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DrStephenTColbert on 29 August 2010
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TheRealMafoo said:
ArnoldRimmer said:

The whole point of the article is:

There is no islamophobia, because there is a higher number of recorded anti-semite incidents.

Someone who argues like this must either be extremely stupid, or - what I believe to be more probable - believe his readers to be just that.

Well, in the end it's just another silly article from the man who has a logical fallacy named after him and who wrote "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."


I the worst year ever, we had 1,600 crimes against Muslims.

We have over 2 million Muslims in this country. At just 2 million, that's 1 crime per every 1,250 people. Every other year, it was less then 1 per 11,000 people.

Sorry, but that's VERY good religions tolerance if you ask me. I would like to know what other countries are like. I bet it's not near as good as 1 in 11,000.

FBI's UCR statistics are inherently flawed.  They depend on local and state authorities to report hate crimes.  William Rubenstein at UCLA has written a very comprehensive article on the issue.  Essentially, some states use different mechanisms to prosecute hate crimes and others simply under report hate crimes.  This happens either because the police officer doesn't want to fill out additional paperwork, or because of an inherent distrust of the police by the community in question.  This skews the results to a point where they can't be relied upon to estimate hate crimes against a particular group.  In addition, it makes no distinction between property damage and personal injury.  While I agree that most Americans are tolerant of other religions, there is a disturbing subset of the population that believes Islam is a violent cult that must be stopped at all costs.  As an example, look at the people protesting the Murfreesboro, Tennessee mosque.  If you ask me, that is not "VERY good" religious tolerance; in fact it's an insult to the men and women who risk and lose their lives defending the Constitution.