Hate Crimes and the Threat of Domestic Extremism

In August of 2012, in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, a white supremacist shot and killed six Sikh worshipers in the Oak Creek Gurdwara. Satwant Singh Kaleka, the founder of the gurdwara, fought off the gunmen with a butter knife, which gave others in the temple time to seek refuge. Sadly, the shooting in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, was not an isolated incident. More than 6,600 hate crimes were reported to the FBI in the calendar year 2010. And a 2005 study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics believes that even those crimes that are reported are just a fraction of those that actually occur. In the week, following the Oak Creek shooting, there were numerous attacks on mosques, including a mosque being burned to the ground in Joplin, Missouri; a shooting at a mosque in Morton Grove, Illinois, while 500 worshipers were praying inside; and an unidentified perpetrator throwing an improvised explosive device at an Islamic school, again in Illinois, in Lombard, during a prayer service. According to the Justice Department, the increase in discrimination against mosques since 2010 "reflects a regrettable increase in anti-Muslim sentiment." At the same time, African Americans continue to be targeted by a vast majority of racially motivated hate crimes; Jewish Americans continue to be victims of religiously motivated hate crimes; Latinos are the victims of most ethnically motivated hate crimes; and hundreds of LGBT Americans are the victims of violent hate crimes every single year.