The good news: With its session ending March 14, Virginia’s legislature did not pass State Sen. Saddam Salim’s (D-Fairfax) bill (S.B. 624) to make “Islamophobia” a crime. The bad news: instead of defeating this measure — unnecessary at best, dangerous at worst — legislators carried it over to 2027.
A tale of opposites:
In 2022, the Virginia Commission to Combat Antisemitism recommended that the General Assembly adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. IHRA’s definition has been accepted by 46 countries, including the United States, and 37 states, Virginia now among them.
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As a result, governmental agencies in the Commonwealth possess a guide to identify and tabulate incidents of Jew-hatred, from graffiti and vandalism to physical assaults. A good definition seemed necessary because the number of such acts had been rising in the Commonwealth and nationally.
And they continued to do so. A joint 2025 survey by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Jewish Federations of North America found that effects of the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of 1,200 people in Israel by Hamas (the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement) “profoundly reshaped American Jewish life.” And not for the better; 55% of America’s roughly 6.5 million Jews reported experiencing some form of antisemitism, 18% victims of verbal harassment, threats, or actual physical assaults.
According to a separate ADL audit, anti-Jewish acts had surged to a historic high during the past decade. “In 2024, ADL tabulated 9,354 antisemitic incidents across the United States.” This represents an 893% increase over the past 10 years.
Virginia was part of the trend, with 266 reported anti-Jewish potential misdemeanors or felonies in 2024, up 19% from 2023. Other incidents went unreported due to victims’ concern that no action would be taken or for fear of being targeted for speaking up, pollsters said.
In contrast, authorities lack evidence indicating a wave of anti-Muslim incidents. U.S. Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) last year noted that “religiously motivated incidents increased by 3.1% with 3,096 offenses reported, and of those 69% were anti-Jewish incidents.”
What is the proof for an outbreak of “Islamophobia”? A suspect source is the Council on American Islamic Relations. CAIR claims to be an American Muslim civil rights group. Last year, the council produced what it asserted was a substantive national report on rising anti-Muslim incidents.
But CAIR’s claims are unreliable. The ADL charged as far back as 2007 that “CAIR characteristically seeks to cast any criticism of itself as an attack on Islam, claiming that such critiques amount to ‘Islamophobia’ and an effort to marginalize the Muslim community.”
In fact, the council is a derivative of the century-old, Egyptian-born Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood remains anti-Western, anti-Christian, and anti-Jewish.
A 2006 out-of-court settlement between CAIR and an anti-CAIR website let stand claims that the council was founded by Hamas members, founded by Islamic terrorists, and funded by Hamas supporters. The 2009 federal retrial of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development listed CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator. The foundation was convicted of funneling more than $12 million to Hamas. Five men received prison terms, including Ghassan Elashi, a founder of CAIR’s Texas chapter, who got 65 years.
Yet in 2019, the council was still smearing critics, charging 40 non-profits as “Islamophobic.” In fact, the groups’ transgressions appeared to be criticism of CAIR itself and of Islamism—a politicized version of religion fueling recurrent anti-Western, anti-Israeli terrorism since al Qaeda’s Sept. 11, 2001 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in the United States. Subsequent such assaults here have resulted in the murders of at least 107 more.
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And in 2023, after the council’s national executive director praised the Hamas-led massacres in Israel, the Biden administration booted CAIR from its nonsensical position on an advisory panel organized to fight antisemitism.
Hate crimes against American Muslims should be condemned like similar religious, ethnicity or race-based cases. But they already are covered by law. Virginia does not need a vague “anti-Islamophobia” statute, the effect of which would be to deflect attention from Islamist extremism.
Eric Rozenman served on the 2022 Virginia Commission to Combat Antisemitism.