Authorities say in recent weeks there has been an unprecedented wave of hate crimes targeting library buildings, books, and the people who read them. The officials told the New York Times they'd rarely seen such before. These crimes are intended to terrorize, and they follow a recent report by the F.B.I. which says hate crimes against Muslim people in America shot up over the past year.

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A librarian at the public library in Evanston, Ill., was recently preparing for a program titled "The Quran: Is It a 'Good Book'?" She gathered books to display for attendees and discovered that inside the cover of one, "The Koran for Dummies," someone had written "lies cover to cover," drawn a swastika and made a disparaging remark about the Prophet Muhammad. She discovered six more books about Islam and the Quran that had been similarly defaced with racist language and imagery, officials said. The vandalism was a first for the library, Karen Danczak Lyons, its director, said in an interview.



An excerpt of the vandalism done inside the book.

In addition to the books defaced in Evanston, the American Library Association highlighted a number of terrifying cases, some of which are detailed in this New York Times story.

You can make contributions to the Evanston Public Library, where the crime detailed above took place.

From the Evanston Public Library, right after the defacements happened.