US hate groups on the rise, surge in crimes against Muslims

[Mormolyce]

The SPLC has documented another increase in the number of US hate groups, especially among anti-Muslim groups, while researchers observe a spike in crime against Muslims. Note that these are preliminary, the FBI releases the final stats in November.

The number of hate groups in the United States rose for a second year in a row in 2016 as the radical right was energized by the candidacy of Donald Trump, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) annual census of hate groups and other extremist organizations, released today.


The most dramatic growth was the near-tripling of anti-Muslim hate groups – from 34 in 2015 to 101 last year.

The growth has been accompanied by a rash of crimes targeting Muslims, including an arson that destroyed a mosque in Victoria, Texas, just hours after the Trump administration announced an executive order suspending travel from some predominantly Muslim countries. The latest FBI statistics show that hate crimes against Muslims grew by 67 percent in 2015, the year in which Trump launched his campaign.

The report, contained in the Spring 2017 issue of the SPLC’s Intelligence Report, includes the Hate Map showing the names, types and locations of hate groups across the country.

The SPLC found that the number of hate groups operating in 2016 rose to 917 – up from 892 in 2015. The number is 101 shy of the all-time record set in 2011, but high by historic standards.

“2016 was an unprecedented year for hate,” said Mark Potok, senior fellow and editor of the Intelligence Report. “The country saw a resurgence of white nationalism that imperils the racial progress we’ve made, along with the rise of a president whose policies reflect the values of white nationalists. In Steve Bannon, these extremists think they finally have an ally who has the president's ear.”

The increase in anti-Muslim hate was fueled by Trump’s incendiary rhetoric, including his campaign pledge to bar Muslims from entering the United States, as well as anger over terrorist attacks such as the June massacre of 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando.

The overall number of hate groups likely understates the real level of organized hatred in America as a growing number of extremists operate mainly online and are not formally affiliated with hate groups.

Aside from its annual census of extremist groups, the SPLC found that Trump’s rhetoric reverberated across the nation in other ways. In the first 10 days after his election, the SPLC documented 867 bias-related incidents, including more than 300 that targeted immigrants or Muslims.

Also, in a post-election SPLC survey of 10,000 educators, 90 percent said the climate at their schools had been negatively affected by the campaign. Eighty percent described heightened anxiety and fear among students, particularly immigrants, Muslims and African Americans. Numerous teachers reported the use of slurs, derogatory language and extremist symbols in their classrooms.

In contrast to the growth of hate groups, antigovernment “Patriot” groups saw a 38 percent decline – plummeting from 998 groups in 2015 to 623 last year. Composed of armed militiamen and others who see the federal government as their enemy, the “Patriot” movement over the past few decades has flourished under Democratic administrations but declined dramatically when President George W. Bush occupied the White House.

The SPLC also released an in-depth profile of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), an anti-LGBT hate group. Leaders of the legal advocacy organization and its affiliated lawyers have regularly demonized LGBT people, falsely linking them to pedophilia, calling them “evil” and a threat to children and society, and blaming them for the “persecution of devout Christians.” The group also has supported the criminalization of homosexuality in several countries.

https://www.splcenter.org/news/2017/...-radical-right


https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-h...gy/anti-muslim

WASHINGTON — Hate crimes against American Muslims have soared to their highest levels since the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, according to data compiled by researchers, an increase apparently fueled by terrorist attacks in the United States and abroad and by divisive language on the campaign trail.

The trend has alarmed hate crime scholars and law-enforcement officials, who have documented hundreds of attacks — including arsons at mosques, assaults, shootings and threats of violence — since the beginning of 2015.

While the most current hate crime statistics from the F.B.I. are not expected until November, new data from researchers at California State University, San Bernardino, found that hate crimes against American Muslims were up 78 percent over the course of 2015. Attacks on those perceived as Arab rose even more sharply.

Police and news media reports in recent months have indicated a continued flow of attacks, often against victims wearing traditional Muslim garb or seen as Middle Eastern.

Some scholars believe that the violent backlash against American Muslims is driven not only by the string of terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States that began early last year, but also by the political vitriol from candidates like Donald J. Trump, who has called for a ban on immigration by Muslims and a national registry of Muslims in the United States.

“We’re seeing these stereotypes and derogative statements become part of the political discourse,” said Brian Levin, the director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at the San Bernardino campus. “The bottom line is we’re talking about a significant increase in these types of hate crimes.”

He said that the frequency of anti-Muslim violence appeared to have increased immediately after some of Mr. Trump’s most incendiary comments.

The latest major episode of anti-Muslim violence came last weekend, when an arsonist on a motorcycle started a fire that engulfed the Islamic Center of Fort Pierce, Fla., where Omar Mateen — the gunman in the June massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando — had sometimes prayed.

The police, who called the attack “a terrible tragedy” for the community, arrested a local man who had criticized Islam in social media postings.

The arson, along with an earlier assault on a congregant outside the mosque and other episodes there, has left worshipers scared, said Mohammed Malik, 43, a businessman who has attended the mosque for nearly a decade.

“There is a lot of negative rhetoric,” he said. “The negative rhetoric is causing the hate, and in turn the hate is causing the violent acts.”

The new study from Mr. Levin’s nonpartisan group, based on official police reports in 20 states, estimated that there were about 260 hate crimes against Muslims nationwide in 2015.

That was the most since the record 481 documented hate crimes against Muslims in 2001, when the Sept. 11 attacks set off waves of crimes targeting Muslims and Middle Easterners, Mr. Levin said. The huge increase last year was also the biggest annual rise since 2001, he said.

The rise came even as hate crimes against almost all other groups — including blacks, Hispanics, Jews, gays and whites — either declined or increased only slightly, his study found. One exception was hate crimes against transgender people, which rose about 40 percent.

An advance copy of the study was provided to The New York Times.

The statistics almost certainly understate the extent of the problem, researchers say, because victims are often reluctant to report attacks for fear of inflaming community tensions, and because it is sometimes difficult for investigators to establish that religious, ethnic or racial hatred was a cause.

In the killing last year of three Muslim students in Chapel Hill, N.C., for instance, the authorities did not bring hate crime charges against a neighbor who is charged with murdering them, despite calls from Muslims who said there were religious overtones to the violence. The police said that a parking dispute, not bigotry, may have led to the killings.

Sometimes, the evidence is more clear-cut.

“I hate ISLAM!” a former Marine named Ted Hakey Jr. wrote to a friend on Facebook after last November’s terrorist attacks in Paris. Hours later, in a drunken rampage, he fired a high-powered rifle four times into the mosque next door to his Connecticut home.

Last month, an apologetic Mr. Hakey began a six-month prison sentence after pleading guilty to a hate crime charge.

In Brooklyn, two women out walking their children in strollers were attacked this month, the police said, by a woman who screamed anti-Muslim obscenities and tried to rip off their traditional veils. And in Queens, a man was beaten in April by three strangers who shouted “ISIS, ISIS.”

In Minneapolis, a man shouting obscenities about Islam shot two Muslim men in traditional religious garb in June, the authorities said.

In St. Louis, a man was arrested in February after the police said he pointed a gun at a Muslim family shopping on his block and told them they “all should die.”

Last month, an imam in Queens and his assistant were shot and killed execution-style on the sidewalk. The authorities have charged a 35-year-old man in the attack but have not determined a motive or whether it should be treated as a hate crime.

The increase in reports of apparent hate crimes has worried Justice Department officials.

“We saw it after 9/11, and we continue to see an uptick in allegations of hate-related incidents today following the tragic events over the past year,” said Vanita Gupta, who leads the Justice Department’s civil rights division.

“We see criminal threats against mosques; harassment in schools; and reports of violence targeting Muslim-Americans, Sikhs, people of Arab or South-Asian descent and people perceived to be members of these groups,” Ms. Gupta said.

The Justice Department has moved to draw public attention to the problem and marshal resources to combat it as part of a broader effort against religious discrimination.

A number of experts in hate crimes said they were concerned that Mr. Trump’s vitriol may have legitimized threatening or even violent conduct by a small fringe of his supporters.

In a few cases, people accused of hate crimes against Muslims and others have even cited Mr. Trump.

The police here in Washington released a videotape in May of a woman who reportedly poured liquid on a Muslim woman after berating Islam and declaring that she was going to vote for Mr. Trump so that he could “send you all back where you came from.”

On Thursday, Hillary Clinton charged that Mr. Trump had “incited violence” in a campaign marked by “bigotry” and “hatred.”

Mr. Trump’s supporters say that he has never endorsed violence against any minorities, and some conservatives have challenged data showing an increase in violence against American Muslims as a creation of liberal-leaning researchers.

Mr. Trump has said he is not responsible for any violence by his supporters.

“They’re not angry about something I’m saying,” he said on “Meet the Press” in March. “I’m just a messenger. The people are angry about the fact that, for 12 years, the workers in this country haven’t had a pay increase.”

James Nolan, a former F.B.I. crime analyst who teaches about hate crimes at West Virginia University, said that the data seemed to show “a real spike” in hate crimes against American Muslims, caused in part by candidates’ “raising the specter that radical Islam is at our doorstep.”

Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups and extremism, went further.

“I don’t have the slightest doubt that Trump’s campaign rhetoric has played a big part” in the rising attacks, he said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/u...lims-rise.html



https://www.documentcloud.org/docume...5-9-16-16.html

[PC2]

Being Muslim is a choice. The US has no obligation to be a Muslim or Islam friendly country. Only to prosecute individuals when a law is violated.

[Deleted]

Do these numbers take the staggering about of hoaxes into account?

[May90]

I bet most of the members of those "groups" have never spoken to an actual Muslim in their life. Easy to hate something you don't know anything about.

[Mayhem]

Being Muslim is a choice. The US has no obligation to be a Muslim or Islam friendly country. Only to prosecute individuals when a law is violated.

This whole freedom of religion thing means nothing to you does it?

[Cuppy]

I bet most of the members of those "groups" have never spoken to an actual Muslim in their life. Easy to hate something you don't know anything about.

Yeah. This.
Some weird idea that we are like a different species or something :/

[Endus]

Being Muslim is a choice. The US has no obligation to be a Muslim or Islam friendly country. Only to prosecute individuals when a law is violated.

That pesky First Amendment would pretty strongly disagree with that nonsense. The USA is absolutely obliged to be Muslim-friendly. And Christian-friendly. Bhuddist-friendly. Etc. That's what "free exercise of religion" looks like.

[PC2]

This whole freedom of religion thing means nothing to you does it?

Freedom means hating anything. I'm agnostic but it's fine if others create a group that hates agnostics like me. Nobody is obligated to respect my belief.

[announced]

does that SPLC also account for the fact that the mosque in Texas was burned down by a devout Muslim? or the fact that some of these hate crimes were actually committed by blacks or Muslims themselves?
its easy to blame Trump for all of their problems, facing reality is much harder.

[Endus]

Freedom means hating anything. I'm agnostic but it's fine if others create a group that hate agnostics like me. Nobody is obligated to respect my belief.

You, as a private person, are free to hate whatever you want in your own little corner.

The government must respect the rights of all religious persons and their right to practice that faith.

[Delana]

This whole freedom of religion thing means nothing to you does it?

It has a law system. Not a morality code, but a law system. Islam is a political ideology. The fact that it involves a deity is irrelevant. Nothing about their belief in a deity is objectionable. Their law system on the other hand is ludicrously bad.

If the Nazis had elevated Hitler to godhood, would we have had to tiptoe around their beliefs too?

[PC2]

That pesky First Amendment would pretty strongly disagree with that nonsense. The USA is absolutely obliged to be Muslim-friendly. And Christian-friendly. Bhuddist-friendly. Etc. That's what "free exercise of religion" looks like.

Nope, all ideas and groups are open to criticism. Hating something is not a real issue nor is it illegal.

[FiveDkp]

You, as a private person, are free to hate whatever you want in your own little corner.

The government must respect the rights of all religious persons and their right to practice that faith.

And the government does respect it......? You're literally making no argument.

[Endus]

does that SPLC also account for the fact that the mosque in Texas was burned down by a devout Muslim? or the fact that some of these hate crimes were actually committed by blacks or Muslims themselves?
its easy to blame Trump for all of their problems, facing reality is much harder.

Oh, drop the "it's all false flag" conspiracy nonsense. Yes, they were looking at motivation. Hate crimes exist, and people are suffering, and making light of that is pretty damned reprehensible.

[Delana]

You, as a private person, are free to hate whatever you want in your own little corner.

The government must respect the rights of all religious persons and their right to practice that faith.

Is it okay to use faith to shield a bad political ideology from criticism?

Because if it is, we're screwed. It was nice knowing you guys.

[Endus]

Nope, all ideas and groups are open to criticism. Hating something is not illegal.

Nobody said it as.

Acting on that hate, however, often is. Harassment and so forth.

And the government does respect it......? You're literally making no argument.

PrimaryColor's first post was stating that "The US has no obligation to be a Muslim or Islam friendly country". That's incorrect. That's the point.

[Deleted]

Good, people are waking up, time to take our countries back from "invisible" powers and foreign invaders.

[May90]

Good, people are waking up, time to take our countries back from "invisible" powers and foreign invaders.

Nope, the alliance of the Illuminati and Reptilians will crush your petty rebellion!!!

[Acidz]

It has a law system. Not a morality code, but a law system. Islam is a political ideology. The fact that it involves a deity is irrelevant. Nothing about their belief in a deity is objectionable. Their law system on the other hand is ludicrously bad.

If the Nazis had elevated Hitler to godhood, would we have had to tiptoe around their beliefs too?

Oh, is that it.

[Deleted]

Nope, the alliance of the Illuminati and Reptilians will crush your petty rebellion!!!

I wouldn't go that far, it's pretty clear who the invisibles are.