Anti-Muslim, anti-gay hate groups on the rise in US: Report

New York, Mar.9 (ANI): Hate groups in the U.S. have grown each year for the past 11 years, according to a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The most recent report reveals that there where two types of hate groups that saw a significant increase from 2010 to 2011: Anti-Muslim and anti-gay groups.

Anti-Muslim hate groups tripled from 10 to 30 last year, and anti-gay hate groups increased from 17 to 27.

"We've never had a count that high before. It's just steady significant growth, 3, 4, 5 percent every year going back to the turn of the millennium," Mark Potok, the author of the report, told ABC News.

Potok attributes the rise in anti-Muslim groups to the debate over the ground zero mosque in 2010 and to "opportunistic politicians and activists."

"It was a completely artificial thing," Potok said.

"That anti-Muslim wave is the work of propogandists and nothing more."

In 2000, the center reported that there were 602 hate groups, and now in 2011, that number has climbed to 1,018,ABC News quotes the report, as saying.

Potok said the increase from 2000 to 2008 was primarily fueled by the immigration debate.

"Around 2000, we saw very dramatically neo-Nazi groups, Klan groups and similar kinds of groups simply drop their propaganda about the alleged evils of black people, of gay people, of Jewish people in order to concentrate pretty much 100 percent on illegal immigrants," he said. (ANI)