Patrick Poole, who recently wrote about CAIR for AT, caught AFP this weekend floating fake hate crime numbers from a CAIR report debunked by Daniel Pipes more than a year ago. He writes on his blog Existential Space:

... an article by Mira Oberman of Agence France Presse, "US Muslims plagued by discrimination after 9/11 attacks", that makes the following claim advanced by the Council on American—Islamic Relations (CAIR):

CAIR has seen a steady increase in the number of complaints of harassment, violence and discriminatory treatment over the past five years. In 2004, complaints rose 49 percent to 1,522, of which 141 were reports of actual and potentially violent hate crimes.

These numbers are taken from CAIR's May 2005 report, Unequal Protection: The Status of Muslim Civil Rights in the United States 2005....

Just one problem: a week after CAIR published the report, Daniel Pipes and Sharon Chadha revealed ("CAIR's Hate Crime Nonsense") that this report included "a pattern of sloppiness, exaggeration, and distortion", especially that it included incidents that CAIR reported as hate crimes when it was known that the "hate crimes" they cited were perpetrated by the Muslim "victims" themselves. In one case in McAllen, Texas included in the CAIR report, even the New York Times had debunked CAIR's "hate crime" claims seven months prior to the CAIR report's release. In another case reported by CAIR in May 2005 as a "hate crime", an Everett, Washington grocer had been charged with setting fire to his own store in August 2004 — a full eight months prior to CAIR's published report. The Seattle Times reported CAIR's "hate crime" as a hoax by in August 2004 when the charges were filed against the owner.

Thomas Lifson   9 06 06

Update: The BBC appears to be buying into the same or similar statistics. Dennis Sevakis points to this BBC story, where, if you click on the hate crimes tab, you will see unsourced data that hate crimes against Muslims in the USA soared in 9/11 and continue at a higher than pre—9/11 levels.