WASHINGTON (ABP) — An annual report by an American Islamic group shows that reports of anti-Muslim incidents increased dramatically last year.
Officials of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation's largest Islamic civil-rights group, announced May 11 that reports of anti-Muslim bias sent to the organization increased nearly 50 percent in 2004.
The report cited 1,522 incidents of anti-Islamic acts, ranging from attacks, hate crimes, job discrimination and unreasonable arrest, search or detention. That is an increase of 49 percent over the 2003 figure of 1,019.
Of the 1,522 anti-Islamic incidents reported in 2004, 141 were violent, an increase of more than 50 percent over the previous year's figures.
The numbers of such reports have increased every year since CAIR began compiling them, according to the document. Officials attributed that to several factors, including increased anti-Muslim sentiment since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks but also increasing awareness of civil-rights violations among the Muslim community. The report also attributed part of the increase to the growth in local CAIR chapters, which collect many of the incident reports.