E/CN.4/1999/58/Add.1 page 13 communication between religious leaders from abroad and young Muslims who are Americanized, the International Institute of Islamic Thought has introduced a programme of instruction in religious doctrine leading to an MA in Imamate Studies; the Institute is also preparing an MA in Islamic Studies. 36. However, despite a general and comparative situation that is positive, the situation of Muslims within the national religious mosaic is problematic. The Muslim representatives said that they felt that there was both latently and openly a form of islamophobia and racial and religious intolerance in American society. It emerges very clearly that an essential factor in that situation is the particularly harmful role played by the media in general and the popular press in particular, which purvey a stereotyped and distorted message of hatred, treating Muslims as equivalent to extremists and terrorists, as can be seen from the media treatment of the episode when United States diplomats were taken hostage during the Iranian revolution, the explosion at the World Trade Center in New York, the Gulf War, and even the Oklahoma City bombing, which was immediately attributed to Muslims, etc. The media also concentrate their reporting almost exclusively on the often controversial group known as the “Nation of Islam” (see also paragraph 39 below). 37. Such behaviour by the media is very disturbing: these powerful means of communication have a decisive effect on the formation of American public opinion, and hence American society; some of those spoken to did not hesitate to assert that United States policy was decided, among other things, by the position in the media. The result is that most Americans are not only kept in a state of basic ignorance about Islam and Muslims, but are also insidiously and involuntarily conditioned by the media through negative representations of this community. It is therefore not surprising to find the following manifestations - direct or indirect, intentional or unintentional - of intolerance and discrimination, both racial and religious: (a) Acts of vandalism against mosques and Muslims' private property, verbal and physical attacks, discrimination in the field of employment, particularly as regards respect for religious practices, and above all against women wearing “Islamic” dress (the hijab), isolated acts of intolerance by public employees, such as the teacher in South Carolina who called on people to “kill Muslims”. The 1996/97 report on hate crimes and discrimination against Arab Americans prepared by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) includes 22 instances of hate crime, 55 cases of discrimination in the workplace and 22 cases of discrimination by local or federal government agencies; these cases are merely a sample of the types of discrimination complaints received by the ADC and do not reflect the actual number of complaints received; (b) A security system used by American airline companies uses a “terrorist profile” that is seen to be discriminatory and humiliating to Arabs and Muslims (the above-mentioned ADC report includes 30 cases of harassment at airports selected from among hundreds of complaints); (c) The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 allows the deportation of non-citizens on the grounds of suspicion of links to organizations abroad which the United States designates as “terrorist”, and