By Dina Rashed, IOL Chicago correspondent

CHICAGO, November 17 (IslamOnline) - Hate crimes against Muslims, Arabs rose to a sky rocketing level following the events of September 11, and law enforcement officials were not fully prepared to combat such onslaught, a recent report by the Human Rights (HRW) Watch advocacy group said.

“This violence was directed at people solely because they shared or were perceived as sharing the national background or religion of the hijackers and al-Qaeda members deemed responsible for attacking the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,” said the report.

Issued by Human Rights Watch organization, the report said that government officials should have been better equipped to combat the anti-Muslim anti-Arab backlash that occurred following the attacks so September 11.

The forty-page report released on Thursday, November 14, is written by Amardeep Singh, U.S. Program researcher at Human Rights Watch. He investigated challenges of the Arab and Muslim communities in the aftermath, in Washington, D.C. and five other cities across the United States including Chicago, Dearborn and Los Angeles.

The report examined the origin of the anti-Muslim and anti-Arab hate crimes in the past decades dating it to the 1970s, finding that it has always had a positive correlation with escalation of tension in the Middle East conflict.

It reiterated that given this fact, the law enforcement officers should have developed earlier plans to combat crimes of bigotry against Muslim, Arabs and other ethnicities who share their physical features such as Hindus and Sikhs.

According to the report’s figures, hate crimes against Muslims rose by a 15 fold in the cities of Chicago, where 60 crimes were reported in 2001 compared to only 4 in 2000, and in Los Angles where the number jumped to 188 from 12 crimes in the same years.

Meanwhile findings proved that in other cities where pre-existing relations between the community and local officers were well established fewer crimes were reported.

“(In) Dearborn, Michigan, where only two violent September 11-related assaults occurred in a city with 30,000 Arab-Americans, reflected steps taken by local and state officials long before September 11.

In particular, Dearborn police had already identified high-risk communities and were ready to deploy officers where needed within hours of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon,” stated the report.

Singh acknowledged that U.S. officials as high as the President spoke publicly against finger pointing the whole Arab and Muslim American communities, and that officials in many cases responded quickly to curtail the violence, but suggested that Law enforcement authorities should prepare a "backlash emergency mitigation plan" ready to be implemented immediately following any event that may trigger anti-Arab/Muslim sentiments.

Yet the report said the Arab and Muslim communities received mixed messages from officials who on one hand urged the public not to view Muslims or Arabs differently than anyone else, nevertheless measures and procedures undertaken as part of the anti-terrorist campaign undermined the earlier rhetoric about tolerance.

“The detention of some 1,200 persons of almost exclusively Arab, Muslim, or South Asian heritage because of "possible" links to terrorism; the FBI requests to interview over eight thousand men of Arab or Muslim heritage; and the decision that visitors to the United States from certain Middle Eastern countries would be fingerprinted. Activists believe these actions reinforce an image of Arabs and Muslims as potential terrorists or terrorist sympathizers,” the report mentioned.