Incidents of hate and discrimination against Muslims and Palestinians across the U.S. increased drastically as Israel’s genocidal assault of Gaza was ongoing in the last three months of 2023, the U.S.’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy group has announced.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) released data on Monday showing that the organization received 3,578 complaints of anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian hate between October and December of 2023. This is an increase of 178 percent over a similar period in the previous year, the organization reported.
The increase in hatred came after, earlier in 2023, CAIR reported that 2022 saw a drop in complaints of anti-Muslim hatred for the first time since the organization began tracking such incidents in 1995, with a total of 5,156 complaints nationwide in 2022.
The spike in complaints comes as Muslim and Palestinian communities in the U.S. have seen a new wave of hate and violence in recent months, with Israeli officials and U.S. Zionists stoking anti-Palestinian sentiment and spewing dehumanizing rhetoric about Palestinians as they are slaughtered en masse in Gaza.
“In the face of relentless hate and bogus smears, American Muslims, Arabs and a broad coalition of Jewish, Christian, African American, Asian Americans, and others continue calling for justice for Palestine,” said Corey Saylor, CAIR research and advocacy director, in a statement. “This coalition knows the way to stop the hate is to end the apartheid, occupation, and genocide occurring in Palestine.”
Among these incidents is the October killing of Wadea Al-Fayoume, a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy who lived in a neighborhood outside of Chicago with his mother. The family’s landlord, a white man named Joseph Czuba, had allegedly become obsessed with a bunk, Islamophobic conservative conspiracy theory about a “national day of jihad” that spread after Israel’s current Gaza assault began when he stabbed Al-Fayoume 26 times, killing him, and attacked his mother with a knife, sending her to the hospital.
Then, in November, Jason J. Eaton, a white man, allegedly shot and wounded three Palestinian American college students in Burlington, Vermont, paralyzing one of them by shooting him in the spine. The students were reportedly wearing keffiyehs, a traditional Arab scarf symbolic of Palestinian pride and resistance, when they were shot.
Discrimination in employment represented the highest proportion of complaints gathered by CAIR, representing roughly a fifth of incidents. The next two categories with the most incidents were hate crimes and education discrimination, both representing 13 percent of the incidents, the group found.
Previous research has found that hatred against Palestinians and Muslims is closely tied to political rhetoric around Israel’s settler-colonialism in Palestine, with U.S. foreign policy and widespread pro-Israel sentiment among politicians fueling Islamophobia and vice versa.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.