By the FBI's own admission
Sharp rise in attacks on Muslims in U.S.
By Leslie Feinberg
The FBI is a big cog in the repressive state machinery that
manufactures the policy of racist profiling. And the political
police play a big role in demonizing Arab, South Asian and
Muslim people as "potential terrorists" in order to shroud the
U.S. military drive to conquer the oil-rich Middle East and
Central Asia part-and-parcel.
So when FBI bigwigs admit that hate crimes against Muslims
in this country have shot up steeply, there's no ground for
disbelief.
The agency issues an annual report of hate crimes in the
United States. If anything, FBI statistics have been berated
for under-reporting. And victims of hate crimes--an amorphously
named legal category for victims of myriad forms of
oppression--are often loathe to voluntarily walk into police
precincts, fearing additional abuse.
This is especially true for Muslims at this time. Although
they are being "disappeared" in silence, it's no secret that
many Muslims have been rounded up and imprisoned without
charges. They fear that the next step is deportation. So
oftentimes Arab, South Asian and Muslim people in this country
endure attacks on their persons and their property without
reporting it to the authorities.
Yet even if the FBI downsizes the actual numbers, the
reality of the statistical trend cannot be suppressed: reported
racist attacks on Muslims in the U.S. last year increased by
more than 1,600 percent. The number of filed incident reports
leaped from 28 in the year 2000 to 481 last year.
It's important to note that while attacks on Muslims have
mounted precipitously during the Bush administration's war at
home and abroad, racism in general is rife in this capitalist
citadel. And other forms of oppression illustrate that this is
what "democracy" looks like--democracy as a form of rule by and
for the wealthy elite, that is.
Most of last year's hate crimes were fueled by racism. These
attacks stepped up 45 percent. And the majority were carried
out against African Americans.
Assaults motivated by prejudice against ethnicity or
national origin jumped 22 percent. Religious bias attacks rose
22 percent. Hate crimes based on perceived sexual orientation
were up 14 percent. Anti-disabled offenses grew by three tenths
of a percent.
Virtually every anti-war march, rally and vigil in the
United States since 9/11 has highlighted the demand to stop the
domestic war against Muslim, Arab and South Asian people in
this country. And at a time of deepening capitalist economic
and military crisis, combating this sharp climb in bigoted
attacks must be a high priority of the fight-back movement in
order to cement solidarity in the struggles of workers and
oppressed peoples.
Reprinted from the Dec. 12, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted
under a Creative
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