seeking news stories on recent anti-muslim hate crime in NYC

Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa.

OP here.

Before clarifying my long-lost intent with this posting, since the conversation has digressed I would like to say that for the first time ever, I find myself essentially aligned with MHA - to wit: The planners of the community center Constitutionally and otherwise have a right to build it wherever they want, but if they didn't predict strong opposition to this location, they were idiots. I'm amazed it became such a big national issue, but then it's summer and we all love big meaningless stories in the summer.

Thing is, however unreasonable, unfair, shitty, racist, ignorant, Glenn Beckian and and all other things the virulent protests against the building are, the fact that there's at least some kind of hue and cry isn't surprising. Unfair, but not a shocker. And it could have been avoided. I support the planners' right to build their center there, but if I'd been the planner and my sole goal was to create a Muslim-oriented 92nd Street Y type of institution to benefit both Muslims and others, I would have picked a less freighted spot.

Now to my point. I myself may be a radical leftist, but that's not what was going on with this post. The organization I work for is the most prominent tracker of hate crimes in the United States, and we were being asked by a major TV news organization to confirm that there had been only the 2 that I mentioned. Knowing that I'm recently from NYC, my boss asked if I had any sources that might be able to confirm or disconfirm this notion. I wasn't looking to inflate any numbers. I was looking to make sure that when my boss appeared on TV as an expert, he didn't miss anything prominent OR inflate numbers.

Part of what my organization found is that Muslims are such a small percentage of the US population that it's not especially meaningful to include them in statistics comparing them to other groups that are targets of hate crimes in this country. It'd more useful to compare hate crimes against them from year to year and see if there's a change. Such as in the helpful chart in Krowonhill's 1st page post. Gotta keep that chart updated and make sure it reflects reality, not media predictions re violence and hate crimes against Muslims.

A hate crime, btw, is 1st a crime and 2nd motivated by hate. Lots of racist stuff doesn't fall within hate crime. But for instance if you beat someone up because you don't like them, that's a crime. If you beat them up because they're Muslim, that's a hate crime. The crime was the assault. The "hate" part is about hating Muslims and if it can be proven to be your motivation, it can amplify your sentence.

Legally, protests and racist statements, however awful, are free speech, not hate crimes unless they incite violence/mayhem in the very specific way that something like shouting "Fire" in a crowded theater (which is also not protected free speech) does.

To reiterate: This post was about confirming facts, not helping either the left or the right make some kind of political point. If your organization is the source of facts, you want to make sure it has the facts. Even if someone on this board had mentioned some hate crime we hadn't heard of, I would have carefully confirmed it via multiple sources before feeling confident I could relay it to my boss as fact.

In conclusion, yeah, I hope Glenn Beck falls hard from grace and John Stewart is canonized, but those hopes had zero to do with the question I asked in this post.