Hate crimes of the state? : some anti-Muslim instances since 2001

![CDATA[This paper considers the possibility that the concept of ‘hate crime’ should be expanded to include those crimes motivated (at least in part) by racism, which are perpetrated by the State and its agents. In particular, it focuses on cases of state crime which involve prejudice, bias or hatred against Muslims. Examples include ‘security’ raids which are ethnically targeted, involve unnecessary force, and deliberately violate privacy (and indeed safety) by incorporating the media. Cases are instanced involving complicity of the Australian state in kidnap, unlawful detention without trial, ‘rendering’ and torture by US forces in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and the US enclave at Guantanamo in Cuba. Also considered as racism-related state crime are cases of the unlawful refusal of assistance to asylum seekers and those in danger of their lives at sea within Australia’s surveillance zone, and even the possibility of covert involvement in life-endangering disruption of carriers of ‘boat people’. It is argued that such consideration can take us beyond pathologising the individual ‘bad apples’ in Islamophobic state crimes, to bring a critical focus to systemic racism woven into the fabric of the state.]]