Comment by Riaz Haq on May 13, 2021 at 6:29pm

The terrorism concerns proved to be massively overblown, and allows us by the French think tank Fondapol found that since 2015, Germany has experienced only a fraction of the Islamic terror attacks that France has. While taking in far more migrants.

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/2105/09/fzgps.01.html

ZAKARIA: And now for the last look. On Tuesday, Germany's interior minister made a disturbing announcement for right crime in his country hit a record high last year with more than 23,000 incidents. A university have also study of far right terror attacks in Europe shows that over the past 30 years, Germany has had the most far right terrorist incidents on the continent by far.


In the most troubling recent incident near Frankfurt, a far right gunman killed 10 people in two shisha bars last February. Politically motivated crimes like that one were up and alarming 10.8 percent with national elections just four months away, authorities wanted to particularly unstable time. They're worried that far right groups will use frustration with repeated lockdowns and a botched vaccine rollout to stir up resentment toward the government and encouraged sedition.

All this comes at a time of major political transition. After 15 years of Angela Merkel steadying influence at the helm, Germany will be electing a new chancellor come September.

The record breaking year the Germany just experienced as the latest in a years long upward trend. And that trend is made even more striking by the fact that it seems to have emerged in reaction to an imaginary crisis.

Official data shows that far right crimes saw the first major spike in 2015. The year Merkel decided to open her country's borders to a large number of migrants, many fleeing war torn Syria. Eventually over 1.2 million people amounting to 1.5 percent of the German population were allowed to settle in the country under that policy.

And that fueled intense anxieties about how out of control immigration could lead to integration problems and Islamist terrorism.

Before the far right fears about impending Sharia doom, today most of those 1.2 million refugees have already assimilated nicely into German society. As Thomas Rogers wrote in The New York Review of Books last month, the migrants from that period have integrated faster than previous refugee influxes.

Approximately half of them have jobs and another 50,000 are taking part in apprenticeship programs. The federal education minister has stated then more than 10,000 are enrolled in university. Three quarters of them now live in their own apartment or house and feel welcome or very welcome in Germany.

In the German institutions and German society have both been quite welcoming.

[10:55:01]

As Rogers writes, German companies created purpose built jobs for the newcomers. And over half of Germans say they have volunteered or donated in some capacity to help the migrants make a new home in their country.

The terrorism concerns proved to be massively overblown, and allows us by the French think tank Fondapol found that since 2015, Germany has experienced only a fraction of the Islamic terror attacks that France has. While taking in far more migrants.

The German public seems to have noticed. Polls showed that the biggest rivals to Merkel's political errs will be the pro-immigrant, pro- asylum Green Party, while the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party is at the back of the pack.

Let's hope the Germans realized that while they were constantly warned about Islamist terror, the violence that actually materialized came from the far right, and is still on the rise even now.

Thanks to all of you for being part of my program this week. I will see you next week.


https://youtu.be/dNVh7qWH5g0

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 19, 2021 at 4:44pm

FACTSHEET: RASHTRIYA SWAYAMSEVAK SANGH (RSS)
by Bridge Initiative Team
Published on 18 May 2021

https://bridge.georgetown.edu/research/factsheet-rashtriya-swayamse...


IMPACT: Founded in 1925 by K.D Hedgewar, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is an Indian right-wing, Hindu nationalist, paramilitary volunteer organization. In 2020, RSS had almost 585,000 members and over 57,000 branches or sakhas, including a trade union wing (Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh), women’s wing (Rashtriya Sevika Samiti), student wing (Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad), and economic wing (Swadeshi Jagaran Manch). The Print, an Indian news outlet, estimates that 3 out of 4 ministers in the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are members of the RSS, including the current Prime Minister, Narendra Modi.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) was founded in 1925 by K.D Hedgewar in response to a series of small and large scale riots between Hindus and Muslims across northern India. As the historian Tapan Raychoudhuri has noted, Hedgewar believed the riots were Muslim riots as he [Hedgewar] claimed that in every single case, “it is they [Muslims] who start them.”

In the Sangh’s mission statement, Hedgewar wrote: “The Hindu culture is the life-breath of Hindustan. It is therefore clear that if Hindustan is to be protected, we should first nourish the Hindu culture. It is the duty of every Hindu to do his best to consolidate the Hindu society.” In 1927, RSS co-founder — Dr. B.S. Moonje — described the RSS as an institution which could produce “the military regeneration of the Hindus” and unify the people in line with “the idea of fascism.” In 1940, M.S Golwalkar succeeded Hedgewar as head of the RSS.

Golwalkar, widely regarded as the ideological architect of the Sangh, is the author of We, or, Our Nationhood Defined, which maps out a vision of a “Hindu Rashtra”. A March 2018 piece by Parnal Chirmuley in The Indian Express notes that Golwalkar’s vision [of a Hindu state] drew inspiration from Italian fascism, specifically Mussolini’s organization of fascist paramilitary forces. In comparing the supremacy of Hindus in India to the supremacy of the Aryan race in Hitler’s Germany, Golwalkar wrote, “To keep up the purity of its race and culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging of the country of the Semitic races— the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here .. a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.”

In the 1940s, under Golwalkar, RSS volunteers were forbidden from taking part in Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s “Quit India Movement” against the British empire. During the partition of the subcontinent in 1947, Golwalkar is reported to have met with Gandhi over RSS’s alleged involvement in widespread anti-Muslim pogroms. On January 30, 1948, Nathuram Godse, a former member of the Sangh, assassinated Gandhi. In the aftermath, Golwalkar was jailed, and the RSS banned.

In 2009, following the BJP’s defeat in national elections, Mohan Bhagwat— who grew up in a staunchly RSS family— took over the organization. Leading up to the 2014 election, the Sangh actively campaigned for the Hindu-nationalist party, backing Narendra Modi, then the Chief Minister of Gujarat, as the front runner. Narendra Modi is a lifelong member of the RSS, and is accused of “allowing” the 2002 massacre of Muslims in his state.

In recent years, the RSS has been at the forefront of promoting Hindu-nationalism in India, with the Sangh accused of inciting violence against India’s Dalit-Bahujan community, including hate crimes against Muslims, lynchings of Dalits, and pogroms against religious minorities.

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 19, 2021 at 4:44pm

FACTSHEET: RASHTRIYA SWAYAMSEVAK SANGH (RSS)
by Bridge Initiative Team
Published on 18 May 2021

https://bridge.georgetown.edu/research/factsheet-rashtriya-swayamse...

In recent years, the RSS has been at the forefront of promoting Hindu-nationalism in India, with the Sangh accused of inciting violence against India’s Dalit-Bahujan community, including hate crimes against Muslims, lynchings of Dalits, and pogroms against religious minorities.

In 1992, RSS had campaigned for the destruction of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, arguing the Mughal era structure was built on top of the birthplace of the Hindu God, Ram. Following the BJP’s landslide electoral victory in May 2019, Mohan Bhagwat reaffirmed the Sangh’s commitment to the masjid-mandir (mosque-temple) debate at an RSS-education camp, saying, “Ram’s work will be done.” In December 2019, after the Supreme Court of India ruled in favor of the destruction in November 2019, three RSS leaders were charged with “commuting a deliberate and malicious act intended to outrage religious feelings and uttering words with deliberate intent to wound the religious feelings of a person” in Karnataka, India, for reenacting the demolition of the mosque.

In April 2019, The Caravan reported a new initiative by the RSS to bring “true nationalist narrative” to Indian academia. Since BJP came to power in 2014, prominent historians such as Romila Thapar have argued that the Sangh is “attempting to foreground revisionist histories with a glorified view of a Hindu past” by rewriting school textbooks, setting up “RSS-model schools”, and lobbying streaming platforms to remove “anti-nationalist” content. Balmukund Pandey, the head of the historical research wing of the RSS, is on record asserting: “The time is now to restore India’s past glory by establishing that ancient Hindu texts are fact not myth.”

Since its early days, RSS has been linked to white supremacist organizations in Europe and North America. In 2011, Anders Breivik— the Norwegian mass murderer— hailed India’s Hindu nationalist movement as a “key ally in a global struggle to bring down democratic regimes across the world”, listing the websites of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the National Volunteers’ Organisation, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad as resources.

The Sangh has also been linked with Hindu-American advocacy groups in the U.S, chief among them the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) in Washington, D.C. Mihir Meghani, co-founder of HAF, is a long time member of Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, and has spoken at conferences organized by Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America, the international religious branch of the RSS. Meghani is also the author of Hindutva: The Great Nationalist Ideology where he writes, “The future of Bharat is set. Hindutva is here to stay. It is up to the Muslims whether they will be included in the new nationalistic spirit of Bharat. It is up to the government and the Muslim leadership whether they wish to increase Hindu furor or work with the Hindu leadership.”

In 2005, the Hindu America Foundation (HAF) partnered with the Vedic Foundation and the Hindu Education Foundation, to push the state of California to change passages on Hinduism in official school textbooks. In a February 2006 cover story, Siliconeer, a monthly magazine for south Asians on the west coast, said the changes in curriculum that HAF was pushing for reflected “chauvinistic political agendas” seeking to equate the history of India with the history of Hinduism. Recently, HAF board member Rishi Bhutada served as the official spokesperson of “Howdy Modi,” the RSS backed rally for India’s BJP prime minister held in Houston, Texas on September 22, 2020.

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 19, 2021 at 4:45pm

FACTSHEET: RASHTRIYA SWAYAMSEVAK SANGH (RSS)
by Bridge Initiative Team
Published on 18 May 2021

https://bridge.georgetown.edu/research/factsheet-rashtriya-swayamse...

In October 2019, HAF invited Aarti Tikoo Singh, who claimed, in a Twitter exchange with Tarek Fatah, that “Islamophobia is a bullsh*t word thrown in as a slur by those who have irrational fear (phobia) of any criticism of Islamic extremism [and] regressive Muslims.” In April 2019, after city councils across Canada voted to allow the Islamic call to prayer (adhan) to be broadcasted for a few minutes a day during the holy month of Ramadan, Fatah claimed that the Muslims wanted the public adhan to become a “permanent feature”, and that Greek Town (as the neighbourhood of the mosque is known) might soon become “Islamabad.” Fatah was retweeted by Ravi Hooda, who commented that the decision— to broadcast the adhan— opened the door for “separate lanes for camel & goat riders” or laws “requiring all women to cover themselves from head to toe in tents.” Writing for Foreign Policy, Steven Zhou identified Hooda as a volunteer for the local branch of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, which represents the overseas interests of the RSS.

In February 2020, following anti-Muslim pogroms in Delhi, 16 RSS cadres were arrested and charged with murder and rioting. At least 53 people were killed during the violence, almost three quarter of whom were Muslims. According to The Guardian, the catalyst for the pogrom is widely acknowledged to have been a comment by Kapil Mishra, a BJP leader, who issued a public ultimatum declaring that if the police did not clear the streets of a protest against a new citizenship law seen as anti-Muslim, his supporters would be “forced to hit the streets”.

Today’s RSS tries to distance itself from its past. But according to Arundhati Roy, “its underlying ideology, in which Muslims are cast as treacherous permanent ‘outsiders,’ is a constant refrain in the public speeches of BJP politicians, and finds utterance in chilling slogans raised by rampaging mobs. For example: ‘Mussalman ka ek hi sthan—Kabristan ya Pakistan’ (Only one place for the Muslim—the graveyard, or Pakistan). In October this year, Mohan Bhagwat, the supreme leader of the RSS, said, ‘India is a Hindu Rashtra’—a Hindu nation. ‘This is non-negotiable.’”

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 26, 2021 at 10:48am

Modi's Hindu Nationalism (Islamophobia) Hurts Everyone, Including Hindus

https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/05/26/modi-hindu-nationalism-hindutv...

Chain reactions sparked by Hindutva ideologies have claimed the lives of innocent people—a Muslim lynched on the suspicion that he eats beef, a Hindu woman who suffered a miscarriage while imprisoned for marrying a Muslim man, an 8-year-old Muslim girl raped and killed in a Hindu temple, and countless others. The lie has transformed nearly every aspect of Indian society beyond recognition.

Now, as India is ravaged by COVID-19, it faces the latest casualty of this lie: the official and likely undercount of 4,000 lives lost every day to a deadly second wave that was precipitated and exacerbated at every turn by Hindu nationalism.

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Hindu nationalists jumped on the opportunity to link the virus to Muslims, inventing the conspiracy theory of “coronajihad.” That had real consequences: Muslims were beaten and denied hospital beds, and Muslim health care workers were ostracized.



--------

The Modi government and right-wing media particularly seized upon a conference hosted in Delhi in March 2020, by a Muslim organization, the Tablighi Jamaat. This conference with just 9,000 attendees took place before any government COVID-19 restrictions were in place, at the same time as India’s largest Hindu temples were welcoming tens of thousands of devotees. The Tirupati temple, the world’s richest and most visited Hindu temple, limited its visitors to 4,000 people per hour on March 17, and it did not fully close until March 20.

Yet, unlike Hindu temple officials, organizers and attendees of the Tablighi Jamaat’s conference were met with widespread hate and criminal charges for hosting a superspreader event. Many were arrested, and some are still awaiting trial. All of this was done in the name of public health.

One year later, the BJP is directly responsible for putting millions of Hindu lives at risk—and it doesn’t have a convenient Muslim scapegoat to pin the blame on. In the name of upholding Hindu traditions and beliefs, the BJP government decided to hold the Kumbh Mela, the world’s largest religious gathering, in the middle of a pandemic. The Kumbh was scheduled for 2022, but the BJP government of India’s Uttarakhand state moved it forward to 2021 based on the recommendations of astrologers. Many, including some ministers in the BJP itself, argue that the true reasons were political and economic. In advancing the Kumbh by a year, the BJP allowed 9 million Hindus to gather without masks and social distancing, ushering in the deadliest phase of the pandemic.

Thanks to the BJP’s claim of protecting Hindu interests, India has been plunged into its biggest crisis since the bloodbath of the 1947 Partition, which took the lives of as many as 2 million people. Just as the violence of 1947 targeted Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs alike, today’s coronavirus is wreaking equal-opportunity havoc on all faith communities, with the poorest being the hardest hit.

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 7, 2021 at 10:07am

The @ACLU, a Bastion of #FreeSpeech, is in Identity Crisis. Progressives argue that #HateSpeech is a form of psychological & even physical violence, particularly by the powerful against the weak. #Racism #Islamophobia #MuslimLivesMatter #BlackLivesMatter https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html?smid=tw...

It was supposed to be the celebration of a grand career, as the American Civil Liberties Union presented a prestigious award to the longtime lawyer David Goldberger. He had argued one of its most famous cases, defending the free speech rights of Nazis in the 1970s to march in Skokie, Ill., home to many Holocaust survivors.

Mr. Goldberger, now 79, adored the A.C.L.U. But at his celebratory luncheon in 2017, he listened to one speaker after another and felt a growing unease.

A law professor argued that the free speech rights of the far right were not worthy of defense by the A.C.L.U. and that Black people experienced offensive speech far more viscerally than white allies. In the hallway outside, an A.C.L.U. official argued it was perfectly legitimate for his lawyers to decline to defend hate speech.

Mr. Goldberger, a Jew who defended the free speech of those whose views he found repugnant, felt profoundly discouraged.

“I got the sense it was more important for A.C.L.U. staff to identify with clients and progressive causes than to stand on principle,” he said in a recent interview. “Liberals are leaving the First Amendment behind.”

The A.C.L.U., America’s high temple of free speech and civil liberties, has emerged as a muscular and richly funded progressive powerhouse in recent years, taking on the Trump administration in more than 400 lawsuits. But the organization finds itself riven with internal tensions over whether it has stepped away from a founding principle — unwavering devotion to the First Amendment.

Its national and state staff members debate, often hotly, whether defense of speech conflicts with advocacy for a growing number of progressive causes, including voting rights, reparations, transgender rights and defunding the police.

Those debates mirror those of the larger culture, where a belief in the centrality of free speech to American democracy contends with ever more forceful progressive arguments that hate speech is a form of psychological and even physical violence. These conflicts are unsettling to many of the crusading lawyers who helped build the A.C.L.U.

The organization, said its former director Ira Glasser, risks surrendering its original and unique mission in pursuit of progressive glory.

“There are a lot of organizations fighting eloquently for racial justice and immigrant rights,” Mr. Glasser said. “But there’s only one A.C.L.U. that is a content-neutral defender of free speech. I fear we’re in danger of losing that.”

Founded a century ago, the A.C.L.U. took root in the defense of conscientious objectors to World War I and Americans accused of Communist sympathies after the Russian Revolution. Its lawyers made their bones by defending the free speech rights of labor organizers and civil rights activists, the Nation of Islam and the Ku Klux Klan. Their willingness to advocate for speech no matter how offensive was central to their shared identity.

One hears markedly less from the A.C.L.U. about free speech nowadays. Its annual reports from 2016 to 2019 highlight its role as a leader in the resistance against President Donald J. Trump. But the words “First Amendment” or “free speech” cannot be found. Nor do those reports mention colleges and universities, where the most volatile speech battles often play out.

Since Mr. Trump’s election, the A.C.L.U. budget has nearly tripled to more than $300 million as its corps of lawyers doubled. The same number of lawyers — four — specialize in free speech as a decade ago.

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 7, 2021 at 5:27pm

Muslim family killed in #hatecrime in #London, #Ontario. A 20-year-old White supremacist man driving a pick-up truck slams into and kills 4 members of a #Muslim family in what police say was an attack "motivated by hate." #Islamophobia #Canada @TRTWorld https://www.trtworld.com/americas/canada-police-ontario-muslim-fami...

Four people killed after a car jumped the curb and ran into them were deliberately targeted in an anti-Islamic hate crime, Canadian police has said.

"It was pre-planned and premeditated and that's why first degree murder charges were laid," London Detective Superintendent Paul Waight told reporters on Monday.

"There is evidence that this was ... motivated by hate. It is believed that these victims were targeted because they were Muslim," Waight said.

Waight said police in London, about 200 km southwest of Toronto, were liaising with the Royal Mounted Canadian Police on potentially filing terrorism charges.

A Canadian man Nathaniel Veltman has been arrested.

The 20-year-old suspect was arrested at a mall seven kilometres from the intersection crosswalk in London, Ontario where it happened, and has been charged with four counts of murder and one count of attempted murder.


Canadian PM said he was "horrified" by the news of killings.

"To the Muslim community in London and to Muslims across the country, know that we stand with you. Islamophobia has no place in any of our communities. This hate is insidious and despicable - and it must stop," Justin Trudeau tweeted.

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 17, 2021 at 5:04pm

They shared a video of a #Muslim man being attacked in #India. Now they're being investigated by police. #Indian police opened an investigation into 3 Muslim journalists & 3 Muslim members of the opposition Congress party who had shared the video.#Hindutva https://ti.me/3gwnLhy


Indian authorities have launched a fresh attack on freedom of expression, escalating a crackdown on press freedom and social media platforms. It’s yet another indicator that India, often called the world’s largest democracy, is lurching toward authoritarianism.

The trigger was a video of a violent assault on a Muslim man that went viral on Twitter, which ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) officials say was used to spread misinformation aimed at stoking religious tensions.

Late Tuesday night, Indian police opened an investigation into three Muslim journalists and three Muslim members of the opposition Congress party who had shared the video, along with Twitter and news site The Wire—one of the few media outlets in India that have remained independent.

India’s IT Minister also accused Twitter of failing to comply with the government’s new Internet rules on Wednesday, intensifying an ongoing confrontation that some observers have speculated could culminate in the social media platform being banned in the country.

The video in question showed a group of men attacking an elderly Muslim man in the state of Uttar Pradesh. The individuals named in the police investigation had shared comments from the victim, who said that his attackers had cut off his beard and forced him to chant “Jai Shri Ram” (Glory to Lord Ram), an expression that has become a rallying cry for Hindu nationalists, in a suggestion that the attack was religiously motivated. Many mainstream Indian media organizations also reported the victim’s comments but were not named in the investigation.

Police investigating the case denied that the incident was motivated by religion, saying Tuesday that some of the attackers were Muslim. In a statement announcing the investigation, police said that those named had “tried to create animosity between Hindus and Muslims,” and “did not make an attempt to establish the truth in the case,” adding that they had spread “false news.” Police said the six individuals would be investigated for several possible offenses including attempting to provoke a riot, promoting enmity between religious groups, public mischief, and criminal conspiracy.

The move has been heavily criticized by journalists and free speech organizations. “The accusation brought by the Uttar Pradesh police is based on absolutely no tangible element and clearly amounts to judicial harassment,” said Reporters Without Borders in a statement on Thursday. “Reporters Without Borders calls on the police of northern India’s Uttar Pradesh state to immediately withdraw the absurd charges.”

The Uttar Pradesh state government had not responded to a TIME request for comment at the time of publication.

Intimidation of journalists
One of the journalists named in the police investigation was TIME and Washington Post contributor Rana Ayyub, an award-winning journalist who recently reported from overstretched Indian hospitals for a TIME story arguing that governmental failures were to blame for the country’s devastating second wave of COVID-19. Others include Mohammed Zubair, the co-founder of fact-checking website AltNews, which regularly debunks misinformation shared by the government and its supporters, and Saba Naqvi, an author and journalist. The other three people named were members of the opposition Congress party.

In an interview with TIME, Ayyub said that, while the victim’s comments that the attack was religiously motivated had been reported by many newspapers across the country, she believed police had targeted her and other prominent Muslims in order to intimidate them. “It shames the Indian government that they are targeting journalists for reporting basic facts,” Ayyub says.

Comment by Riaz Haq on July 6, 2021 at 11:02am

Welham Boys' School Officials Booked for Seeking #Halal #Meat Suppliers. Welham is a prominent school in Dehradun #India. Complaint was filed by #BJP-allied Bajrang Dal's convener Vikas Verma for 'promoting enmity between groups'. #Hindutva #Islamophobia https://www.thequint.com/news/india/dehradun-welham-boys-school-boo...

Authorities of the Welham Boys' School, a prominent school in Dehradun, were booked on Friday, 3 July, for 'inviting halal meat suppliers for the mess'.

The complaint was filed by Bajrang Dal's convener Vikas Verma for 'promoting enmity between groups', reported The Times of India. The principal, vice principal and the manager of the residential school have been booked under Section 505 (2) of the Indian Penal Code which pertains to statements creating or promoting enmity, hatred or ill-will between classes.

"The school has issued a tender for serving halal meat in the school canteen with the intention of religious conversion of students. Due to this act, the religious sentiments of Hindu community have been hurt," the complaint read, reported the Times of India.

Comment by Riaz Haq on September 7, 2021 at 11:13am

Pew Research: Islamophobia in America has doubled from 25% to 50% in the last 20 years

Islamophobia among Republicans is up from 32% to 72% in last two decades.

Among Democrats, Islamophobia has risen from 23% to 32% in this period.


Ishaan Tharoor tweeted: Am I reading this right — that, six months after 9/11, fewer Americans believed Islam encourages more violence than other religions than they do now? https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/09/02/two-decades-later-t...

https://twitter.com/ishaantharoor/status/1435238567832399875?s=20


Views of Muslims, Islam grew more partisan in years after 9/11
Concerned about a possible backlash against Muslims in the U.S. in the days after 9/11, then-President George W. Bush gave a speech to the Islamic Center in Washington, D.C., in which he declared: “Islam is peace.” For a brief period, a large segment of Americans agreed. In November 2001, 59% of U.S. adults had a favorable view of Muslim Americans, up from 45% in March 2001, with comparable majorities of Democrats and Republicans expressing a favorable opinion.

Chart shows Republicans increasingly say Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence
This spirit of unity and comity was not to last. In a September 2001 survey, 28% of adults said they had grown more suspicious of people of Middle Eastern descent; that grew to 36% less than a year later.

Republicans, in particular, increasingly came to associate Muslims and Islam with violence. In 2002, just a quarter of Americans – including 32% of Republicans and 23% of Democrats – said Islam was more likely than other religions to encourage violence among its believers. About twice as many (51%) said it was not.

But within the next few years, most Republicans and GOP leaners said Islam was more likely than other religions to encourage violence. Today, 72% of Republicans express this view, according to an August 2021 survey.

Democrats consistently have been far less likely than Republicans to associate Islam with violence. In the Center’s latest survey, 32% of Democrats say this. Still, Democrats are somewhat more likely to say this today than they have been in recent years: In 2019, 28% of Democrats said Islam was more likely than other religions to encourage violence among its believers than other religions.

The partisan gap in views of Muslims and Islam in the U.S. is evident in other meaningful ways. For example, a 2017 survey found that half of U.S. adults said that “Islam is not part of mainstream American society” – a view held by nearly seven-in-ten Republicans (68%) but only 37% of Democrats. In a separate survey conducted in 2017, 56% of Republicans said there was a great deal or fair amount of extremism among U.S. Muslims, with fewer than half as many Democrats (22%) saying the same.

The rise of anti-Muslim sentiment in the aftermath of 9/11 has had a profound effect on the growing number of Muslims living in the United States. Surveys of U.S. Muslims from 2007-2017 found increasing shares saying they have personally experienced discrimination and received public expression of support.

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