Two weeks ago, Wade Michael Page walked into the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis., armed with a bicep full of racist tattoos and a Springfield 9mm semi- automatic handgun.

Page proceeded to shoot down six Sikh worshipers in cold blood before putting a bullet in his own head.

Whether Page chose his victims based on their traditional turbans or because they were several shades darker than his self-professed Aryan ideal is unclear and frankly immaterial.

What couldn’t be more apparent is that this was an act of pure, unadulterated hate.

Prejudice is once again on the rise in America, and a recent Applied Research Center study shows that hatred may have more to do with economics than ideology.

According to the Los Angeles Times, religiously motivated hate crimes have surged back to an all-time high after reaching a post September 11 low.

This is evidenced by a dramatic spike in attacks against Muslim-Americans during this past month’s Ramadan celebrations.

In the last 30 days, seven mosques across the U.S. were targeted by vandalism, shooting and one successful act of arson which reduced a Joplin, Mo., mosque to nothing but cinders and ash.

As we enter an 11th consecutive year of war abroad, our economy continues its slow grind sideways. The largest drought since the Dust Bowl has lain waste to the American Midwest, Europe is collapsing and the list goes dismally on.

But this spate of violence and terror hasn’t been brought about by genuine anger.

It’s a much more insidious emotion that has settled into our collective psyche: fear.

And while it may be difficult to solve the problems we face, it is much easier to produce an ephemeral enemy — an enemy who looks differently and speaks differently and who stands out from the majority — and direct that fear toward them.

In Medieval Europe, when famine and plague would wipe out a kingdom’s crop, political and religious leaders would lay the blame on local Jews for poisoning the water.

And while these lies didn’t resurrect the wheat, they did unleash pogroms that killed thousands of European Jews centuries before the holocaust.

The same sort of actions were perpetrated against Christians in Muslim lands, and acts of violence against our African-American countrymen reached epidemic proportions during the Great Depression.

That is why within days of Congressman Joe Walsh’s (R-Ill) recent anti-Muslim tirade at a Chicago town hall meeting, two mosques in his district were targeted—one by a homemade acid bomb.

“There is a radical strain of Islam in this country…trying to kill Americans every week. … It is a threat that is much more at home now than it was after September 11,” Walsh told his constituents.

Despite the fact that not a single American civilian has been killed by Islamic extremists on U.S. soil since September 11, this false narrative is being pushed into the media stratosphere.

Right-wing Political Action Committees have sent out anti-Muslim propaganda to more than 28 million American homes, and bus ads in San Francisco have declared calling Muslims “uncivilized” and “savages.”

It is easier to hate something with a face — insidious foreign interlopers are far more palatable, far less scary — than our actual problems.

It’s easier to throw a Molotov cocktail at the house of an innocent Muslim family in Tampa, Fla., (Aug. 15, as reported by the Sacramento Bee) than it is to grapple with a failing economy and rapid social change.

Why? Because those things can’t be dealt with on an individual level. There isn’t anything we can do to bring all those dead crops back. There isn’t anything we can individually do to create more jobs.

There are a slew of statistics to support the correlation between hate crimes and tough times, but the circumstances of the Sikh shooter are telling in and of themselves.

Page was unemployed, uneducated and the frontman of a white supremacist rock band nobody cared about or listened to.

Page, like many Americans, needed a solution but was given someone to blame.

So he found an enemy — a group of people he never met and knew nothing about — and he massacred those people because that was easier than facing his real problems.