The Muslim Elephant in the Room of Tolerance

Headlines in New York papers are blaring once again that Islamophobia is up. Up and rising. Statistics released by the state's Division of Criminal Justice Services reveal that Islamophobic bias attacks are up by a whopping 15 percent.

Muslim Synagogue Vandalism

15 percent does sound like a lot. And by a lot, I mean that they've gone up from 8 incidents in 2008 to 11 in 2009. That's right, that whopping "15 percent" is actually an increase of 3 incidents. To put this into context, in 2008 there were 219 attacks targeting Jews. And in 2009, that number went up to 251. And here's some more context. That same report shows that Anti-Multi-Religious Groups attacks went up from 3 to 11 incidents in that same year. That's a much steeper spike which brings us to the same number as the so-called Islamophobic attacks. And yet you don't see the media trumpeting those numbers. But when there are more bias attacks by people who can't figure out which religion they hate more, than anti-Muslim attacks, it's safe to say that there is no Islamophobia crisis.

In 2010, we've been witness to multiple fake Islamophobia incidents in New York City. Just a few weeks ago, hate crimes charges were dropped against two latino men who got into a subway scuffle with an Imam. The Imam, Rod Peterson, is a criminal with an extensive rap sheet for burglary, robbery and possession of a weapon. It's not clear that his victims had any such record. But because Rod Peterson had become an Imam, he went free, while his victims faced hate crimes charges. Now the hate crimes charges have been withdrawn. But the lesson of the story is that an altercation by a Muslim criminal who cries, "Hate Crime" will get him off the hook, while the men he got into a fight with still face criminal charges.

Then there was the famous "Prayer Rug Urination of 2010". Newspaper headlines told the awful tale of a horrible Islamophobe who ran into the Al-Iman Mosque mosque, cursing Muslims and urinating all over their prayer rugs. As the story developed, it turned out that the "Urinating Islamophobe" was actually Omar Riviera, a Latino man on a several day bender, who urinated on the street, at a prayer rug near the entrance to the mosque. Omar never cursed any Muslims. He had no idea where he was. But none of that stopped Rachel Barenblat, an Al-Jazeera contributor and radical anti-Israel leftist, from jumping on the incident to raise over a thousand dollars to buy the Al-Iman mosque a new prayer rug. (For a 1000 dollars, you could probably carpet several rooms in the mosque, but why bother jumping on the details.) The Al-Iman Mosque turned out to have anti-semitic and homophobic materials on their website, but that didn't stop Nicholas Kristof from featuring Rachel Barenblat as a model for all self-hating Jews to follow.

Then there was Michael Enright, a dead drunk alcoholic arts student, who became the poster child for Islamophobia, after he slashed the Muslim cabbie who was driving him home. Afterward Enright sat down in the street and was so incoherent that police took him to Bellevue Hospital, rather than a prison cell, but he was too useful to let go of. Earlier that year, a Muslim cabbie had been robbed and beaten by an attacker, but the timing wasn't right yet. Enright's drunken slashing came at the perfect time for Bloomberg to put on a show in defense of the Ground Zero Mosque.

Bloomberg invited the cabbie to City Hall. The media depicted Enright as a hate crazed monster, even though there was an extensive history showing that he actually liked Muslims. And an even more extensive history showing that he was an alcoholic prone to crazed behavior when drunk. But none of that mattered. Bloomberg had his pigeon. While Enright should have faced justice for his attack, it should have been as part of a legitimate investigation, rather than a prop in a show about tolerance. The cabbie and the media colluded to misrepresent Enright's comments. And just as in the previous cases, an assault that was not a hate crime, became transformed into a hate crime.

Why does all of this matter? These were the three most prominent Islamophobic incidents in New York City in 2010. They will show up in a report just like this one. And they were all fake. Typical city violence transmogrified into a hate crime because it served the interests of the politicians, who pressure the policeinto making a good show of fighting Islamophobia. Which means making arrests for anti-Muslim hate crimes, whether those hate crimes actually exist or not.

In 2009, we somehow managed to scratch up a full 11 incidents. But the real statistics show that there were more hate crimes against almost every other minority ethnic group and religion. There were far more anti-black, anti-Jewish, anti-Hispanic, anti-gay and anti-everything incidents, than there were anti-Muslim incidents. And the same report which carefully tracks hate crimes across multiple victim breakdowns, fails to do the same for perpetrators. The religion of the perpetrators of hate crimes is not tracked. Only race is. And the racial breakdown of hate crimes is listed as 44.9% white and 36.8% black and 17% other or unknown. This snapshot shows that in a state with less than a 1/5th black population, black men are nevertheless disproportionally reported as perpetrators of hate crimes. Those numbers upset the myth that hate crimes are a symptom of white racism against minorities. But the failure to track Muslim perpetrators means that they may be rolled into the "black" category, if carried out by Black Muslims. Or rolled into the white category, as Arab Muslims often are. And so we have no true picture of Muslim hate crimes, because the statistics are just not being kept.

We can get a small glimpse of Muslim hate crimes by looking at some of the more prominent incidents, like the Bronx Synagogue Bombing Plot by four black Muslims, which was plotted in 2008 and culminated in 2009. But even though ringleader James Cromitie, said that he "hated Jews and Jewish people and he hated the American people", no hate crimes charges were ever filed against him or the other men. And the judge ridiculed the idea of charging them with terrorism. And this sort of thing is going on all over the country. As it is common in Europe.

News reports typically misrepresent Muslim attacks on synagogues as hostility to Israel spilling over into Anti-Semitism. But in reality it was always Anti-Semitism. Muslim hostility to Israel springs out of a hatred for Jews. An attitude that goes back to the days of the Koran and the founding of Islam. If this was really about Israel, then why attack synagogues? Particularly synagogues that are often non-political. Sometimes downright liberal. So too Muslim violence against Americans is supremacism spilling out. It's not really about the War in Iraq, or any war, those are only excuses for Muslim violence against people they consider to be subhuman. There's over a thousand years of history for this sort of thing. And it isn't going away any time soon.

Targeting synagogues and churches is a clear example of a religious war. A religious war has political components, but it is religious first and political second. Muslim violence is part of a religious war. It's not a mistake or a misunderstanding. There's no confusion on the subject. It's a religious war guided by the scriptural verses and tenets of the Koran. Yet while we frantically collect scraps of Islamophobic crimes, we have never defined the sheer body of hate crimes by Muslims.

Both attacks on the World Trade Center by Muslim terrorists were hate crimes. Not the petty hate crime of someone urinating in a doorway or a subway scuffle, but the old-fashioned genocidal kind. A continuation of the crime that began with Mohammed's genocidal massacres and enslavement of Jews and pagans in the deserts of Arabia and continues on today with planes full of terrified passengers being flown into buildings. Total oppression and total murder. Those are the real hate crimes we have to contend with.

The bombing of a church in Alexandria, misrepresented by Barack Hussein Obama as an attack on Muslims and Christians-- is yet another Muslim hate crime. In a region where such hate crimes are so common that they are part of a culture of oppression, practiced by the Muslim majority against the non-Muslim minority. These are not protests against oppression, as liberals too often like to characterize terrorism, they are oppression. They are the very body and soul of oppression. Religious violence in the name of religious supremacy. A Jihad to degrade and destroy the infidel. All one and the same. The common thread that links a church bombing in Egypt and a synagogue bombing in New York-- is Islam.

Muslim hate crimes are the elephant in the room of tolerance. We can't talk about them, because they're not supposed to exist. The narrative is that Muslims are victims, not perpetrators. Even when there are thousands of Americans dead at the hands of Muslims, and a single Muslim dead at the hands of an American-- the narrative still stands. And if we have to roll a drunk or two to fill out the tab of Muslim victimhood so be it. Pile on some pissed on rugs. And lie, lie and lie some more about what is going on-- then so be it. The die is cast. And we go on dying. Every now and then a conspiracy is broken up here or there. Another bomb plot. Until one of them finally succeeds. And dozens, hundreds or thousands of people die in a single day. And our leaders take to the air to urge us to be more tolerant. Because while tolerance may not stop bombs or bullets, it does stop you from thinking. And to our leaders who promote Tolerance Uber Alles, thinking is a thousand times more dangerous than bombs or bullets. Bombs and bullets kill, but thoughts bring change.