Blog Post

AEIdeas

Members of which of these groups were most likely to be a victim of a hate crime in 2014: Muslims, Blacks or Jews? Based on media coverage, you would have to say Muslims or Blacks. According to a Google news search for the term “hate crimes” along with the name of each of those three groups, there are 88,300 results for “hate crimes” + black, 63,400 results for “hate crimes” + Muslims and only 26,200 results for “hate crimes” + Jews.

And yet recently released hate crime data from the FBI for 2014 reveal that there were 2,022 African-American victims of hate crimes last year, 648 Jewish victims of anti-religious hate crimes and 184 Muslim hate crime victims. Adjusting for the population size of each group (42 million blacks, 6.2 million Jews and 5.7 million Muslims), the hate crime victimization rates last year per 100,000 population were 10.4 for Jews, 4.8 for blacks and 3.2 for Muslims (see chart above). Therefore, American Jews were more than twice as likely as blacks to be a victim of a hate crime last year, and three times more likely than a Muslim to be a hate crime victim.

The FBI data for 2014 on anti-religion hate crimes also reveal that of the 1,140 victims of anti-religious hate crimes last year in the US, 648 were Jewish (56.8% of the total) and 184 were Muslim (16.1% of the total). Obviously, since 56.8% of the anti-religious hate crime victims in 2014 were Jewish, there were more Jewish victims last year of anti-religious hate crimes (648) than victims of all other religious groups combined (492).

Question: Based on the actual rates of hate crime victimization and the fact that Jews are so disproportionately targeted, wouldn’t we have to conclude that hate crimes against Jews are routinely under-reported by the media relative to the reporting of hate crimes against blacks and Muslims?

Update: In response to a comment below the post by Brian Kerk about variations in the estimates for America’s Muslim population, I’ve created the new chart below with a different assumption about the Muslim population in America. As this American Thinker article by Carol Brown points out:

Estimates on the number of Muslims living in the US vary, ranging from 3 million to 7 million. Whatever the precise number, it’s already outdated as it rises with each passing nanosecond. Since 9/11, there has been a dramatic uptick in immigration from Islamic countries with a 66% increase in the past decade. And things are just warming up. Islam is now the fastest growing religion in America.

The chart above on hate crime victimization rates assumes a Muslim population of 5.7 million, based on a recent estimate from DinarStandard, a well-respected Muslim market research firm that partners with Thomson Reuters (the world’s leading source of intelligent information for businesses) to produce annual reports on “The State of the Global Islamic Economy,” and was recently hired by Ritz-Carlton Hotels to help them better serve Muslim guests in the US. But to address Brian Kerk’s concerns, I’ve adjusted the Muslim population in the US to the lower estimates of 3 million, which results in the following hate crime victimization rates: 10.6 per 100,000 for Jews, 6.1 for Muslims and 4.8 for blacks. The Jew-Muslim difference in hate crime victimization rate is not as dramatic as before, but still highly significant. With these new hate crime rates, we could say that Jews were 74% more likely to be a victim of an anti-religious hate crime in 2014 than a Muslim, and 117% more likely than a black to be victimized by a hate crime.