A Muslim advocacy group said that discrimination and attacks against American Muslims and Arabs grew by 7.4% in 2024 due to elevated Islamophobia generated by U.S. partner Israel’s war in Gaza and the resulting college campus demonstrations.
The Council on American Islamic Relations stated it registered the highest number of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab claims, 8,658, in 2024, since it started publishing data in 1996.
Most complaints were in the classes of employment discrimination (15.4%), immigration and asylum (14.8%), education discrimination (9.8%) and hate crimes (7.5%), according to the CAIR report.
Human rights activists have noted an upsurge in Islamophobia, anti-Arab bias and antisemitism since the beginning of Israel’s devastating attack on Gaza following a fatal October 2023 Hamas attack. The CAIR report also describes police and university attacks on pro-Palestinian demonstrations and encampments on college campuses.
Protesters have for months urged an end to U.S. backing for Israel. At the elevation of college campus demonstrations in the summer of 2024, classes were annulled, some university officials resigned, and student protesters were stopped and apprehended.
Human rights and free speech supporters criticised the crackdown on demonstrations, which were called obstructive by university officials. Significant incidents include violent detentions by police of peaceful demonstrators at Columbia University and a mob raid on pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“For the second year in a row, the U.S.-backed Gaza genocide drove a wave of Islamophobia in the United States,”
CAIR stated.
Israel rejects genocide and war offences accusations. Last month, an Illinois jury convicted a man of hate crime in an October 2023 deadly stabbing of a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy.
Other threatening U.S. happenings since late 2023 include the tried drowning of a 3-year-old Palestinian American girl in Texas, the killing of a Palestinian American man in Texas, the assault of a Muslim man in New York and a Florida murder of two Israeli visitors whom a suspect misperceived to be Palestinians.
In recent days, the U.S. administration has faced complaints from rights advocates over the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student who has played a major function in pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University.