Hate crimes against Muslims in the United States have soared by nearly 70 per cent, according to new figures from the FBI.
After a growth in angry rhetoric against Muslims by politicians and commentators, anti-Muslim hate incidents grew by 67 per cent in 2015.
The FBI reports 257 anti-Muslim hate incidents in the US in 2015 compared with 154 in 2014.
But other minority groups have also found themselves targets of hatred and assault.
Among the incidents this year alone, a Florida man pleaded guilty to threatening to firebomb two mosques.
A Virginia man was charged with assaulting a gay victim.
An Iowa man was convicted of stamping on and kicking the head of an African-American victim.
"Hate crimes like these can have a devastating impact upon the communities where they occur," said the FBI, which has made investigating hate crimes that fall under federal jurisdiction the number one priority under its civil rights program.
The latest Hate Crime Statistics report contains figures collected through the uniform crime reporting program of nearly 15,000 law enforcement agencies throughough the country. The report reveals 5,850 criminal incidents and 6,885 related offenses that were motivated by bias against race, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, sexual orientation, disability, gender, and gender identity.
The figures have been collected since 1990, under the Hate Crime Statistics Act.
For the first time, the 2015 Hate Crime Statistics has included seven additional religious categories – bias against Buddhists, Eastern Orthodox, Hindu, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, other Christians and Sikhs.
FBI Director James Comey said: "We need to do a better job of tracking and reporting hate crime to fully understand what is happening in our communities and how to stop it."
The Council on American-Islamic-Relations (CAIR), the nation's largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organisation, called on America's leaders to repudiate growing Islamophobia.
"We witnessed a sharp jump in anti-Muslim incidents nationwide last year, with that spike in Islamophobia continuing through 2016 and accelerating after the November 8 election," said CAIR government affairs director Robert McCaw. "This unprecedented increase in bigotry of all kinds must be repudiated in the strongest terms possible by all our nation's leaders, beginning with President-elect Donald Trump."
McCaw noted that the FBI statistics confirm CAIR's own report of an unprecedented number of anti-mosque incidents in 2015. The organisation said that since the election, there had been a spike in incidents targeting American Muslims and other minority groups.
