John Rosenthal in the quarterly edition of his Transatlantic Intelligencer has an excellent article dissecting French hate-crimes statistics. Not surprisingly, he finds that the press, and even Israel's Prime Minister, vastly underreported anti-Jewish crime...and inflated some other. I think I had read this before but it was behind a pay portion of John's site which appears to be free now.
Really worth reading and bookmarking (Lots of other great stuff there as well).
Beyond the Numbers Games: A Closer Look at the Statistics on Anti-Semitism and “Islamophobia” in France
...Let us start with the simple inaccuracy. The Ministry of Interior statistic of 595 cases cited by the Times as referring to “acts against people of North African origin” and by the Guardian as referring to “threats and attacks against Muslims” in fact refers neither to the one nor to the other. It refers to all racist or xenophobic incidents, both violent acts and “threats” (such, for instance, as the painting of racist graffitis), that were not directed against Jews. In other words, it also includes, say, threats or attacks against persons of sub-Saharan African descent or, for that matter, threats or attacks against non-French Europeans. The list of the “most serious” racist or xenophobic episodes included in Appendix 1 of the CNCDH report notes, for example, at 10 May the assault “of three young Germans staying in a school [in Lempdes] as part of a scholastic exchange”.[21] Unlike the Guardian, moreover, the CNCDH seems to distinguish between manifestations of anti-Arab racism as such, which has a long history in France pre-dating more recent pre-occupations with Islam, and violence that can be attributed a specifically “anti-Muslim” motive. Thus, the CNCDH notes that of the 525 racist (i.e. but not anti-Semitic) incidents included in the Ministry of Interior statistics some 123 – or 21% – can be regarded as “strictly ‘Islamophobe’”.[22] This is a far cry from the 525 – i.e. all the incidents – described as “anti-Muslim” by the Guardian. Some 433 incidents are classified by the CNCDH report as being more generally directed against North African Arabs or persons of North African descent – not the entire 595 put in this category by the New York Times.
As for the violent incidents, i.e. the violent “acts” as opposed to the mere “threats”, the Ministry of Interior statistics show some 75.5% to have been directed against North African Arabs or persons of North African descent. This corresponds to a total of some 131 incidents: a figure which in itself is indeed comparable to the figure of some 200 incidents of anti-Jewish violence. However, as in previous years, a wildly disproportionate part of the anti-Arab violence – 60 of the national total of 131 cases – occurred just in Corsica...
