Muslim civil rights groups are quick to label shootings, book burnings and harassment incidents as Islamophobic hate crimes, using them to raise their profiles and funds.
However, once the full evidence comes to light, such incidents are often revealed to have no religious motive at all, something the groups or liberal media outlets don’t always clarify, watchdogs point out.
A Post investigation has found four incidents where this has been the case.
Weeks after Hamas launched terrorist strikes on Israel on October 7, 2023, a man wearing Muslim robes was shot outside a mosque in Providence, Rhode Island, where he was selling Islamic books.
The 52-year-old victim was shot in the buttocks and released from hospital two hours later, claiming he was the victim of a hate crime, a police report shows.
The incident drew international headlines and the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil rights group in America, urged Providence police to investigate the incident as a “bias” crime.
“Because we have witnessed an unprecedented spike in anti-Muslim incidents nationwide in recent weeks, we urge local, state and federal law enforcement authorities to investigate a possible bias motive for this attack,” said CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper on the group’s website at the time.
An investigation by Real Clear Investigations recently found the victim — Dean Scott Mustafa Ramos — was not targeted in a hate crime.
“It was absolutely not a hate crime,” said Major David Lapatin, commanding officer of the Investigative Division of the Providence Police Department.
Court records revealed Ramos is a convicted drug dealer who served five years in prison for manufacturing and distributing drugs. The suspect in the shooting, Nasir Dupont, is a Muslim convert and recidivist criminal, with a history that includes illegal gun possession, robbery and drug-related crimes. He is currently in prison awaiting trial on drug and weapons charges, according to the investigation. The shooting has not been prosecuted due to a lack of evidence, police said.
Neither man is now co-operating with authorities, but Lapatin told The Post they were known to each other and appeared to have had a personal beef before the shooting, also contradicting the hate crime narrative. Dupont and Ramos could not be reached for comment.
The accusations of Islamophobia helped obscure alleged antisemitic and anti-Christian sermons taking place inside the mosque where the shooting occurred — the Islamic Center of Rhode Island (ICRI).
For example, in one December 2023 sermon, Jews were accused of “genocide” and described as “corrupters” to be “punished” and “prophet killers,” according to Real Clear Investigations.
“CAIR and Imam [Abdul-Latif] Sackor were given examples of the virulent anti-Christian and jihad sanctioning sermons [at their mosque], but failed to denounce them — [which] indicates the sham ‘Islamophobic shooting’ narrative they promoted was a deliberate, tactical distraction from the Islamic religious hatred preached at the ICRI,” claimed Andrew Bostom, a retired Brown University physician who researches extremism.
Since those accusations, the mosque has stopped posting its sermons online, The Post has found. ICRI did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
In October 2023, a few days before the October 7 Hamas terrorist strikes in Israel, a video circulated on social media showing an Indian-American high school student allegedly burning a copy of the Quran during summer vacation that year.
Those who saw the video quickly attributed it to a student at the Indian Prairie School District 204 in Naperville, outside Chicago, and falsely identified the burning book as a Quran. Groups such as CAIR and the Indian-American Muslim Council were quick to pounce on the incident.
“This particular incident is … part of a larger trend of Hindutva[nationalist]-inspired Islamophobia playing out in Naperville and other communities, and it is high time it is confronted,” CAIR-Chicago wrote in a statement still on their website, even after the Quran burning was deemed a hoax.
“It is a stark reminder of the impact of ideological extremism quietly imported into America and the need to address it urgently.”
CAIR told The Post they stand by all of the statements published on their website.
The Indian-American Muslim Council also condemned the incident and called for an investigation into “Hindu far right influences.” Their statement from October 2023 is also still on their website.
“There are a lot of reasons why entities would not correct information about what they believed to be a hate crime that ended up being disproven,” said Lara Burns, a former FBI agent who is head of terrorism research at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism and the co-author of a 2025 study about CAIR.
“It is essential that reporting on hate crimes be accurate and transparent…Promoting acts of violence as hate-related when they are not, instills fear where it should not and could promote hate that did not exist before.”
Last week CAIR said “mosque incidents” had gone up 183 percent over the last year, with a total of 17 incidents in May, June and July.
The organization times its studies of Islamophobic incidents to coincide with other reports on the rise of antisemitic crimes compiled by the Anti Defamation League, claims Steven Emerson, an expert on terrorism and extremism. CAIR’s October 25, 2023 “unprecedented surge” report came one day after the ADL’s “heavily covered” report of a 388 percent spike in antisemitic incidents, he said.
Two months later, in Dcemeber 2023, the Muslim civil rights group released a report of a “staggering 2,171 complaints” which landed on the same day the White House condemned CAIR director Nihad Awad’s comments celebrating aspects of the October 7 attacks — a statement he said was taken “out of context” in comments to the New York Times last week.
A month after the book burning came to light, three Palestinian university students were shot in Burlington, Vermont, while visiting relatives over the Thanksgiving holiday. Two of the men were wearing Keffiyehs and were speaking Arabic and English, according to reports.
Both CAIR and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) were quick to label the shootings a hate crime, with CAIR offering a $10,000 reward for information about the shootings.
“CAIR also called on state and federal law enforcement authorities in Vermont to investigate a possible bias motive for the shooting,” according to a November 26, 2023, statement on CAIR national’s website, which is still available.
At the time of the shootings, both police chief Jon Murad and Burlington mayor Miro Weinberger cautioned the public not to come to conclusions about the nature of the crime.
“The fact is that we don’t yet know as much as we want to right now,” Murad told a press conference. “But I urge the public to avoid making conclusions based on statements from uninvolved parties who know even less.”
No specific motive has emerged for the shootings, which left one man paralyzed, but the suspect, Jason Eaton, 51, is going to be allowed to use an insanity defense at trial, according to local reports.
Eaton, a former Boy Scout troop leader, will face trial in September and is acting in his own defense, claiming without evidence that the CIA told him to carry out the shootings.
The ADC stands by its claim the shootings were anti-Arab. “Pleading insanity does not negate the possibility this was a hate crime,” said ADC president and legal director Jenin Younes in a statement to The Post last week.
“Given that the victims visibly identified as Palestinian, and the anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim rhetoric permeating the country … it was more than reasonable to surmise given the circumstances that the violent incident was motivated by the victims’ ethnicity.”
Islamaphobia and anti-Muslim crimes are a problem in the US, with the FBI reporting 228 hate crimes against Muslims in 2024. Then in a shocking crime this May, two teenage gunmen killed three people in a shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego, before turning their guns on themselves.
In 2023, when CAIR highlighted attacks against Muslims, donations to their national group, the CAIR Foundation, rose by nearly 16 percent from $7.5 million in 2023 to $8.7 million in 2024, public records show.
Contributions to the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee were also up slightly from $625,000 in 2023 to $675,000 the following year, a nearly eight percent increase. Donations to the Indian American Muslim Council were also up in the same period from $1,545,000 to $1,557,000 according to public records.
Meanwhile, in August 2004 Amjad Abunar, a Jordanian-American who owned a Middle Eastern market in a Texas border town, complained that “Go Home” was spray-painted on a door of his Al Madinah Market before a fire destroyed the small deli. CAIR was quick to demand the FBI investigate a possible hate crime.
“If whoever set this fire was motivated by anti-Muslim bias, that person needs to be brought to justice before he or she can strike again,” a spokesman for the Muslim civil rights group said.
But a police investigation found otherwise and Abunar was arrested on an arson charge.
A spokesman for CAIR told The Post at the time the group called it “a possible” hate crime and they were just as stunned as everyone else to learn Abunar was later arrested.
He disappeared shortly before his December 2005 trial date and a bench warrant for his arrest remains in effect, according to reports.
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