Fox News and conservative media outlets are perpetuating an Islamophobic narrative that leads to a rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes, an attorney for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), alleged in a recent interview with Russian Television (RT).

"There are people who are professionals whose main job is to say and do negative things about and against Muslims, these people have been now given wider stages, have been given more time on the air, on news media," CAIR legal counsel Nadhira Al-Khalili said. "For example, Fox News, as the gentleman stated before, has now been featuring many more Islamophobes than they ever had in the past, and we believe that the media has a direct correlation to the things that are happening in real life."

While there have been isolated attacks on Muslims by deranged individuals, law enforcement data fails to show the kind of alarming spike in attacks Al-Khalili and CAIR want people to believe is taking place.

From this, she jumps to a theory that there "is a small group of people who are profiting" by perpetuating bigotry against Muslims so that the American people will buy into the narrative and support Congressional funding for the expansion of the U.S. military and drone strikes to combat "the other."

Khalili states "Muslims are being portrayed as 'the other.'"

This type of sentiment illustrates CAIR's strategy – to propagate that the United States, the West, and key individuals are perpetuating a war on Islam, as opposed to a radical fringe of Islamists who exploit the religion for political goals.