Justice Dept. To Reclassify Antisemitic Incidents As Islamophobia

The change will take place at the urging of President Barack Obama, who is eager to help reduce racial and religious tensions.

Washington, September 22 – A spike in antisemitic incidents in the last eighteen months has led the Department of Justice to reconsider its treatment of hate-crime statistics, with the main thrust of the reformulation a change in the way the Department understand attacks on Jews. Specifically, antisemitic occurrences will henceforth be labeled as Islamophobic incidents.

The change will take place at the urging of President Barack Obama, who is eager to help reduce racial and religious tensions amid increased concerns over police violence, Islamic terrorism, and resurgent expressions of bigotry in public discourse.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch ordered her staff and section heads to implement the policy at once, and stressed that the new classification of anti-Jewish crimes as anti-Muslim would bolster the government’s image as responding to an Islamophobic backlash to recent acts of terrorism.

“The main concern for our government, in the wake of terrorism, is that Muslims not be blamed collectively for the violence,” she explained. “Coverage of the victims is all well and good, as far as that goes, but our underlying values must be reflected in how the community that produced the perpetrator is actually a victim. Very often, the feared backlash does not occur, which calls into question the government’s rhetoric and the meme that the mainstream media trumpet, to the effect that Muslims will face increased discrimination following an attack. To that end, we will be changing our statistics to reflect an actual increase in hate crimes targeting Muslims so we can justify the maintenance of that approach.”

“Of course it would be fraudulent to invent hate crimes,” continued Lynch. “Instead, the very real incidents targeting Jews will be categorized as targeting Muslims, and each will be a bona fide incident in the statistics.”

Commentators differ on the benefits of the new approach. “My problem isn’t with the manipulation of statistics – everybody does that,” noted New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. “The danger here is that some people will get confused between Muslims and Jews, and accidentally perpetrate hate crimes against Muslims when they mean to target Jews. There have to be some safety measures in place to prevent such mishaps.”

Former Hillary Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal, however, defended the new policy. “Ultimately it’s the Jews’ fault anyway, since Israel’s policies are the only reason Islamist violence exists in the first place,” he argued. “So really, whenever a Jew is attacked, it’s all an expression of the same phenomenon: Jewish collective guilt for everything that goes wrong. It’s actually pretty smart to label it in such a way that Jews do not attract sympathy as a result.”