Echoes of 2001: A Renewal of Anti-Muslim Violence

By Dennis J. Bernstein, Reader Supported News

19 December 15

here have we seen this picture before? It was right after the twin tower attacks: When anyone walking the streets with a complexion slightly darker than John Wayne, any Arab American, anyone with a turban, anyone with a name like Ziad or Mohammed or, God forbid, Jihad – one of the more popular names in the Middle East – was fair game for white supremacist racists to target with knives and high-powered rifles, fake white powder and some not so fake.

On September 19, 2001, I wrote about “a new terrorist war inside the United States” targeting Americans who wear turbans, pray in Muslim mosques, are mistakenly identified as Muslims – or look like Osama bin Laden. The victims are men and women going to work or out shopping, children on the way to school, people kneeling for God’s blessing. Since the horrific hijack-attacks of September 11, this second wave of terrorism has left three people dead, dozens wounded, and thousands of South Asian and Arab Americans terrified.

I wrote about Balbir Singh Sodi, who lived in Mesa, Arizona. He was the first casualty in America’s homespun terrorism response to the 2001 World Trade Center attacks. “He was just standing outside supervising some landscape work,” said his cousin, Adam Singh, “when a red pickup rolled into the station. The man rolled down the window and shot three times – he didn’t even come out of his truck, he just slowed down – and sped away. Balbir died on the spot.” Singh firmly believed the murder of his cousin was a hate crime, based solely on his clothing and skin color, but nothing ever came of it. “He is a Sikh, and he wears a turban and has a full grown beard. And the media has been showing bin Laden on the TV all the time wearing a turban and with a flowing beard and ...” “I am an American,” Frank Roque, 42, told police after he was charged with Sodi’s murder. “Arrest me, let those terrorists run wild.”

These days, with Trump on the stump and the corporate media loving to hate him, it’s a big thumbs-up for white supremacists and just about any old-style racist to spew, threaten, and sometimes shoot at the perceived Middle East terrorists living in communities all over America. Among the more vile attacks was one on December 7th when a caretaker at the Al Aqsa Islamic Society in northern Philadelphia found a severed pig’s head left right on the doorstep. This was particularly hurtful and offensive because devout Muslims do not eat pork for religious reasons.

According to a recent press release from CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the human rights group has received “more reports about acts of Islamophobic discrimination, intimidation, threats, and violence targeting American Muslims (or those perceived to be Muslim) and Islamic institutions in the past week-and-a-half than during any other limited period of time since the 9/11 terror attacks. CAIR attributes this spike in anti-Muslim incidents to the Paris attacks and to the mainstreaming of Islamophobia by political candidates and lawmakers in the run-up to the 2016 general election. Of particular concern is the extreme anti-Muslim rhetoric and falsehoods being espoused by leading Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump and Ben Carson.”

Some other violent events documented by CAIR nationally include vandals painting an Eiffel Tower peace symbol on a wall outside an Islamic center in Omaha. Also, multiple shots were fired at the Baitul Aman mosque in Meriden, Connecticut, penetrating three walls and striking prayer areas. And the list goes on from coast to coast and border to border.

On Monday, I spoke with Zahra Billoo in an interview for the Flashpoints show on Pacifica Radio. Billoo is a civil rights attorney, the executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-SFBA), and a leading voice for the civil rights of American Muslims. Billoo said the threats and the number of attacks on mosques and Muslim community centers is growing by leaps and bounds. She said they “cannot even keep track of them, there are so many.”

“Just in the last week or two we saw threats mailed to CAIR offices, both in D.C. and Santa Clara, forcing evacuation and even hospital assessments of our staff for their safety,” said the Arab American civil rights attorney. “We saw a mosque in Coachella, California, fire-bombed. Just this weekend we saw in Camden, Michigan, during a store robbery, the person violently shot the clerk in the face and said ‘I killed people like you in Iraq.’ Over the weekend also there were two mosques that were vandalized in Southern California. In this case, I believe there was a fake hand grenade left behind. It’s so much that we’re losing track ... we’re having a difficult time keeping up, because it’s daily, almost.”

Omar Ali is on the staff of the San Francisco-based Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC). Ali said in an interview this week that there is an almost constant flow of calls and people coming in to report some form of abuse, including serious threats and actual physical abuse. “In recent weeks,” said Ali, “especially after Donald Trump announced earlier this week that he is going to ban Muslims from this country ... we’ve been getting a lot of phone calls and people just coming right into the office, very frightened and shaken, saying that they’ve been verbally or physically abused, or actually assaulted, on the streets of San Francisco and in communities all over the Bay Area.”

Ali said most of the attacks are coming against women and young people. “They are really frightened, unable to function in their daily lives. They have serious security concerns about what they can and cannot do. They are constantly looking behind their back, wondering if something happens to them and they are under attack, will anyone try and help them.”

Mosques taking special precautions

As executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area CAIR and a practicing civil rights attorney, Zahra Billoo has been deeply involved in documenting the upsurge of attacks on Arab Americans and the entire Middle East community. Billoo said she has been witnessing and documenting a situation similar to that described by Ali in San Francisco, through out the Bay Area, and in fact across the country. “And we’re telling people to report even the hate incidents or interactions that don’t necessarily rise to the level of a crime. Because that will enable us to keep better track of what’s going on. These are the consequences of dangerous rhetoric of politicians, impacts on the daily lives of individuals.”

Billoo agreed with Ali that there were a growing number of attacks on young people, both in the streets and at school, even before Trump’s verbal attacks on Muslims and his rhetoric about having them banned from entering the country hit the fan. “We just, maybe a month ago now, published a report through CAIR California, our four California offices that surveyed around 600 students,” said Billoo. “Muslim students in California public schools in 2014. So we surveyed them in 2014, we published the report about a month ago. And what we found was that about 55% of Muslim students had experienced some form of bi-space bullying. Now it’s lower in metropolitan areas, higher in more rural areas. And at the same time we don’t, we can’t imagine how much worse it is now. Like now, today, December versus October even. Right? Things have changed so drastically in the last six weeks that we worry. Of course there’s a trickle down effect on the playground.”

Billoo also said that many mosques and community centers are hiring extensive security to deal with the growing threats. “I know a number of mosques, unfortunately, who have had to hire armed security, and that’s such a frightening thing, right? For children, for worshippers to have to have armed security to protect themselves. But sadly that is the reality. And then for CAIR, given the situation last week with a suspicious substance being mailed to us. We are changing the way we deal with mail. We’re looking at how to make our work more secure. The cost of doing this work, sadly, is that people would target us for hate attacks and intimidation.”

Billoo also said that there is a serious discussion going on now about whether women should be afraid to wear a head scarf or a Hijab, and if they choose not to out of fear of reprisals, will that be a serious violation of their beliefs. “That’s a very real conversation in the community ... If I don’t feel safe ... is there a religious exception? And so, there is a religious exception that some people have explained and have asserted which is essentially that if your life is in danger, if you are feeling unsafe, then your safety comes first. And then, of course, there are women that are saying, ‘We’re not going to take off our head scarves, because we can’t take off our skin color even after we take off our head scarves. We want to remain strong and courageous in the face of hate.’ And so it’s a difficult conversation that many Muslim women are grappling with these days.”

Billoo, a seasoned civil rights attorney and activist for human rights, cautions people to pay attention to the larger picture, and to try to understand that Trump is not the only one, and that Muslims are not the only target. But she says what Trump is doing is legitimizing the behavior. “You know, I’m struggling, because Donald Trump is, I think, the epitome of horrible politicians, marginalizing different communities. Right now he’s on the Muslim community. But a few weeks ago it was the Latino community. I imagine he’s gone after other communities as well. So what he’s doing is making it socially acceptable to be openly bigoted. And that’s dangerous, because people are starting to feel it. They can fire bomb a mosque, and maybe it’s not going to have a consequence. Or they can threaten a civil rights organization, or they can shoot at a Muslim woman in Florida, and it won’t have any consequence. And then I worry,” said Billoo, “that if we make it too much about Donald Trump, we forget that other GOP candidates have been saying comparably horrible things. They may just not have the platform that Trump has. But if we make it too much about Trump, then when he hopefully does not get the Republican nomination everyone else gets away with everything. Because everyone breathes a sigh of relief and thinks that we’ve weathered the storm.”

Billoo did express some concern that law enforcement was not consistently taking up the investigation of possible hate crimes. She said that while law enforcement is fairly thorough in some instances, many of the crimes go uninvestigated and fall by the wayside. She added that there is a real hesitation regarding law enforcement and the treatment of the Arab American community as generally a breeding ground for terrorists in the US. “And this is another challenge for the community during times like this,” Billoo said. “We want to turn to law enforcement and say ‘Protect us. Do your job. Protect and serve our community.’ But because we’ve been under surveillance for so long, there is also a concern that we are being treated as suspects. And I wonder if that’s the explanation. If law enforcement, particularly the FBI and others, are disproportionately expecting violence from the Muslim community, they’re not prepared to handle it or protect us when we are the targets of that violence.”