Complaints of anti-Muslim, anti-Arab incidents in US jumped 7.4% in 2024 – report
Council on American-Islamic Relations blames Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza for apparent spike in hate incidents, notes arrests and expulsions of anti-Israel campus activists
Discrimination and attacks against American Muslims and Arabs rose by 7.4 percent in 2024, the Council on American-Islamic Relations said Tuesday, in a report that blamed the apparent spike in hate incidents on Israel’s war against the Hamas terror group in the Gaza Strip.
“For the second year in a row, the US-backed Gaza genocide drove a wave of Islamophobia in the United States,” CAIR said.
Israel, which has faced accusations of genocide since the war began, insists its fighting accords with international law, and points to efforts to avoid civilian casualties despite Hamas’s use of human shields.
CAIR said it recorded the highest number of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab complaints — 8,658 — in 2024 since it began publishing data in 1996. The methodology of the report, which was not itself immediately available, was not immediately clear.
Most complaints were in the categories of employment discrimination (15.4%), immigration and asylum (14.8%), education discrimination (9.8%) and hate crimes (7.5%), according to the CAIR report, which will be released to the public on Tuesday.
Rights groups and law enforcement agencies around the world observed a surge in both antisemitism and hate crimes targeting Muslims and Arabs following the Hamas terror group’s October 7, 2023, massacre and hostage-taking on southern Israel, which sparked the subsequent, ongoing war in the Gaza Strip.
In the year following the massacre, a third of US Jews said they were a target of an antisemitic incident, and 77% said they feel less safe as Jews in the United States, according to a survey released last month by the American Jewish Committee (AJC). Some 33% of respondents said they had been the victim of an antisemitic attack, personal remark, vandalism, online post, or other form of antisemitism during 2024.
The founder and executive director of CAIR said in November 2023 that he was “happy to see” the Hamas attack — in which over 5,000 terrorists from Gaza invaded Israel, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 people captive — and said that “the people of Gaza have the right to self-defense” while “Israel, as an occupying power, does not have that right to self-defense.”
Last month, an Illinois jury found a man guilty of murder in the October 2023 fatal stabbing of a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy, designating the killing a hate crime.
Other US incidents since late 2023 include the attempted drowning of a 3-year-old Palestinian American girl in Texas, the stabbing of a Palestinian American man in Texas, the beating of a Muslim man in New York and a Florida shooting of two Israeli visitors whom a suspect mistook to be Palestinians.
The CAIR report also addressed universities’ and police responses to anti-Israel protests that emerged in the wake of the Hamas attack and have persisted, with students erecting tent encampments and occupying university buildings in calls for schools to cut ties with Israel.
The demonstrations, which frequently included open endorsements of violence and support for terror groups, resulted in waves of arrests as well as some suspensions and expulsions, which many pro-Palestinian groups have condemned as an attack on free speech.
On Saturday night, US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement arrested Mahmoud Khalil, an anti-Israel student activist at Columbia University with permanent residency in the country.
The White House said he was “Hamas-aligned” and vowed to deport him, which sparked a chorus of criticism in the name of civil liberties and due process, including among some critics of Khalil’s activism itself.
