Let’s recap. We’ve had twenty months of radical intimidation campaigns targeting Jews on college campuses in the US. In recent weeks, the Jewish governor of Pennsylvania got firebombed out of the state’s mansion. An assassin executed two Israeli embassy employees and injured several others outside of a Jewish museum in Washington DC. And last week, a self-proclaimed jihadist attempted to murder dozens of Jewish demonstrators in Boulder, Colorado with Molotov cocktails and a makeshift flamethrower.
So with that fact pattern, guess what ABC News has set its focus upon? Three guesses and the first two don’t count:
As law enforcement agents investigate Sunday’s fiery attack on a group of pro-Israel demonstrators in Boulder, Colorado, crime data shows the rampage came amid a dramatic increase in antisemitic and Islamophobic hate crimes across the nation, suggesting further that the war between Israel and Hamas terrorists continues to spill into the U.S.
Is that true? It’s not difficult to accept that there has been a dramatic increase in anti-Semitic hate crimes since October 2023, since much of that evidence is in video and in news reports. But where did ABC News get data to support the idea that there has been a dramatic increase in “Islamophobic hate crimes”? The FBI? Local police reports?
Nope. ABC just regurgitated claims from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR):
Islamophobic attack have also been on the rise, according to a report issued in March by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization. CAIR reported that it received more than 8,650 complaints in 2024, the highest number the group has ever gotten.
You gotta admit … stenography is a lot easier than actual reporting. That’s especially true when activist groups start flooding reporters with their own curated “data” in an attempt to distract from a wave of anti-Semitic attacks and to position Muslims as the real victims. (USA Today got a jump start on that process this morning, in fact.) Something smelled fishy about this claim when it took twenty paragraphs for ABC News to reveal its sourcing.
In fairness, the FBI compiles its statistics slowly, so more recent data isn’t available. However, we have enough to show that the scope of the two hate-crimes categories differ radically from each other. Here are the charts from the FBI’s data showing the difference. Let’s start with anti-Islamic hate-crime incidents by month from 2020-2023 inclusive:
Note that the number of reported incidents (gray line) never gets to 70 per month. With one exception, not one month before October 2023 had reported incidents above 20. Now let’s take a look at the same period for the FBI’s data on hate crimes against Jews, noting the scale on the X axis on the left:
Even before October 2023, every month in this period had at least 40 anti-Semitic hate crime incidents reported and recorded by the FBI. About half of the months in this period had over 100 anti-Semitic hate crime incidents each. After the Hamas atrocities of October 7, those incidents skyrocketed to over 360 in that month and 448 in November, only coming down to 294 in December 2023.
No one is arguing that anti-Islamic hate crimes don’t exist, but they’re nowhere near the scale of threat that Jews face in the US. That was true well before the “Free Palestine/Globalize the Intifada” brought intimidation campaigns and assaults on Jews back into fashion on the Left. Other hate crimes also have scales approaching or exceeding that of anti-Islamic hate crime scale, especially anti-LGBTQ hate crimes, which also range from 30 to 95 incidents a month and peaked out a couple of times at well over 100.
Did ABC News even bother to look at the FBI data? Apparently not; there are four mentions of the FBI (plus another in a photo caption), and none of them have anything to do with their publicly available hate-crime data. It’s unclear whether this is from ignorance or willful avoidance, but it certainly seems as though ABC News didn’t want actual data to get in the way of its ability to scold Americans for being Islamophobes after watching twenty months of escalating attacks on Jews turn into outright murders and murder attempts.
And the Protection Racket Media wonder why their consumers despise them. The answer is that we still don’t despise them as much as they despise us.
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