I have been reading with interest the back and forth on Ms. Razin’s fiction article that first appeared two weeks ago. Ms. Razin believes there was an anti-Muslim fervor after 9-11 and quotes The Independent, “…Laguna’s embrace of someone that stands out amid the anti- Muslim fervor that followed the attacks…” Now for another quote from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”
Here are the facts. While no one knows how to measure “fervor” the FBI has been measuring hate crimes since 1997. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report for 2002 on Hate Crime Statistics: Anti-Jewish bias accounted for 65.9 percent of the 1,576 reported offenses rooted in religious bias. Anti-Islamic bias made up 10.8 percent of these types of offenses. That means on a per capita basis Jews were more than two times more likely to be victims of hate crimes than Muslims. Here are my calculations made in an attempt to normalize for the different cohort sizes, Jews- .000271, Muslims- .000116 per one million US population.
To date it hasn’t changed much. The 2012 FBI Uniform Crime Report on Hate Crime Statistics indicates that in fact hate crimes against Muslims (11.6% of the total reported crimes) on per capita basis have gone down when the increase in the population is considered.
Ms. Razin’s has a right to her opinion. But not only was it not clearly indicated that this was fiction (not fact) the presentation of the article, and the subsequent doubling down on the idea that anti Muslim hate is rampant in Laguna or the country is just plain incorrect.
Emil Monda, Laguna Beach
Well said, Mr. Monda. We constantly hear about the ‘Muslim backlash’, but I have yet to see a single example. Since 9/11 people screaming Allahu Akbar have murdered hundreds of thousands, maybe a million people. I am not aware of a single Muslim in the U.S, paying a similar price. Three Muslims were killed in North Carolina recently. The media had a field day but, it seems, the altercation was over a parking space, not religion.