Anti-Semitism may be a common theme in hate crimes in the United States, but the frequency of various hate crimes relative to one another cannot be seen as being representative of the prejudices of the general population. Pew surveys in the past few years have found that the percentage of Americans who hold unfavorable views of Jews has consistently remained in the single-digit range. In contrast, Pew measured the percentage of Americans who hold negative views of Muslims as having fluctuated between 31 and a little below 23.
There are many dimensions to anti-Muslim/anti-Arab sentiment with the phenomenon of hate crimes being just one of them. Trends seen in various discriminatory practices and civil liberties issues have been causes for concern over the past few years. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee provides an overview of these many dimensions along with specific examples of each in their 2003-2007 Report on Hate Crimes and Discrimination Against Arab Americans. What evidence do you have that hate crimes are more significant in their effect than all these other problems?
I did some research on the Hate Crime Statistics program and found that serious questions have been raised about its accuracy. The Southern Poverty Law Center wrote a lengthy article in their Intelligence Report about the methodological flaws plaguing the FBI's efforts to collect information on the nation's hate crimes. They specifically criticize the 2007 report on their Hatewatch blog and contrast it with a report by the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics based on data from National Crime Victimization Surveys that suggests hate crimes occur at a rate 20 to 30 times greater than what is shown by the FBI's work. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any information on how specific religious groups were targeted in the latter report and so can't compare anti-Muslim crime rates with those of crimes characterized by other biases. However, it is important to note that the SPLC points out that hate crimes of certain biases get underreported because the same kinds of prejudices which make certain groups the targets of hate crimes in the first place can also contribute to a mistrust of the police among those groups, so perhaps anti-Muslim/anti-Arab incident numbers are low in the FBI report not on account of the virulence of the racism against Muslims/Arabs being less significant than that of other less common forms of bigotry but instead because the virulence and quantity of racism against Muslims/Arabs is so great. An LA Times article about the sudden increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes after 9/11 lends credence to this suggestion when it says Islamic leaders told the paper that many Muslims were afraid to go to the police to report hate crimes for fear of becoming the subjects of investigations.
Compared to US military action of the past century, Muslims actually look very peaceful.
We know there's a good chance it biases the information. We know people are afraid to report being victimized, and we know individuals in charge of reporting hate crimes who are resistant or apathetic to the Hate Crime Statistics program also cause incidents to go uncounted. An inability on the part of some record keepers to recognize some kinds of hate crimes properly has also created a good deal of inaccuracy in the report, and the embarrassment hate crimes can bring to a community further contributes to cases being ignored. Systemic problems play a role too.
At the most, what we might see is a small minority of people directing an unusual amount of energy toward anti-Semitic activity, but as is evidenced by the Pew surveys, anti-Semitism is far from being thoroughly entrenched in American culture as it once was. I, as a Jew, haven't personally come across much of it, although I supposedly don't really look Jewish, and since I'm secular, most people wouldn't even realize I was a Jew, unless I went out of my way to tell them. Arabophobia/Islamophobia, on the other hand, is much more common in America, and frighteningly, some manifestations of it are often seen as acceptable. This is what Chomsky was trying to explain. Pro-Israel groups warn about a "new anti-Semitism" all the time in order to discredit criticisms of Israel when polls show anti-Semitic beliefs are expressed only by a single-digit percentage of the American population.
I agree with you that the low quality of information we have on the subject under discussion will probably preclude this conversation from reaching any sort of definite conclusion, although I don't share your presumption that the proportions between anti-Jewish hate crimes and hate crimes motivated by other biases shown in the FBI report are correct. The most important fact in all of this is that there is no reliable evidence to suggest there to be a widespread resurgence of anti-Semitism in the United States, and it is claims from the pro-Israel camp about such a phenomenon which Chomsky criticizes.
