At the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino on Dec. 2, 2015—or 55 years to the day after someone very near and very dear to me was born in nearby St. Bernadine Hospital—14 people were killed and 22 were injured in a terror attack perpetrated by a married Muslim couple from Redlands.
Not that you’d want such an incident to spark hate incidents directed at Islamic folks, but for that year of 2015, only 33 were reported in all of San Bernardino County, the largest county by land mass in the continental United States. (I believe Alaska has the largest sized county in the country.)
Let us contrast that with Orange County, which sustained no terror attacks in 2015 but logged 363 hate incidents directed toward Muslims that year, the most of any county in California.
That tidbit is included in the annual report compiled by the Council of American-Islamic Relations, whose Greater Los Angeles office is located in Anaheim. The Orange County Human Relations Commission confirms its numbers pretty much conform with CAIR’s.
After OC, the county with the most complaints involving hate incidents against Muslims is Los Angeles County (321), according to CAIR.
Riverside County, which is a short drive up the 91 freeway from the Inland Regional Center, had 66 in ’15, the council found.
Statewide, these hate incident reports jumped by 58 percent compared to 2014, and Hussam Ayloush, CAIR-LA’s executive director, cited the terror attacks in San Bernardino and Paris a month earlier (130 dead) as major factors.
Ayloush, who noted the number of hate incidents may be even higher because so many are never reported, also blamed political rhetoric, including Donald Trump seeking to ban Muslims from entering the United States.
