Free-to-Hate Zone

The Seattle Times reports on a campaign to get more Muslims to vote:

Jama is heading a voter-registration drive on behalf of Hate Free Zone Campaign of Washington, a civil-rights advocacy group, and the Seattle branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-Seattle). The groups are hoping to reach as many as 10,000 Muslims statewide — either new voters or those who've registered but are not on the mailing list of either group.

The so-called "Hate Free Zone"

was formed as an immediate response to hate crimes and discrimination from individuals and government policies targeting Arabs, Muslims, South Asians and other communities following September 11, 2001.

Fair enough. But the group approaches its mission with an inappropriate hysteria. The home page has a prominent link to this article

Hate crimes surged last year against people of Islamic faith and those of Middle Eastern ethnicity in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, the FBI reported Monday. Incidents targeting Muslims, previously the least common involving religious bias, increased from just 28 in 2000 to 481 in 2001 -- a jump of 1,600 percent.

Only thing though, is that the report, issued in 2002, was succeeded by the 2003 report which showed that the number of anti-Muslim incidents in 2002 fell to 155. But this reassuring drop-off is nowhere mentioned over at the Hate Free Zone. (As a point of comparison, the annual mumber of anti-Jewish hate crimes, also reported by the FBI but nowhere mentioned by the Hate Free Zone, is relatively stable in the range of 1,400 - 1,600 per year). The Hate Free summary of the FBI report also informs us that:

Whites made up the vast majority of known offenders for all cases, at 6,054, followed by blacks at 1,882

Those hateful whites! But alas, one reason that the "vast majority" of hate crimes are committed by whites is that the vast majority of Americans are white. A comparison of hate crime statistics with population statistics shows that the percentage of white people among hate crime offenders is the same as the percentage of white people in the general population. But the Hate Free Zone doesn't bother to put the "vast majority" number in this context.

In addition to whipping up hysteria about the imaginary epidemic of anti-Muslim hate crimes committed by white people, the other thing that is weird about the "Hate Free Zone" is that their voter-registration drive recruits Muslims exclusively and is in partnership with the local chapter of CAIR. What kind of political activity does the local CAIR group encourage? Its proudest accomplishment was inserting a plank into the county Democratic platform that singles out Israel for condemnation. That sounds like a form of hate to me.

A better name for the "Hate Free Zone" might be the "Free-to-Hate-Whites-and-Jews Zone".

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at July 31, 2004 04:41 PM