DoJ ramps up investigations of land discrimination against Muslims

The assistant civil rights attorney general at the Justice Department has identified what he calls a troubling surge of suspected land discrimination against Muslims in the country, Talking Points Memo reports.

According to Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez, the department has launched investigations into eight cases of alleged discrimination against Muslims since May 2010 under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, which protects religious groups' right to build houses of worship.

Overall, Justice has investigated just 18 cases of alleged land discrimination against Muslims over the past decade — which means the past five months have accounted for almost half of the total cases.

"For members of our nation's Arab-American and Muslim-American communities, who have been subjected to an unjustified backlash — a backlash that continues today, nearly a decade after 9/11, as we've seen in recent weeks in communities across the country — our nation's promise has not yet been fulfilled," Perez said last week.

As we reported last week, a coalition of faith leaders including high-profile opponents of the proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero have also said that America has a "problem" in which Muslims are being denied the right to build mosques. They formed a coalition to help these communities defend themselves from local challenges to their mosques.

(Photo: Perez/AP)

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Perez as the no. 2 official at the DOJ.