US police acted quickly to protect Muslims and other groups targeted after the Sept 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, but they should have been better prepared for such incidents, says a new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW).

That lack of foresight is one reason why anti-Muslim hate crimes in the US rose 1,700 percent during 2001, despite calls by public officials, including US President George W Bush, for citizens to respect the rights of Muslims.

Crimes included at least three and as many as seven murders, at least 49 other violent assaults, and dozens of incidents of vandalism and property damage, especially against mosques, most of them within the first week after the attacks.

The 41-page report, 'We Are Not the Enemy', concludes that many US police departments made serious efforts to contain violence against suspected Muslims and mosques, but it calls for law-enforcement agencies to adopt pre-emptive policies, including building closer ties with local Muslim communities, to prevent violence against Muslim targets in the event of future terrorist incidents.

''Government officials didn't sit on their hands while Muslims and Arabs were attacked after Sept 11,'' said Amardeep Singh, author of the report and HRW's US programme researcher. ''But law-enforcement and other government agencies should have been better prepared for this kind of onslaught.''

Backlash predictable

The backlash was entirely predictable, according to the report, which locates the beginning of serious anti-Muslim harassment in the United States at the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and oil embargo.

Six years later, the Iran hostage crisis and the 1980 'ABSCAM" (short for ''Arab Scam'') scandal a federal sting operation in which FBI agents posed as wealthy sheiks and offered bribes to politicians added fuel to a growing fire of anti-Islamic sentiment in the United States, it says.

The 1990-91 Gulf War set off the first major wave of hate crimes nationwide against US Arabs and Muslims.

While the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) reported only four anti-Arab hate crimes from January to August 1990 when Iraq invaded Kuwait it recorded 40 hate crimes between August and the start of the US military offensive in mid-January 1991, and 44 more during the first week of the campaign.

Similarly, the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, which the mainstream media speculated was the work of Muslim terrorists for three days before the FBI identified right-wing individuals as the culprits, gave rise to scores of incidents of harassment, assault and property damage.

As a result, says the report, when last year's attacks took place, Muslims, Arabs and Sikhs who have been often mistaken for Muslims were expecting a major backlash against them.

"Unlike previous hate crime waves, however, the Sept 11 backlash distinguished itself by its ferocity and extent,'' it says. "The full dimensions of the backlash may never be known'', in part due to the voluntary and incomplete nature of the various reporting systems used by police.

The report notes that while violent acts against suspected Muslim targets largely subsided after Dec 2001, incitement against Muslims has continued, particularly by leaders of Christian fundamentalist groups, such as the Christian Coalition chief Pat Robertson, and Franklin Graham, son of the internationally-known evangelist, Billy Graham.

By all accounts, backlash against suspected Arabs and Muslims skyrocketed in the wake of the Sept 11 attacks, which killed more than 3,000 people in New York and the Pentagon.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reported a 17-fold increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes, from 28 in 2000 to 481 in 2001, almost all of them after Sept 11.

In addition, Muslim and Arab groups around the country received more than 2,000 reports of harassment, violence, and other acts related to Sept 11.

Government efforts to protect target groups varied from state to state, says the report, which focused on the performance of law-enforcement agencies in six cities across the country Seattle, Dearborn in Michigan state, Chicago, Los Angeles, Phoenix and New York City, as well as that of the federal government.

In many cases, government officials responded quickly and vigorously to the backlash violence.

High marks

The report gives high marks to both Bush and Attorney-General John Ashcroft for making strong statements as early as Sept 12, both against retaliation against Muslims and in support of their rights in the United States. By Sept 15, both houses of Congress, as well as numerous city councils had also passed resolutions condemning crimes against Arabs, Muslims and South Asians.

At the same time, the report notes that federal authorities also took measures that ''cast a cloud of suspicion over all Arabs and Muslims'', including detaining some 1,2000 people of almost exclusively Arab, Muslim, or South Asian heritage because of ''possible'' links to terrorism.

Such ''mixed messages'' were also conveyed by FBI requests to interview over 8,000 men of Arab or Muslim heritage and the later decision to fingerprint citizens from certain Middle Eastern nations.

''Most people are probably asking, 'if government doesn't trust these people, why should I'?'' noted one Arab-American activist quoted in the report.

At the local level, the best police successes were found in Dearborn where, as a result of close ties between the police and the large Arab community of some 30,000 people, police immediately deployed to areas that were most likely to be targets of backlash attacks. Only two violent Sept 11-related assaults were reported there.

Despite the lack of such close ties, police in New York, Phoenix, and Los Angeles dispatched police very quickly to Muslim and Sikh places of worship and residential areas, says the report.

But none of those cities had backlash mitigation plans, despite recent history that showed clearly that violence usually follows acts of terrorism attributed to Arabs or Muslims, the report said.

Such plans, the report notes, are badly needed, along with better reporting on hate crimes and specialised police and prosecutor units to deal with them.

The potential for backlash violence persists, it adds, particularly given continued incitement by Christian Right leaders and politicians associated with them.

The just-elected senator from Georgia, C Saxby Chambliss, for example, called publicly for local sheriffs to ''arrest every Muslim that crosses the state line''. He later apologised.

But fundamentalist leaders like Robertson and Graham both strong supporters of Bush have refused to apologise for their remarks. Graham last year called Islam ''wicked, violent and not of the same God''. IPS