IPT reports: Durbin's Flawed Hearing
U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., in an attempt to address what he claims is an increase in anti-Muslim bigotry, is relying on questionable statistics and a witness with a record of opposing virtually all law enforcement attempts to deal with Islamist-inspired terrorism.
In a statement, Durbin said his hearing Tuesday on the state of Muslim civil rights in America comes "in response to a spike in anti-Muslim bigotry in the last year including Quran burnings, restrictions on mosque construction, hate crimes, hate speech, and other forms of discrimination."
While hate crime data for 2010 has not yet been released, FBI reports in recent years show no spike in anti-Muslim attacks. Those statistics show 107 anti-Islamic incidents reported in 2009, compared to 156 anti-Muslim crimes in 2006. In both reports, race related crimes dominated, and religiously-targeted attacks involved Jews as victims about nine times more often than Muslims in 2009 and more than five times more in 2006.
Durbin does not appear prepared to challenge them. After making critical statements about the organization, the three-term senator has embraced the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and visited a Chicago-area mosque whose leaders have been cited in federal court records as part of support front groups for Hamas, the U.S.-designated Islamic terrorist group that leads the government in Gaza.
A key witness, Farhana Khera, leads a group which claims there is widespread abuse of Muslims by law enforcement. "We have very serious concerns about FBI surveillance tactics that are used," she said in the wake of a series of arrests in terror plots involving sting operations and informants. In an April 13, 2010, article titled "Americans Should Be Free to Pray without FBI Snooping," Khera accused the FBI of "planting informants" in "American Muslim congregations." Without providing any evidence, she claimed "FBI agent provocateurs" had infiltrated mosques "without evidence of wrongdoing" in places as far out as New York, Florida and Southern California.
Read more at: http://www.investigativeproject.org/2719/durbin-flawed-hearing
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