Dear Friend,

The email came to my inbox on a Sunday. Its subject read “Hate crime in Oklahoma.”

Khalid Jabara, an Arab American from Tulsa, had been and shot and killed by his next-door neighbor two days earlier, on August 12, 2016. His family was suffering. He was murdered on their front porch. He was murdered in a hate crime. 

Nearly three years have passed since Khalid's death, but his memory endures. 

What we’ve done since that tragic day is an example of pain turned into action, and a testament to the big difference a small, committed organization can make—and while I don’t usually talk about us this way, I need to share this with you.

Hate crime has been a key issue for us since our founding, and in the past few years especially. Since 2014, we have seen a substantial increase of hate crimes targeting communities, including our own. At the same time, we've seen reports of significant undercounts in official hate crime statistics. Here are just two examples of what we've recently done:

- We convened stakeholder meetings in 16 states with more than 100 community partners across the country through our #ReportHate Project <[link removed]>, empowering local communities to lead on the response to this growing hate.
- We tirelessly monitored hate crime data recorded in federal, state, and local statistics, and published a groundbreaking report <[link removed]> in July 2018 that evaluates the response of all 50 states and the District of Columbia to hate crimes.

Before I tell you more about what we’ve done, I want to take us back to Khalid.

It was in the process of writing our report that we discovered that Khalid’s murder—though a high-profile hate crime that received national and international attention—was not reported in official FBI hate crime statistics. We were shocked. Even with the chronic problem of underreporting, how could Khalid be missing given all the attention his murder received?

We started looking at other high-profile hate crimes and our findings were devastating.

In what came as a heartbreaking revelation, our research detected the omissions of other high-profile hate crimes from official statistics, including the murder of Heather Heyer <[link removed]> in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12, 2017—exactly one year after Khalid’s murder.

If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that communities need more support and assistance when it comes to hate crime, and that official hate crime data are seriously underreported. Hate crime victims are often reluctant to seek help from the authorities due to fear or distrust of law enforcement, and law enforcement often lack proper training on reporting, identifying, and responding to hate crime. And as our research discovered, problems arise with even the most obvious, high-profile hate crimes.

Simply put, our communities deserve to be more informed and better protected.

So that's what we're trying to do.

Working with the families of Khalid Jabara and Heather Heyer, we helped advance bipartisan legislation that would improve our hate crime statistics and provide assistance to hate crime victims and their communities. Introduced in both houses of Congress last week, the bill is called the Khalid Jabara and Heather Heyer NO HATE Act.

I am so proud of our AAI team for playing a leading role in drafting key aspects of this bill, which has received endorsements from a broad coalition of civil rights and community organizations. 

We are grateful to both Khalid's and Heather’s families—including the Khalid Jabara Foundation Fund and the Heather Heyer Foundation—for their support. We acted in the hope their unimaginable loss could help inform our response to hate crime and possibly prevent other families from enduring that same pain.

We are also grateful for the leadership of the bill’s original co-sponsors—Senators Blumenthal, Durbin, Gillibrand, Hirono, Kaine, and Warner, and Representatives Beyer and Olson.

Finally, we look forward to being in touch again after the passage of the Jabara-Heyer NO HATE Act.

Thank you for your continued support.

Best,



Maya Berry
Executive Director
[link removed]



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Arab American Institute - United States
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