Several headlines coming out about the FBI’s report on a 67 percent spike in hate crimes on U.S. Muslims in 2015 seem intent on attributing that spike to President-elect Donald Trump’s candidacy.
First and foremost, Trump didn’t announce his candidacy until June 2015, and his most cited transgression — the Muslim immigration ban — did not occur until December 2015.
Meanwhile, the slaughtering of a dozen cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo Jan. 7 and a staggering 1,200 sexual assaults in Cologne, Germany, Dec. 31 bracket a year of demonstrably bad headlines for the Muslim community ringing loud in the ears of the West.
Comprehensive retelling of history didn’t stop The New York Times deputy Washington editor from insinuating the rise in hate crimes are a burden of Trump’s 2016 campaign rhetoric.
While bearing brief mention of the tangible surge in high-profile Islamic attacks across the U.S. and Europe, media discussion of the FBI’s findings tends to put emphasis on Trump’s rhetoric.
Aside from the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, 2015 saw bloody Islamic State victories across Syria, the November Paris attacks, and then the December San Bernardino terrorist attacks. Collectively, these attacks killed nearly 200 people in the West and thousands in the Middle East.
These attacks were themselves spikes in a rather moderate, but consistent hum of bad news streaming from Muslim refugee camps popping up all around Europe.
Hate crimes against Muslim Americans historically correlate to terrorist attacks. Indeed, 9/11 is the news peg wider media seems most eager to cite along with Trump’s 2015 run.
To the end of avoiding key omissions, the Paris and San Bernardino attacks prompted widespread discussion of U.S. immigration and refugee policy. Which makes sense, as the San Bernardino attacker, Tashfeen Malik, entered the U.S. on a spousal visa, and at least some of the Paris attackers entered Europe posing as Syrian refugees.
The Syrian refugee debate focused not only on counter-terrorism, but on troubling criminal incidents occurring all across Europe. German police documents indicate nearly 2,000 men, including many Syrian and Iraqi refugee’s, sexually assaulted 1,200 German women on New Years Eve 2015.
Berlin’s biggest pool was even forced to hire burly security guards to deter Muslim refugees from touching women. German civil society organizations also have created councils to teach refugees Western norms at pools — chief among these norms is not touching women.
The sharp rise in high-profile Western terrorist attacks and the flow of nearly 2 million Muslim refugees into Europe may have had more of an effect in stoking anger towards Muslim Americans than campaign rhetoric, which really didn’t hit its crescendo until early 2016.
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