Hate crimes against Muslims are up in Arizona. Republican bill targets organization tracking them

Hate crimes are up in Arizona — particularly Islamophobic hate crimes. And, at the same time, GOP state lawmakers are focused one of the organizations that tracks those hate crimes.

Republicans at the Capitol passed a resolution to designate the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, a terrorist group. And that’s just one of many bills the Legislature is considering that are aimed at Muslims.

Journalist John Washington, staff writer for Lookout, is tracking them all and he joined The Show to talk more.

Full conversation

LAUREN GILGER: So let's start with this bill aimed at CAIR. It was crafted by state Rep. John Gillette, who has said some pretty inflammatory things about Muslims.

JOHN WASHINGTON: Yeah, that's right. Yes, he has. Last year, there was some in inflammatory and defamatory claims about Muslims, and now he has sponsored this bill, which is a really a copycat bill of something we've seen it both at the federal level and a few other states. And the idea is to ask the federal government to research whether or not CAIR, Center on Islamic-American Relations, is a hate group.

And what CAIR does, CAIR in Arizona and across the nation is it investigates hate crimes, it tracks the rise of hate crimes, and it pushes for religious freedom and the, you know, success and integration of Islamic Americans.

Mikaela McGee

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Department of Homeland Security

GILGER: Yeah. Let's talk about the central claim here that Gillette is saying that CAIR has ties to terrorist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. Is there any truth to that?

WASHINGTON: No, there's just plainly not truth to that. This is something that has been litigated over and over again, both in the courts and in public opinion and by researchers. And the way that CAIR is looking at it is that this is part of a more concerted effort to target certain, specifically them and more broadly Islamic Americans and Muslims living in the United States.

And what they have said is that this actually tracks the same sort of vile, targeted hate speech against people who were pushing for civil rights back in the 1960s.

I spoke with Azza Abuseif, the executive director of CAIR Arizona, and she was pretty alarmed. You know, if they are being so — in our state Legislature, under the Capitol dome — if they're being, being so openly racist, so bluntly Islamophobic and so bluntly homophobic as well. There's another sort of raft of bills targeting specifically trans people right now in the Capitol. How does that translate on the ground, and what would the actual impacts be?

GILGER: So as you're getting out there, this is not the only bill at the state Capitol right now ... aimed at this group of people. Many of them have to do with this idea of Sharia law and a fear of that. Like tell us about state Sen. Wendy Rogers' bill to prohibit a from using a religious law like this. What would it do?

WASHINGTON: Right. So first, CAIR Arizona is tracking 64 bills that would negatively impact them right now just in this session. And the one that you mentioned. Yes, sponsored by Wendy Rogers, SB 1573, that would disallow the courts from following Sharia law. That is already disallowed. They're only able to follow the law on the books.

And yet doing something like this is just putting a target on the backs of the Muslim community here in Arizona. And it doesn't really have any legal force because it's already covered. It sort of belts and suspenders on something that is already clearly understood in the way that the justice system should be following the law in the books.

GILGER: Yeah, yeah. Another bill, this one sponsored by Janae Shamp, state Sen. Janae Shamp, defines foreign law to expressly include Sharia law. What's the point there?

WASHINGTON: You know, there's a lot of redundancy in these and there's also both redundancy in specifically targeting these laws that come from Islamic traditions. And yet there's these carve-outs, too. They say that they want to have this sort of continue this separation of church and state and yet they also in this bill particularly have this carve-out of any law system that comes arises out of an Anglo-American tradition.

And of course that is exactly where our law system came out of. But that carve-out seems sort of selective and sort of blurring that that firewall a little bit between the separation of church and state.

GILGER: So this is a part of kind of a broader narrative on the right that that, you know, Muslims are trying to implement Sharia law in the U.S. and they're trying to defend against that. Is it true that some Muslim communities might follow some religious code, but not in any kind of official way?

WASHINGTON: Well, of course. I mean the ... Catholic community follows their religious code. The Jewish community follows their religious codes and something that has been done forever in this country and in any country in the world. So yeah, of course they follow some of their own codes. But that it's an actual threat, I think, to the American communities in which they live. There's really no basis for this.

And yet this also comes in a context of, well, one, it's Ramadan right now, you know, one of the holy periods in Islamic faith. And while the United States is yet again waging another violent war in the Middle East and all of it has this sort of potential momentum to really spin out of control.

And we saw in the months after 9/11 and then when we started to go to war with Iraq and Afghanistan, a huge spike in hate crimes. And that's something that CAIR Arizona and many others are really worried about right now.

GILGER: Let me ask you about the rise in hate crimes before I let you go, John, because it's remarkable and pretty steep in the last just year or two. It sounds like CAIR thinks this is related to protesters, right? Like anti-Palestinian or anti-Israeli protesters, maybe on college campuses, things like that to do with the war in Palestine.

WASHINGTON: Yeah. So it's hard to track hate crimes, especially in Arizona. There's not a really good system that that follows this. And also a lot of people right now are maybe wondering whether the FBI, who nationally tracks hate crimes, is the most trusted organization to do so. We only have stats going back to 2024, but all the signs are pointing to yet another rise in hate crimes.

And one point here that I made in the newsletter this week is that there is no specific hate crime law in Arizona. There's only hate crime enhancements. So if there's a violation and only a felony that could be considered part of a hate crime, the enhancement will be increasing the charges. But there's no specific anti-hate crime law yet in Arizona.