Trump effect: Spike in anti-Muslim hate crimes
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There is a spike in anti-Muslim hate crimes tied to the timing of the Republican presidential campaign.
Some of the incidents can be directly linked to GOP front-runner Donald Trump, who employed anti-Muslim rhetoric in the wake of events like the terrorist attacks in Paris, according to the report. Generally, the uptick in violence can be traced back to the beginning of the campaign season in 2015.
“Mr. Trump made many anti-Muslim statements during televised appearances on mainstream news media outlets, impacting millions of viewers across the U.S. and around the world,” the study notes. “As Mr. Trump called for shutting down mosques in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks and the mass shootings in San Bernardino, California in December 2015, anti-Muslim attacks initially tripled with nearly half of those attacks directed against mosques.”
There was a surge in hate crimes in December, on the heals of the attacks in Paris. Of the 53 total attacks that month, 17 targeted mosques and Islamic schools and five targeted Muslim homes. Anti-Muslim attacks occurred almost on a daily basis in December — sometimes multiple times a day — and constituted a third of all such crimes for the entire year of 2015, according to the report.
“Among the incidents noted were the murders of three university students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the murder of an Iranian-American in California by a white supremacist, and a road-rage incident in Houston in which a Palestinian-American man was killed by a man who told him to ‘go back to Islam,’” the report notes.
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