What's Right.(Arab-Americans and Islamic fundamentalism)

Deadly Dangerous

"At some times I feel like a member of the Jewish community in Germany in the latter stages of the Weimar Republic." -- Ibrahim Hooper, Council on American-Islamic Relations, quoted in the Washington Post, November 30, 2002

You have to give CAIR's Mr. Hooper credit: The man certainly knows how to turn a phrase. "Turn" is the operative word. On the very same weekend that the newspapers of the world reported that Muslim extremists fired on an Israeli passenger jet in order to murder the 261 people aboard -- and that other Muslim extremists detonated suicide bombs at an Israeli-owned hotel in Kenya, killing thirteen -- Mr. Hooper frets that it is the United States that is going Nazi. That is some reversal of reality.

The year since September 11 has put American tolerance to an extreme test -- and Americans have passed with honors and gold stars. In all of 2001, the most stressful and frightening year since 1962, there were 554 victims of anti-Islamic offenses in the U.S., according to the annual report on hate crimes released by the FBI in the last week of November. That's obviously 554 too many. On the other hand, it is only half as many as the number of victims of anti-Jewish offenses: 1,196. And unlike hate crimes against homosexuals, 665 of which inflicted violence on their victims, more than 80 percent of the anti-Islamic offenses in 2001 involved only vandalism or threats.

On the extremely rare occasions that anti-Muslim violence does occur, it is swiftly and severely punished. In 2001, there were three murders in the United States motivated by anti-Muslim prejudice. The man who committed the first murder was insane; the killer responsible for the next two has been sentenced to death by a Texas jury.

The dark night of oppression has clearly not yet descended on the United States. So why Mr. Hooper's mood of foreboding? Why does a man whose own group has co-sponsored rallies at which Jews are compared to apes suddenly feel this remarkable affinity for them?

As Hooper himself told the Washington Post, what alarms him now are not the decreasingly common attacks on Muslims as individuals, but the increasingly common criticisms he hears of Islam as a religion and a culture.