After 9/11 and Fort Hood: The Anti-Muslim Backlash That Almost Never Happened

A strange rhythm reverberates through American society. Every few years or months, another mass shooting punctuates the national consciousness. Each massacre is like an aftershock of the last, a seismic tremor that immediately seems to foreshadow the next inevitable tragedy. Of course, the Fort Hood shooting stands apart. Here, the assailant's religion and motives, the non-civilian nature of the targets and it's connection to the Afghan War, mark off the shooting as belonging to that murky sub-genre of mass violence called terrorism.

After having been both victimized and turned into helpless spectators during 9/11, and since then, in a massive case of overcompensation, having borne the brunt of the military casualties in two wars, it would seem plausible that the United States would have fallen prey at home to a wave of anti-Muslim prejudice. Has this, in fact, occurred? The answers are complicated, as the real world has an annoying tendency of being. To begin with, Americans are far less biased against Muslims than almost any other Western nation. The Pew Global Attitudes Project, found in 2008 that the English speaking countries, the U.S. and Great Britain, at 23% of those polled, had lower levels of unfavorability towards Muslims than the nations of Continental Europe. By contrast, in Germany and Spain about 50% the population had a negative perception of their Muslim minorities.


Notably, the U.S. was the only country polled where public sentiment towards Muslims significantly improved since 2004. In other words, there was a backlash against Islam after the Al Qaeda attacks, but it fairly quickly died down. This is confirmed by evidence provided by Human Rights Watch, in a report ironically intended to prove the precise opposite. In the year following the September 11th hijackings, there was an unmistakable surge in hate crimes against Muslims and Arabs in America, from 28 the previous year to 481 in 2001. During that period, four murders, two by the same individual, can be attributed to the anti-Muslim backlash. Yet, the bulk of the violence took place in a window of just a few weeks after the theatrical demolition of the World Trade Center. Again, the same pattern emerged following the London bombings of July, 2005: a disturbing, but brief spate of racially motivated violence, followed by a return to the average trend.

In other words, the data from both international public polling, and from the number of hate crimes committed simply do not provide consistent support for the proposition that levels of terrorism correlate well with bigotry towards Muslims. Rather, the stronger correlation is with levels of racism towards minorities in general. Intriguingly, the same Pew survey indicated that, in broad terms, those nations with higher levels of anti-Muslim animus, are those where anti-Semitism still has prevalence. The lesson here is the moral of the 20th century, the one redeeming value that emerged from the ruins of the last global war: that an injury to one is an injury to all.

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Do Europeans Support Gay Marriage?

Josh Marshall discusses how capital punishment, though banned throughout Europe, is actually consistently supported by percentages comparable to that seen in U.S. polling on the issue. This leads Andrew Sullivan to argue that this is an instance of "civilized" parliamentary independence from public opinion. In other words, certain human rights shouldn't be put to a popular vote:

The difference in Britain is that parliament routinely defies the popular will, as Burke urged them to at times. And because they treat this question - and others, like abortion and gay rights - as matters of personal conscience which political parties should not interfere with. You can call this anti-democratic, but you can also call it civilized.

All this is well and good, and of course Americans have a long historical experience with certain enumerated rights in our constitution (the Bill of Rights comes to mind). However, he slips when he makes the comparison to gay rights. Is it the case, for instance, that in those European nations where same-sex marriage is enshrined in law that a progressive elite has simply acted against majority opinion?

This simply isn't so. The first country to legalize same-sex marriages was the Netherlands, a country known for tolerance and religious liberty going back to the 16th century. Where did the Dutch masses stand on the issue? Well, 62% were in favor of expanding the definition of marriage. In Spain, where gay marriage was legalized in 2005, in the face of Vatican opposition, polling found that a day before the bill passed, 61% of the population supported the measure. Nine months later... support remained the same, and was 62%. Norweigans passed a bill in January 2009 which transitioned the country from having legal gay civil partnerships to full marriage rights. Where did the public stand? 58% supported it, and only 31% stood against this expansion of human liberty. In Sweden, same-sex marriage was just legalized last April. But, not only did a whopping 71% of Swedes support the right before parliament passed it, but even 68% of Lutheran pastors were alright with it!

So, sure, Europeans may agree with us to an extent on capital punishment. But in those countries where gay marriage is legal, strong majorities stand in support of that right.

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