Just Who is in the “Perpetual Crosshairs of Bigotry”?

by Hugh Fitzgerald

After the killing of an imam and his assistant in Queens last week, the media were full of stories about Muslims, in Queens, in New York City, all over the country, apparently terrified that yet another “hate crime” had been directed at them.

The headlines all went like this:

“Dread increases for Muslims.”

“Fear among Muslims in Ozone Park.”

“Muslims decry ‘hate crime.’’

“Muslims blame Trump for ‘hate crime’.”

And the stories under the headlines painted a picture of Muslims terrified of being attacked by those hate-filled Infidels who, we are asked to believe, make the lives of ordinary Muslims so scary:

“I’m scared to walk in the street.” said one Muslim.

““We’re scared now to walk in the street,” said Gousuddin Khan, who worships at the mosque.”

“It makes all the Muslims scared,” Choudry [a Muslim resident of Ozone Park] said. “Last time someone got shot in this neighborhood that I know of was probably 2001.” This wording implies that that “someone” was a Muslim, shot “in this neighborhood” by a non-Muslim – but there is no record of this happening.

CAIR, of course, was all over the case, offering a reward and taking the occasion to report, hysterically, about “an unprecedented spike in anti-Muslim incidents nationwide since Trump’s bigoted call for a complete ban on Muslims entering the United States.”

And Muslim “residents demanded authorities treat the brazen daylight shooting as a hate crime.” They did this before any suspect had been identified, certain that establishing in the public’s mind the idea that yet again “a hate crime” had been committed against Muslims could only help promote the notion that they were constantly the victims, rather than the perpetrators (as in fact they so often are), of “hate crimes.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio added his own log to the bonfire of the bigotries:

“While we do not yet know the motivation for the murders of Maulama Akonjee and Thara Uddin, we do know that our Muslim communities are in the perpetual crosshairs of bigotry.”

On the basis of what facts did the Mayor make his inflammatory remarks that fit perfectly with CAIR’s script of Muslims being terrified of “hate crimes,” because they keep claiming they are? The Mayor might have been asked to list all the attacks on Muslims that support his claim that they are in the “perpetual crosshairs of bigotry.” (Incidentally, he needs to be reminded that the number of genuine anti-Muslim attacks are far fewer than the number of anti-Semitic attacks in this country). Does the sober discussion of what is in the Qur’an and Hadith count, for Mayor de Blasio, as a “hate crime,” because all kinds of unpleasant Qur’anic quotes might alarm non-Muslims about Muslims? Does unadorned information about the texts and tenets of Islam become part of the “crosshairs of bigotry”? You know, the kind of thing you can read at Jihad Watch? I’m afraid it does.

Even if we were to accept as true all claims by Muslims about “attacks” on them, the numbers are very small. Professor Brian Levin has compiled a complete list of “anti-Muslim” attacks for the past five years, of 150.8 anti-Islamic “hate crimes” per year for a monthly average of 12.6, little more than one attack every third day, for the entire United States, with a population of several million Muslims. And what qualifies as an example of anti-Muslim bigotry? It includes not only a pig’s head thrown at a mosque, or attempted arson, but also such things as someone being yelled at once, or a letter sent to a mosque calling Islam “evil.” Not exactly Kristallnacht. We know that many well-publicized examples of supposed anti-Muslim attacks or discrimination ultimately turned out to be unsubstantiated. Consider the Muslim husband in New Jersey, Kashif Parvaiz, who claimed a group of armed men entered his house and one of them shot his wife while screaming “terrorist” (proving that the crime was prompted by hatred of Muslims) when, in reality, the husband had conspired with his mistress to kill his wife, and figured he could blame her death on a “hate crime.”

And for an example of supposed “discrimination,” take the group of hijabbed Muslim women who decided to sue a California restaurant because they were asked to vacate a table on the restaurant’s patio (so that other customers could take turns enjoying these, the most desirable tables) after 45 minutes and when they refused to do so, had to be escorted out. It turned out that the 45-minute rule was prominently posted on all the patio tables, that the women in question were politely offered alternative (non-patio) seating after the 45 minutes had expired, that the restaurant was often full of Muslim women customers, many of them hijabbed, who had never had any complaint, and had always been served without incident, and finally, that one of the restaurant’s co-owners was herself a Muslim. The restaurant is counter-suing, and the restaurant will win.

Of such trumped-up cases, that initially inculpate non-Muslims – for everything from discrimination to murder – is much of the Muslim victimhood narrative fashioned. But even when the truth comes out, the public often remembers only the initial charges and pays less attention to the subsequent correction of the record. CAIR well knows that, as Mark Twain said, “a Lie can go half-way round the world, while the Truth is still putting on its shoes.”

Now how many cases in this country of the killing of non-Muslims by Muslims, beginning with the attack of 9/11/2001, do we know about? Here’s a short list of the best-known examples: the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, Fort Hood, San Bernardino, the Pulse nightclub, the Boston Marathon. But there are dozens more of smaller scope — such as the Chattanooga and Little Rock attacks on Navy recruitment and reserve centers — and hundreds more if we were to include all the attacks that were planned but foiled before they could take place. And the non-Muslim victims so far run into the thousands.

How many Muslims, do you think, have been killed for being Muslims, by non-Muslims, in this country, up to last week? 300? 150? 100? 25? 5? None? The correct answer is “None.” In all this time – since 2001 — there has not been a single proven case of a Muslim being killed by a non-Muslim because he was a Muslim. (I am not including the case of the Sikh man who was murdered, presumably because he was mistaken for a Muslim.) The man who shot three Muslims in North Carolina did so, the evidence showed, because of a long-simmering feud over parking spaces. After all the “dread” and “fear” reported among Muslims, all the “I feel scared” and “we feel scared” stories, after Mayor de Blasio’s insistence that Muslims are “in the perpetual crosshairs of bigotry,” an unwary reader could be forgiven for thinking many Muslims must have been enduring a wave of terror in this country to have felt all this “fear” and “dread.” But if Oscar Morell turns out to have been the killer, and if he did kill the imam and his assistant because they were Muslims, this will have been the first such case, rather than one in a long line of such cases.

Now perhaps some intrepid journalist will dare to ask the Mayor, in public, to tell us how many Muslims he thinks have been killed in this country in “hate crimes,” where all Muslims are supposedly in the “perpetual crosshairs of bigotry.” The Mayor almost certainly will not know the right answer, and when he haltingly tries to supply some guesstimate, it can be held up for examination and, when the inquiring journalist supplies the correct answer, ridicule. And a follow-up question for him: how many terrorist attacks by Muslims on non-Muslims have there been in this country, or in Western Europe. Here he will stumble again. There is no need to be gentle with Mayor Bill de Blasio. He deserves what he gets. If he can’t be shamed, then let him be mocked, into sense.