Israel-Gaza war behind record high US anti-Muslim incidents: Advocacy group

Discrimination and attacks against American Muslims and Arabs rose by 7.4 percent in 2024 due to heightened Islamophobia caused by US ally Israel’s war in Gaza and the resulting college campus protests, a Muslim advocacy group said on Tuesday.

The Council on American Islamic Relations said it recorded the highest number of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab complaints – 8,658 – in 2024 since it began publishing data in 1996.

Most complaints were in the categories of employment discrimination (15.4 percent), immigration and asylum (14.8 percent), education discrimination (9.8 percent), and hate crimes (7.5 percent), according to the CAIR report.

Rights advocates have highlighted an increase in Islamophobia, anti-Arab bias, and antisemitism since the start of Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza following a deadly October 2023 Hamas attack.

The CAIR report also details police and university crackdowns on pro-Palestinian protests and encampments on college campuses.

Demonstrators have for months demanded an end to US support for Israel. At the height of college campus demonstrations in the summer of 2024, classes were canceled, some university administrators resigned, and student protesters were suspended and arrested.

Human rights and free speech advocates condemned the crackdown on protests, which were called disruptive by university administrators. Notable incidents include violent arrests by police of protesters at Columbia University and a mob attack on pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“For the second year in a row, the US-backed Gaza genocide drove a wave of Islamophobia in the United States,” CAIR said. Israel denies genocide and war crimes accusations.

Last month, an Illinois jury found a man guilty of a hate crime in an October 2023 fatal stabbing of a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy.

Other alarming US incidents since late 2023 include the attempted drowning of a 3-year-old Palestinian American girl in Texas, the stabbing of a Palestinian American man in Texas, the beating of a Muslim man in New York, and a Florida shooting of two Israeli visitors whom a suspect mistook to be Palestinians.

In recent days, the US government has faced criticism from rights advocates over the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student who has played a prominent role in pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University.