Here’s a great post by Patrick Poole about the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ inflated “hate crimes” reports, and their history of floating fraudulent information to gullible media: Agence France Presse Pushes CAIR’s Fake Hate Crime Numbers.

These numbers are taken from CAIR’s May 2005 report, Unequal Protection: The Status of Muslim Civil Rights in the United States 2005:

In 2004, CAIR processed a total of 1,522 incident reports of civil rights cases compared to 1,019 cases reported to CAIR in 2003. This constitutes a 49 percent increase in the reported cases of harassment, violence and discriminatory treatment from 2003 and marks the highest number of Muslim civil rights cases ever reported to CAIR in our eleven year history.

In addition, CAIR received 141 reports of actual and potential violent anti-Muslim hate crimes, a 52 percent increase from the 93 reports received in 2003. (p. 5)

Just one problem: a week after CAIR published the report, Daniel Pipes and Sharon Chadha revealed (“CAIR’s Hate Crime Nonsense”) that this report included “a pattern of sloppiness, exaggeration, and distortion”, especially that it included incidents that CAIR reported as hate crimes when it was known that the “hate crimes” they cited were perpetrated by the Muslim “victims” themselves. In one case in McAllen, Texas included in the CAIR report, even the New York Times had debunked CAIR’s “hate crime” claims seven months prior to the CAIR report’s release. In another case reported by CAIR in May 2005 as a “hate crime”, an Everett, Washington grocer had been charged with setting fire to his own store in August 2004 - a full eight months prior to CAIR’s published report. The Seattle Times reported CAIR’s “hate crime” as a hoax by in August 2004 when the charges were filed against the owner.

If you read the CAIR report that’s posted on their website today you will find that all references to these hate crime hoaxes have been scrubbed, but CAIR has never changed the 2004 statistics in the report to account for these fraudulent incidents. Those statistics remain completely unchanged since the original publication of the report, and these are the very same stats parroted by AFP in the article from this weekend.

CAIR was clearly aware enough of this problematic information to scrub any mention of these incidents from the current version of the report available on their website, but careless or deceptive enough not to change the statistics. Regardless, CAIR nowhere indicates that the report has been corrected. And they are still peddling this fraudulent information to their old media allies, who appear to take any information received from CAIR at face value.

Previously at LGF:
CAIR’s Hate Crimes Nonsense.
Behind CAIR’s Hate Crimes Report.
CAIR Cranks Up the Propaganda.
Epidemic of Lies About Hate Crimes.