Hate Crime

A Global Perspective

Paul Iganski, Jack Levin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317655534
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This short, accessible text takes on the global and pervasive phenomenon of hate crimes and hypothesizes potential fixes. Iganski and Levin detail evidence of hate violence in the 21st century, particularly religious hatred, ethnic, racial and xenophobic hatred, violence on the basis of sexual orientation and sexual identity, disablist violence, and violence against women, using the most recently published data from cross-national surveys produced by international organizations. This is an ideal addition to any course on social problems, violence, or hate crimes.

1
Religious Hatred

Violence in the name of religion has a long and bloody history. Islamic Jihads from the 7th century, the Crusades in the 11th–13th centuries, the Inquisition from the 13th–19th centuries, claimed thousands upon thousands of lives for religion. And in the 21st century, when viewed from a global perspective, religious bigotry is a dominant—and possibly even the foremost—force framing hate violence. As we will illuminate in this chapter, however, there is no singular role that religion plays in the experience of hate violence: in some instances it is the main impetus, in others it is only peripheral.

The 21st century dawned with an extreme act of hate violence: the September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda terror attacks on the World Trade Center, in rural Pennsylvania, and against the Pentagon in the United States. The intended targets were symbols of secular political, economic, and military might (Juergensmeyer 2003: 61). The casualties were the nearly 3,000 people, mostly civilians, who lost their lives in a horrible conflagration. The acts combined religious conviction, loathing of secular society, and hatred of the United States. They were nourished by a tradition of radical Islamic political ideology justifying the wielding of violence against those deemed to be hostile to Islam (Juergensmeyer 2003: 80–84). In return, scapegoating against those perceived to be Arab or Muslim followed in the United States with a huge spike in violence and discrimination accompanied by public expressions of vitriol about Islam by certain elected politicians and evangelicals (Welch 2006: 62–76). For a period of time, anyone who had dark skin and spoke with an accent—those who might possibly have come from a Middle Eastern country—was at increased risk for victimization.

After that ominous preface to the 21st century, the state of affairs concerning religious violence just worsened in different parts of the world. The Minority Rights Group International—a campaigning non-governmental organization founded in the 1970s to defend the rights of disadvantaged minorities and indigenous people—has been compiling annually since 2005 the Peoples under Threat index, ranking countries at greatest risk of genocide, mass killing or other systematic violent repression. In many instances, the threat manifests itself as religious, sectarian, or ethnic conflict and persecution. In some instances, the religious, sectarian, and ethnic dynamics of the conflicts are entangled in a complex web of forces behind violence.

Middle East and African states dominate as those with peoples most at risk of mass killing. Eight countries—including Somalia, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Myanmar (formerly Burma) and Ethiopia—have consistently ranked each year in the top ten at greatest risk. Each year, Somalia has been ranked as the highest risk, and since 2010, Sudan has been ranked in second place, rising from third in 2008 and 2009. A few other countries have featured intermittently in the top ten at greatest risk: Chad (2010), Côte d’Ivoire (2011), Iran (2012), Israel/Palestine (2009), Nigeria (2013), South Sudan (2012), Syria (2013 & 2014) and Yemen (2014). Religious and sectarian conflicts feature prominently in a number of these countries.

Extreme Islamist Violence

Syria’s entry into the top ten rankings in 2013 and its rise to the third-ranked country most at risk of genocide, mass killing, or other forms of mass oppression has been associated with the increasingly sectarian complexion (Lattimer 2014) of the devastating civil war besetting the country. Islamist militias with a sectarian agenda perpetrate atrocities propelled by religious zealotry. One such group, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)—an offshoot of al-Qaeda—extended its reach by sweeping through neighboring Iraq in 2014. Its actions attracted volunteer recruits from Muslim communities around the world including Europe, the Caucasus, the United States, and Arab countries. ISIS slickly used social media, apps, and even a Hollywood-style feature-length movie to attract new recruits, spread its message, and intimidate enemies. By late 2014 ISIS was in control of a large swath of territory spanning across Syria and Iraq, and its goal was to reach much further by establishing an Islamic caliphate from the Middle East, North Africa, large areas of Asia, and including the Balkans, Austria, and Spain in Europe.

Islam has two major denominations: Sunni and Shi’a. While there are numerous forces—historical, geo-political, and economic—responsible for hatching and incubating the violence in Syria and Iraq, extremist Sunni Muslim religious ideology has also played a central role in attacks against Shi’a. The violence has not only been sectarian in nature. Ideologically and theologically incited violence was also targeted at Iraqi Christians. In July 2014, the international news media widely reported that Christians had begun fleeing the Iraqi city of Mosul after ISIS issued a threat that they would be killed unless they converted to Islam or paid a protection tax called a “jizya.” A similar ultimatum to Christians had been issued in the Syrian city of Raqqa a few months earlier.

In further episodes of violence widely reported by the international news media in August 2014, Islamic State extremists allegedly slaughtered hundreds of Iraq’s Yazidi ethnic and religious minority community in and around the village of Kocho in northern Iraq. The Islamic State fighters reportedly demanded that the Yazidis convert to Islam or face death. After refusing to convert, the ensuing violence was not only impelled by religious bigotry, but also gendered in character. Men were slaughtered. Women and children abducted: the women carried off into sexual servitude and slavery.

By the summer of 2014, fleeing from the advances of ISIS in northern Iraq, hundreds of thousands of displaced Iraqis from minority communities, not only Yazidis, were seeking refuge near the Turkish border. The international news media widely reported the humanitarian crisis facing tens of thousands of Yazidis trapped in harrowing conditions and exposed to a hostile climate of soaring temperatures after fleeing to Mount Sinjar. Air drops of humanitarian aid including water and shelter were made by the US, UK, and Iraqi air forces.

Sectarian Violence

Elsewhere, violent attacks against Shi’a Muslims have been on the rise in Pakistan since the 1980s (Mihlar 2014). In 2013 alone there were an estimated 700 targeted killings of Shi’a, mostly perpetrated by extremist Sunni groups. The most active Sunni militant groups include Lashkar-e-Jhangri (LeJ), Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) and Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which subscribe to and promote an extreme Sunni Islamic ideology in which Shi’a Muslims are denigrated as heretics, apostates, infidels, impure, and unclean, and their killing religiously justified. Shi’a have been vilified and denigrated in Pakistan in campaigns of hate speech in mosques, schools, and social media. The roots of the violence are not only religious, as there is a cauldron of geo-political, social, ethnic, and religious forces at work in which ethnic Hazara Shi’a Muslims in Pakistan’s south western region of Balochistan have borne the brunt of the violence.

In a particularly notorious attack near the town of Mastung in 2011, a bus on its way to visit holy sites in Iran was forced off the road by gunmen who separated out the Hazara Shi’as from the Sunni passengers, killed 26 Shi’as and wounded six others, and let the Sunnis go. In another notorious attack in 2013, coordinated suicide bomb attacks on a snooker club in Quetta claimed the lives of 96 Hazaras and wounded 150 others.

Religious and sectarian violence has also been severe in Myanmar (formerly Burma)—another of the countries ranked by the Minority Rights Group International in the top ten at greatest risk of genocide, mass killing, or other systematic violent repression. In June and October 2012, sectarian violence between ethnic Arakanese Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims in Arakan state, Myanmar, claimed the lives of 211 people according to the Myanmar government, while Human Rights Watch estimated many more (Human Rights Watch 2013).

There is a long history of violence between Buddhists and Muslims in Arakan State stretching back over decades. And while both populations have faced past oppression by Myanmar governments, the Rohingya population, which is denied citizenship and considered by many to be illegal immigrants, has particularly faced routine persecution and forcible displacement. The outbreak of violence in June 2012 was triggered in late May by the rape and murder of an Arakanese woman in Ramri Township by three Muslim men. Arakanese villagers retaliated by stopping a bus southeast of Ramri and killed 10 Muslim passengers. Communal violence then escalated. Allegedly, state security forces initially stood by without intervening to halt the violence, and later joined Arakanese mobs in attacking and burning Muslim villages and neighborhoods (Human Rights Watch 2013: 7).

In further violence in October 2012, Muslim villages in nine townships across Arakan State were attacked by Arakanese men armed with swords, machetes, homemade firearms, and Molotov cocktails. Again, security forces allegedly either stood by or participated in the violence. Further outbreaks of violence against Muslims in 2013, which spread beyond Arakan State to other parts of Myanmar, claimed more lives with numerous homes burnt to the ground.

In the two years following the outbreak of this latest round of inter-communal violence in Myanmar, the United Nations Commission for Human Rights estimated that 87,000 people had departed irregularly by sea from the Bangladesh-Myanmar border region heading for Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Australia (UNHCR 2014). Many were transported by smugglers in cramped conditions and subjected to verbal and physical abuse. Hundreds reportedly died from the deprivations of the journey and violence by smugglers. Some drowned while trying to escape in desperation (UNHCR 2014). Bangladesh closed its borders, returning Rohingya asylum seekers to sea. Thailand also resisted the influx of asylum seekers (Human Rights Watch 2013: 16).

Elsewhere in the region, in September 2013, communal violence between Hindu Jat and Muslim communities in the Muzaffarnagar and Shamli districts of Uttar Pradesh in India left at least 65 people dead and many injured. Numerous homes in villages were burnt to the ground and 50,000 people were reportedly displaced by the conflict (Hassan 2014). The violence occurred in the context of regular incidents of inter-communal violence and the sewing of communal hostilities by political parties and was stoked by hate speech and incitement in print and social media, escalating a number of trigger incidents (Hassan 2014).

Violence against Muslims in the Western World

The 9/11 terror attacks in the United States in 2001 triggered a wave of anti-Muslim incidents across the Western World. In Europe, the then European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) (now the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights [FRA]), proposed that the 9/11 attacks triggered a latent Islamophobia—a widespread fear and loathing of Muslims. And even though physical attacks against Muslims generally seemed small in number, verbal abuse in person, and abuse by phone or by email to Muslim organizations was widely reported in most countries (EUMC 2001). Muslim women, especially, were targeted. Mosques and Islamic cultural centers were also targeted in acts of vandalism and desecration (Allen & Nielsen 2002: 7).

A few years later, reflecting back on events following 9/11 in Britain, a report by the Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia noted that “Thousands of British Muslims have tales to tell from the days after 9/11—rudeness and insensitivity, or worse, from colleagues, associates and neighbors, and from total strangers in shops and buses, trains and streets” (Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia 2004:16).

The continuing nature of anti-Muslim victimization across the early 21st century was revealed recently by the 2008 EU-MIDIS survey—which interviewed Muslim respondents in fourteen EU Member States (FRA 2009a). Just over one in ten (11 percent) Muslim respondents, in the fourteen states combined, reported at least one incident of personal racist criminal victimization—including assaults, threats, and serious harassment—during the previous twelve months. Many experienced more than one incident, and the average for Muslim victims of personal racist crime was three incidents in the previous 12 months.

Notably, the majority of victims did not report their experience to the police, some suggesting that they were too trivial or not worth reporting—possibly indicating the normalization of incidents. Others lacked confidence in the police being able to do anything. And it is likely that some were reticent about involving the police, given the targeting of Muslims in the ‘War on Terror’ in a number of European countries following the 9/11 attacks.

In addition to the routine victimization of Muslims, waves of anti-Muslim violence in some countries have been triggered by further extreme events since 9/11:

• In 2004 in the Netherlands in the days after the murder of the film maker Theo van Gogh, who was assassinated by a radicalized young Muslim, there was reportedly an outbreak of incidents, including assaults, arson attacks, and criminal damage of mosques and Islamic schools (Veldhuis & Bakker 2009: 25).
• A backlash of attacks against Muslims in London and elsewhere in Britain occurred following the 2005 London bombings.
• A further spike in anti-Muslim attacks followed the murder of Corporal Lee Rigby on a South London street in 2013.

Understanding the Relationship between Religion and Hate Violence

Jonathan Swift, the 17th–18th century Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, poet, and cleric, and author of Gulliver’s Travels, in commenting on centuries of bloodshed in the name of religion, famously wrote that “We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another” (Haught 1990: 12). Yet, as the examples in this chapter indicate, there is no singular role that religion plays in hate violence.

In the instances of violence we have covered, there are three major ways in which religion is implicated. First, theologically-driven hate characterizes some of the atrocities committed by radical groups such as ISIS in Iraq. Based on a long history of theological documentation, members of other denominations or religious groups are seen as sub-humans, infidels, or children of the devil who deserve to be wiped from the face of the earth. The dehumanization of outsiders facilitates the commission of inhumane and brutal acts of violence—for example, distributing videos in which westerners are beheaded by a masked ISIS leader.

Second, inter-communal, or sectarian, hatreds characterize the violence between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims in Pakistan, Buddhists and Muslims in Myanmar, and Hindu Jat and Muslim communities in the Muzaffarnagar and Shamli districts of Uttar Pradesh in India. However, while sectarian violence coalesces around religious identity, religion is not often the primary driving force behind such violence. Take Pakistan, for instance: the Sunni-Shi’a violence has deep historical roots stretching back at least to the 1947 partition of colonial India and the resultant migration of communities in the Pakistani Punjab. Economic and social deprivations suffered by Sunni rural laboring communities in South Punjab were transformed by political agitation into sectarian hatred against Shi’a who were dominant among the land-owning classes and the urban elites. Later, Islamization policies, theologically in step with the majority Sunni population and promoted by Pakistan’s government in the 1980s, met with Shi’a resistance. Regional conflicts exacerbated these sectarian tensions. The newly formed Islamic Republic of Iran sponsored Shi’a activism. And in Pakistan during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, Shi’a sectarian groups which sided with Iran, and Sunni sectarian groups which sided with Iraq, fought a proxy war. Cycles of violence resulted in growing radicalization and further sectarian division (Grare 2007).

Third, in the case of violence against Muslims in the West, religious animosity plays a peripheral role in the violence. Muslims are victimized because of their religious identity. But attacks are not theologically driven. They occur for other reasons, essentially having nothing to do with religion: primarily, the scapegoating of Muslims for extremist Islamist terror attacks. A snapshot listed by Perry (2003) of retaliatory attacks against Muslims in the United States following the 9/11 attacks, for example, shows little evidence of sentiments defaming Islam as a faith or attacking the tenets of Islamic teaching. Instead, the motivation for the attacks is some visceral conception of Muslims—essentially an equation between all Muslims and terrorists, suicide bombers, al-Qaeda, and bin-Laden. This is entangled with xenophobic hostility against Muslims as ‘outsiders.’

While we have covered in this chapter three major ways in which religion is implicated in hate violence, there will be further variations evident in instances of violence that we haven’t had space to include. By the same token, numerous other determinants of violence interacting with religious hatred and divisions, beyond the examples we have provided in this chapter, could be deduced. However, the fundamental point that we have tried to make in taking a global perspective is that while religion is implicated in much hate violence, and violence involving religious hatred to some degree or another has perhaps been the dominant form of hate violence globally so far in the 21st century, religion is rarely the sole determinant. While in this chapter we have tried to pull out the threads of religion involved in the patchwork of variables that interact and result in hate violence, in the next chapter we turn to other determinants: the racial, ethnic, and xenophobic complexion of hate violence.

Questions for Discussion

1. What role does religion play in hate violence in the 21st century?
2. Do conflicts over religious differences primarily fuel sectarian violence?
3. If religious hostility is seen to aggravate victimization of Muslims in the West, what are the other forces at work impelling the violence?

2
Racial, Ethnic, and Xenophobic Violence

While religious hatred has featured prominently among incidents of hate violence in regions of conflict in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa, and in other more stable nations, racial, ethnic, and xenophobic violence is also a global problem. In the Western world, it is arguably one of the most dominant forms of hate violence.

There is a long history of racist violence in the United States, beginning with brutal warfare between early settlers and Native Americans. During the 18th and 19th centuries, black Americans were caught in a legal system of slavery which eventually covered all of the states located below the so-called Mason-Dixon line. During a brief period known as reconstruction following the end of the Civil War, murders of newly freed slaves escalated. Black Americans were, for the first time, given an opportunity to amass power and wealth, a condition that certain white Americans would not tolerate. Into the 20th century, former Confederate officers joined together in a white supremacist organization known as the Ku Klux Klan which came to burn crosses and then lynch former slaves who had become competitive with whites for status, power, and economic resources. By the 1920s, the Klan had increased its membership to some 4 million members and had expanded its acrimony beyond race to encompass Catholics and Jews. Until civil rights laws were passed during the 1960s, black Americans continued to be second-class citizens who, under a legal system of segregation known as Jim Crow, were victims of institutionalized discrimination and violence.

The problem of violence based on racial differences continues into the 21st century. Nationwide hate crime data annually published on the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) web pages show that, in over half of the offenses recorded each year, the victims were t...