The front of the National section of Tuesday’s New York Times featured Mitch Smith in Wichita at the trial of three militia members, accused of planning to bomb an apartment complex occupied by Somali immigrants in, “Terror Plot or Idle Talk? Kansas Trial Hinges on the Answer -- 3 Militia Members Talked of Killing Somali Refugees.”
Smith leaned hard on the purported recent jump in anti-Muslim hate crimes, despite such figures being, as CNN has admitted, “flawed and incomplete.”
The trial comes at a time when threats against religious and racial minorities, particularly Muslims, and incidents of hate-related violence have escalated nationally, according to the F.B.I. and organizations that monitor hate crimes. Mosques have been firebombed; women and men in head coverings have been assaulted; and businesses and homes have been vandalized. In some cases, people have been killed.
But one killing Smith cites happened in 2014, and was anti-Semitic; the other occured last year against an immigrant from India. He skipped the number of documented anti-Jewish “hate crimes,” which is traditionally higher than the number of documented anti-Muslim crimes, which would have provided context.
“It is now approaching the level of hate violence against the same communities that we saw in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks,” said Suman Raghunathan, executive director of SAALT: South Asian Americans Leading Together, a national advocacy organization. In the 12 months following the presidential election in November 2016, there were 213 reported incidents of hate violence targeted at Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, South Asian and Middle Eastern people, a 64 percent increase from the previous 12 months, according to a study compiled by SAALT.
Kansas in particular has seen a series of hate-motivated crimes in recent years. In 2014, a white supremacist killed three people outside Jewish centers in Overland Park. And last year, a man fatally shot one Indian immigrant and wounded another at a restaurant in Olathe after shouting, “Get out of my country.”
The Times takes at face value what it calls a “study” from SAALT (South Asian Americans Leading Together), a hard-left ethnic identity group, despite the group’s virulent stance on Trump in its 2018 report. The newspaper concealed how eager SAALT is to blame Trump for an alleged increase in violent acts that could be attributable to increased reporting of incidents.
SAALT’s Twitter feed shows its anti-Trump animus: “The hate that is seeping through America is hate funneled from the top, and it continues to put lives at risk.” The group was clearly pleased with Mitch Smith's exploration of “the rampant rise of hate in Trump's America.”
SAALT’s dubious methodology to unearth “hate crimes” casts doubt on official crime statistics and instead includes “internet news searches, action alerts and announcements by ally organizations, community members, and media watchdog entities. Members of the public can submit and view descriptions of incidents on this crowd-sourced database.” It’s pretty clear one should take SAALT’s numbers with (ahem) a grain of salt, but the Times treated them as unimpeachable.
The Times jumped on board the issue, doubtless trying to dig up more “hate crimes” it could use to build some unsubstantiated case against Trump as instigator of racist violence:
If you have experienced, witnessed or read about a hate crime or incident of bias or harassment, you can use this form to send information about the incident to Race/Related and other partners in the Documenting Hate project....
