As Israel’s U.S.-backed war on Gaza continues, university administrators, employers, and federal agencies are contributors to rising complaints of Islamophobia.
Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University in New York on April 23. (Abbad Diraniya, Wikimedia Commons, CC0)
By Jessica Corbett
Common Dreams
A spike in “relentless” Islamophobia across the United States that began in October with Israel’s U.S.-backed attack on the Gaza Strip continued through the first half of this year, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy group said Tuesday.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) released data showing the sustained surge in anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian hate from January to June 2024, with 4,951 documented complaints, a 69 percent increase over the same period in 2023.
That came after CAIR received 3,578 complaints from last October through December, a 178 percent increase from a similar three-month period the previous year, as Common Dreams reported when the data was published in January.
The largest share of 2024 complaints related to immigration and asylum cases (19 percent), which is in line with 2023. That was followed by employment discrimination (14 percent), education discrimination (10 percent), and hate crimes and incidents (8 percent).
So far this year, May has had the largest number of education discrimination complaints — which CAIR tied to “university administrations cracking down on anti-genocide student protestors,” beginning with Columbia University in April.
“Too many places of higher education, which have historically permitted Islamophobic speakers to poison their campus in the name of academic freedom, apparently find anti-genocide speech intolerable,” said CAIR research and advocacy director Corey Saylor in a statement. “Since last fall university administrators have been a primary perpetrator of anti-Muslim racism.”
“Our data shows that as student protests dominated media coverage of the movement opposing the Gaza genocide, employers also continued punishing their employees for their viewpoints,” Saylor added. “We are also seeing federal agencies like Customs and Border Protection and the F.B.I. interpreting being Muslim or anti-genocide as suspicious activity.”
Something our media still fails to truly cover:
Anti-Palestinian/anti-Muslim hate https://t.co/NrJ7dMMSj9
— Nida Khan (@NidaKhanNY) July 30, 2024
CAIR’s data release followed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States last week to address Congress — which was boycotted by dozens of lawmakers — and meet privately with President Joe Biden; Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee for the November election; and former President Donald Trump, the Republican candidate.
Enabled by weapons and diplomatic support from Biden and Congress, Netanyahu launched Israel’s ongoing assault of Gaza in retaliation for the deadly Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack. As of Tuesday, Israeli forces have killed at least 39,400 Palestinians and wounded another 90,996, according to local officials—though experts anticipate the final death toll will be far higher.
South Africa is leading a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, which ruled on July 19 that the decadeslong Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank is illegal and must end. United Nations human rights experts said Tuesday that Israel must comply with the ruling, though Netanyahu’s government has shown no signs that it plans to do so.
CAIR has labeled the recent rise in hate across the United States “the Biden-backed Gaza genocide Islamophobia wave.”
“Islamophobia in the U.S. comes in cycles, with the last two large waves generated by Donald Trump’s 2015 announcement and 2017 implementation of his Muslim ban,” the group explained Tuesday. “As we have noted previously, this wave exceeds the combined totals of incoming incidents received during those two cycles.”
Jessica Corbett is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.
This article is from Common Dreams.
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
These are horrible times. The most horrible in my lifetime of 79 years. It’s a time without honorable behavior by an ungodly number of our political leaders, but I don’t know about other times.
All we hear is “Oct 7” and silence on what the Israeli Jews have been conducting since then. It looks like a mental/moral illness has infected the nation. Now we see that we who announce genocide are suspected to be undesirables. We constantly read antisemitism is exploding, yet there’s virtually never a description of actual events. One female Jewish student said she felt intimidated because she saw a sign on campus that read “Gaza is an open air concentration camp.” We’re supposed to be sympathetic to this being?
It’s as if the dominant people in our society and a major portion of its citizenry worship the Israel Narrative as gospel. This does not bode well at all, and I don’t think the country will recover. There are two bills in Congress that will put into law the insulting IHRA definition of “antisemitism.” That’s despite the official offices in the Federal government that are dedicated to such enforcement.
The IHRA Jewish Leaders Insult our Intelligence
(Not just human intelligence, but AI as well)
As a muslim, I think it is wise for all Muslims to return back to their iwn countries. Why try and fight to stay on someone’s soil if you are not welcomed nor wanted. Don’t force yourself.
Last century it was Jews that were hated. This century it is Muslims…Obviously, we Westerners haven’t learned a damn thing. At times I feel like it resembles the game…”follow the leader”…IDIOTS following another IDIOT.
Why am I not surprised at this finding, given main street medias’ dissemination of pro-Israel’ propaganda, a dysfunctional Congress ruled by Christian fascists and trillionaires who also rule the Dow, and large segments of the population who are just plain ignorant.
Good luck, Amerika!
It’ll need more than luck to save it from itself! Actually, I don’t believe anything can save it from collapse.
Propaganda and lies from the mainstream US newsmedia and US political leaders have turned we the people into haters of all the wrong people–Russia, Middle East, China, North Korea, Venezuela, Central America, etc. It is tragic and will end in WWIII and the end of all of us of the human species. Israel and the USA are acting worse than Nazi Germany.
Unfortunately, our government’s unquestioning support of Israel and the lack of truth (propaganda) being told by our mainstream media is leading to this hatred toward Palestinians and others Muslims. If people really knew what was happening in Gaza, I think the tables would turn dramatically but most people just lap up what they are told by MSM rather than researching for themselves. – sad but true…
Absolutely. Mainstream propaganda driven by White House and Pentagon spokespeople like Kirby, Austin, Miller, Blinken, Pierre, Sullivan, Biden, Harris, Nuland, Power, Graham, Cotton, Schumer, Pelosi… on and on. None of them have spoken a word of Truth on Gaza or Ukraine for that matter, and people still keep believing what they say. It’s frustrating.
Islamophobia was created by the Ne0-cons/Israeli-firsters as they embarked on their plan to re-shape the Middle East. 7 Countries in 5 years. To be successful, they also embarked on a marketing/propaganda plan to demonize Muslims.
It continues to this day.