WASHINGTON (ABP)—Complaints of anti-Muslim bias in the United States shot up by 25 percent in 2006 as compared to the previous year, according to a survey by an Islamic group.
The annual report of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, titled “Presumption of Guilt: The Status of Muslim Civil Rights in the United States,” said government acts accounted for much of the increase in reports of discrimination and bias.
The report, compiled annually since 1996 by the nation's largest Islamic civil-rights group, said CAIR processed 2,467 bias complaints in 2006. That's an increase of more than 25 percent over the 2005 figure of 1,972.
The number of anti-Muslim hate crime complaints in 2006 increased to 167 from 153 the previous year.
The highest proportion of complaints—36 percent of the total—came from Muslims who claimed they had experienced discrimination at the hands of a government agency. That's a significant increase over the government-agency proportion of total complaints for each of the previous two years. Alleged bias at the hands of government agencies accounted for 19 percent of the complaints in 2004 and 2005, according to CAIR.
The report's author, CAIR Attorney Arsalan Iftikhar, said the increase in government bias complaints was “most likely because of immigration/citizenship delay is-sues affecting hundreds of thousands of people in America today.”