prisons. And it has taken decades, billions of dollars, and thousands of laws to turn the United States into the largest incarcerator in the world. But did you know that prosecutors also have the power to dismantle this machine — even without changing a single law?
This video series, presented by the ACLU Campaign for Smart Justice and Brooklyn Defender Services, shows how prosecutors can single-handedly transform the broken American criminal justice system.
Featuring DeRay McKesson (civil rights activist), Nina Morrison (The Innocence Project), Baratunde Thurston (Author and Comedian), Adam Foss (a former prosecutor), Scott Hechinger (Brooklyn Defender Services), John Pfaff (professor and author of Locked In), Josie Duffy-Rice (Fair Punishment Project), and Brandon Buskey (ACLU).
Prosecutors have the power to flood jails and prisons, ruin lives, and deepen racial disparities with the stroke of a pen. But they also have the discretion to do the opposite. This video explores the power of prosecutors to continue to drive mass incarceration — or end it.
Bail
The U.S.’s wealth-based incarceration system allows those with money to walk free before trial, while those who can’t make bail remain locked up. Guess who decides whether someone will have to pay bail? Believe it or not, the answer is often prosecutors. But they also have the power to recommend freedom.
Charging
Prosecutors are the gatekeepers of the criminal legal system. They decide whether to prosecute and what to charge. Their harsh and discriminatory practices have fueled a vast expansion of incarceration as the answer to societal ills over the last several decades. This video exposes how basic charging decisions can reduce our reliance on incarceration and lead to healthier communities.
Plea Bargains
Did you know that more than nine out of 10 cases are resolved by plea bargain? That’s in large measure because the harsh criminal laws, like mandatory minimum sentences, have stripped judges of much of their discretion and have instead given prosecutors all the negotiating power. The result: Overwhelmingly, people plead guilty, even when innocent, out of fear of a negative outcome at trial.
Accountability
Almost all prosecutors in America are elected officials. And voters across the United States — in red and in blue states alike — strongly prefer elected prosecutors who are committed to reducing incarceration, ending racial disparities, and being fully transparent. This video explains how voters can hold prosecutors accountable because power concedes nothing without a demand.
Sign up for ACLU action alerts to end mass incarceration. Text SMARTJUSTICE to 82623.
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Hate crimes and bias incidents are a national problem, but there’s no reliable data on their nature or prevalence. We’re collecting and verifying reports, building a database of tips for use by journalists, researchers and civil-rights organizations.
Recent Stories
Stories from ProPublica and our partner newsrooms:
What Data?
We’re assembling a trove of data provided by tips from the public as well as information from law enforcement, news reports, social media and nonprofit organizations. Our database is available, with privacy and security restrictions, to civil-rights groups and journalists and is meant to enrich a national understanding and conversation about hate incidents.
The FBI is required by law to collect data about hate crimes, but the Bureau relies on local law enforcement to collect the data. The consequences are predictable: While the FBI lists about 6,000 hate crimes per year, a survey by the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that the number is closer to 250,000.
The impediments to good reporting are many:
More than half of hate crime victims don’t report to police, and when they do, there are relatively few prosecutions. Local police officers are often poorly trained at identifying and reporting hate crimes, and as local jurisdictions aren’t required to report hate incidents to the FBI, state crime reports often exclude many hate crimes. While the majority of local law enforcement agencies nominally participate in the FBI’s data collection program, nearly 90 percent of them said they had no hate crimes at all in 2016.
Victims and witnesses: Have you been a victim of or witnessed a hate incident? Telling your story is important. Your contribution enables you, civil-rights groups and reporters to get a clearer picture of what’s actually happening, enabling us all to work on the problems at hand. We’ll treat your information with utmost care, and we will not share your report with the police. If you’ve got an incident or experience to share, please fill out this form.
Journalists: Reporters at local news outlets in the United States – TV, radio, online and print – can sign up to receive tips to follow up on and report. You’ll get real-time tips about hate incidents, reporting recipes, and invitations to join community calls. We’ll also promote stories you write using this data on the Documenting Hate site and social media accounts.
Civil-Rights Groups: If you are a civil-rights group or service organization serving vulnerable communities and you gather information about hate crimes and bias harassment, we’d like to talk about data-sharing – both getting your data into our database and giving you access to tips relevant to your service mission. If you aren’t collecting stories but would like to, you can contact us to receive free tools and guidance.
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