Super Bowl halftime show dancer detained for waving Sudan-Gaza flag
A performer in Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show was detained after displaying a Sudan-Palestine flag onstage.
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The nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization received a record number of complaints of discrimination and Islamophobic attacks amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, according to a report released Tuesday.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations received more than 8,650 complaints in 2024, the highest number since the organization began publishing its annual civil rights report in 1996. Complaints rose more than 7%, breaking the previous record set in 2023.
Encounters with law enforcement rose 71.5% as universities and colleges cracked down on campus protests, according to the report. Complaints related to immigration/asylum, education discrimination and hate crimes were among the most reported.
But employment discrimination was the top issue reported to CAIR for the first time as companies began to roll back diversity, equity and inclusion programs and policies.
“Usually, what we’re documenting is people being targeted because of their faith either being Muslim or being perceived as being Muslim,” said Corey Saylor, the director of research and advocacy at CAIR. “Last year, what we saw is people being targeted for their viewpoint, primarily anti-apartheid, anti-genocide viewpoints.”
Anti-Muslim racism ‘thrives in corporate America’
More than 1,300 employment-discrimination incidents were reported to CAIR in 2024, an issue the organization said did not receive enough public attention last year. CAIR highlighted several recent incidents of employees being fired after speaking about the conflict in Gaza saying their data “suggests anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian racism thrives in corporate America.”
In October, Microsoft reportedly fired two employees hours after they organized a vigil for Palestinians killed in Gaza at the company’s head office, CAIR’s Washington office said. A Palestinian American nurse at NYU Langone Health said she was unjustly fired at the end of her shift after expressing concern for the plight of Palestinian women in Gaza while accepting an award, the CAIR report said.
Saylor said it was surprising to see employment discrimination become the top issue, though the data indicated companies were already falling short on commitments to creating more inclusive workplaces made in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
Complaints soar amid campus protests
CAIR’s offices received more than 20% of their total complaints in April and May, a spike the report said likely reflects university crackdowns on student protest encampments.
The report’s release came after immigration-enforcement agents on Saturday arrested Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of the pro-Palestinian student protest movement.
The arrest and the slashing of $400 million in federal funds from the university marks the latest attempts by the Trump administration to punish student protesters and universities the president claims have tolerated or encouraged anti-American and anti-Jewish sentiment.
Saylor said he’s not optimistic about how protesters will be treated under the current administration, but demonstrators should look to earlier mass protest movements as “examples of what standing for your values in difficult times can give you.”
Hate incidents on the rise
The organization received 647 complaints of hate incidents and at least 40 incidents explicitly targeted spaces of Islamic worship.
The report pointed to a number of recent hate crime arrests, including that of a woman in Texas who reportedly attempted to drown a Muslim child at a public swimming pool and another woman in Illinois who allegedly attacked a man wearing a sweatshirt with the word Palestine written on it.
In August, a Florida man was sentenced to more than 3 years in prison for tearing off a postal worker’s hijab and calling her a terrorist while she was on her route. Late last month, an Illinois jury found a man guilty of murder and hate crime charges for fatally stabbing a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy. Both attacks occurred in the days and weeks after the Oct. 7, 2023 attack.
The FBI defines a hate crime as a “criminal offense which is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias(es) against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.” Anti-Muslim hate crimes reported to police increased 18% across 28 major U.S. cities in 2024, according to preliminary data from the Crime and Justice Research Alliance released last week.
Data doesn’t capture the whole problem
Saylor said the report only captures incidents reported directly to CAIR online or in person, meaning it’s almost certainly an undercount of incidents across the country. He also noted that it’s not mandatory for all of the country’s more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies to submit hate crime data to the federal government, and national data on these crimes is notoriously flawed.
“You can’t address a problem until you sort of understand it,” he said.
Saylor said it’s important for community members to overcome some of the barriers to reporting these incidents, and the federal government must also take steps to reduce these crimes, such as tying funding to hate-crime reporting.
“The things that we hear said from the federal government oftentimes make local people feel empowered to go after the Muslim community,” he said.
Contributing: Trevor Hughes, Eduardo Cuevas and Zachary Schermele, USA TODAY; Reuters