THIS WEEK the Council on American-Islamic Relations released its annual report “The Status of Muslim Civil Rights in the United States 2004.” Newspapers (the Washington Post in particular) dutifully gave prominent play to CAIR’s claim that hate crimes against Muslims increased 70 percent in 2003. Little skepticism, however, was applied to CAIR’s shoddy information-gathering or its politicized interpretation of the “data.”
According to CAIR, George W. Bush’s war rhetoric is to blame for the “increase” in hate crimes. But ours is not a society in which hatred and bias begin at the top and trickle down into criminal acts committed by ordinary citizens. And CAIR’s report, along with the way it has been received, proves it. We live in a society of singular, hair-trigger sensitivity to slight, and CAIR is situated at the wacky, exteroceptors end of such interaction. Long before a painful stimulus registers in the reasoning parts of the brain, this hysterical organization screams bloody bias.
