It’s plain that CAIR, which claims to be the “Muslim NAACP,” has been hyping tensions.
Every year the pressure group releases a report citing thousands of alleged civil-rights and physical abuses against Muslims, which largely are based on anecdotal reporting from members. Despite CAIR’s obvious bias (and proven record of dissembling), the PC-addled media report its numbers unfiltered and without question.
But if you peel them back, you find they’re mostly victimless crimes. For instance, in its 2006 report released in June, CAIR listed as a “hate crime” the following example: “A copy of the Quran was found in a toilet at the library of Pace University in New York.” There are other atrocities, too, such as someone trampling on a “flower bed” at a mosque in Texas.
Even in the aftermath of 9/11, when Americans were still raw with anger over 19 Muslims killing almost 3,000 of our fellow citizens, there was virtually no vigilantism or violent backlash against Muslims. In November and December 2001, Zogby polled American Muslims and found that only 6% had suffered “physical abuse or assault.”
These are all inconvenient facts for CAIR and its antiwar agenda. It can’t roll back the Patriot Act and key counterterror measures, such as mosque surveillance and passenger profiling, without ginning up sympathy in Washington for Muslims as a persecuted minority.
Each time CAIR releases another overhyped hate crimes report, it argues that violence and harassment against Muslims have multiplied because of the U.S. war on terror. “Government acts” — including airport searches, detentions and interrogations — “send a green light to mistreat Muslims,” claimed CAIR executive director Nihad Awad.
The time is over both for coffee-table talk in the West about a pie-in-the-sky "reformation" needed in Islam, and the endless habit in the Middle East of blaming others for self-inflicted miseries.
Instead, right now we should hold the Muslim world to the same standards of tolerance that we demand of ourselves - no more apologies for things like our insensitive cartoons or excuses for their insane anger against novelists. In turn, the Middle East must grow up and accept, like the rest of the world, that there are social and cultural costs and consequences for any who wish to embrace the benefits of modernism.
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution
The Pew Research Center just concluded an exhaustive scientific study of the size of the U.S. Muslim population. It was able to identify only 2.35 million Muslims — less than half the figure commonly cited by Muslim activists.
Pew, a liberal group with certainly no interest in marginalizing Islam, described its study as "perhaps the most rigorous effort to date to scientifically estimate the size of the Muslim American population."
Yet it practically apologized for its more accurate reading, being that it came in "significantly below some commonly reported estimates frequently cited by Muslim groups."
Foremost among such groups is the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which claims to represent Muslims in Washington. CAIR commissioned its own survey in 2001 and came up with 6 million to 7 million, an estimate it always touts in its press releases and on its Web site.
As a result, most media outlets — as well as Congress, the White House and the State Department — have parroted the figure to describe the size of the nation's Muslim population.
Politicians in Washington are intimidated by the figure, which CAIR uses as a cudgel to help advance its Islamist agenda. They believe it.
But it's a wildly inflated guess manufactured by CAIR, something the media could have easily refuted all these years if they dared — simply by deconstructing CAIR's unscientific methodology.
Until now, finding reliable data for Muslims in America has been hard because the Census Bureau does not survey creed. So CAIR's fuzzy math went unchallenged, even though the "respected scholar" it hired to lead its "study" wasn't a trained demographer. In fact, as a CAIR board member, he wasn't even independent.
Worse, the Muslim professor admitted the number he arrived at for CAIR was a "guesstimation" that magically and conveniently matched the size — and potential political clout — of the Jewish population in the country, also estimated at 6 million.
It's telling that CAIR did not link to the Pew study or any press coverage of it on its Web site. CAIR derives its power from the size of its potential membership. The bigger it is, the more clout it has in Washington and the corporate boardroom.
Until now, the perception was that CAIR spoke for several million Muslims and could rally them to boycott a company or to vote as a bloc to swing an election if it didn't get its way. Officials feared the group because they thought it could marshal an Islamic juggernaut. The threat alone has caused many to back down from criticism or policies CAIR didn't like.
But it was the Wahhabi lobby's big lie. CAIR couldn't deliver even 2 million voters if it tried. According to Pew, just 1.5 million Muslims are of voting age.
There is no big Muslim lobby, just CAIR's big, hollow PR machine.