RNA - In the weeks after the election, mosques across the country have seen an escalation in backlash and a sharp uptick in hateful letters, emails and phone calls.
The rise has been so sharp that the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the U.S., is having a hard time keeping up with it.
“The election seems to have empowered and emboldened the undercurrent of bigotry in our society,” CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said in a phone interview.
“People who might not normally air their bigoted views now believe that it’s acceptable,” he added. “And that’s a very troubling phenomenon.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center has counted nine letters sent to mosques, threatening Muslim genocide in President-elect Donald Trump’s America.
“He’s going to do to you Muslims what Hitler did to the Jews,” the letters read, arriving at mosques in California, Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida.
Though the FBI does not classify generalized letters like this as hate crimes, the bureau’s own statistics show a surge in hate crimes against Muslims – they spiked last year 67 percent.
And 49 percent of Americans think at least some Muslims in the U.S. are anti-American, according to a Pew poll from January. In the same poll, 42 percent said there were “just a few or none” anti-American U.S. Muslims.
Although some Muslims voted for the president-elect – 13 percent, according to a CAIR exit poll – Trump told supporters on the campaign trail that he thinks “Islam hates us.”
Sharpening the edge of his promise on the campaign trail to ban Muslims from entering the U.S., Trump has in recent weeks stacked his cabinet with people who openly espouse anti-Muslim views.
“Personally, I’m not so worried about Mr. Trump – I think a lot of what he said and did was just showboating,” Hazem Bata, secretary general of the Islamic Society of North America, said in a phone interview. “But it’s the people that are around him that I think are going to cause a lot of damage.”
Trump’s national security pick, Gen. Michael Flynn, has said Islam is a political ideology. He has also called Islam a cancer and recently tweeted that fear of Muslims is rational. Flynn is a board member of ACT for America, which Hooper said is “the most virulent anti-Muslim hate group in America.”
Trump also tapped Breitbart News CEO Steve Bannon as his chief White House strategist. The publication regularly publishes anti-Muslim content, and gives a platform to people like Pamela Gellar, Frank Gaffney and Brigitte Gabriel, who founded ACT for America.
All have been flagged by the Southern Poverty Law Center as key figures in Muslim-bashing activism.
Trump’s cabinet in the making, combined with growing anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S., has left some American Muslims gripped with fear.
“You’ve got people that are afraid to leave their house,” Bata said. “And that’s not hyperbole – they are literally afraid to leave their house.”
“You’ve got some kids that don’t want to go to school because either they’ve been bullied or they’re afraid of being bullied,” Bata added.
The current climate in the United States has a lot to do with that.
At California State University, San Bernardino, Brian Levin with the nonpartisan Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, said anti-Muslim prejudice is higher now than it was after 9/11.
Levin, who has studied extremism for many years, called the rise in Americans with prejudiced views against Muslims “alarming.”
The country can still only speculate about Trump’s plan for national security, but Levin said he worries about anti-Muslim sentiment entering the mainstream and becoming enacted as policy.
“If there are people who are setting policy that subscribe to the notion that all Muslims are a threat – or a cancer – or that it doesn’t constitute a faith, that’s going to have significant consequences for how American citizens who adhere to that faith feel and engage in civic participation,” Levin said in a phone interview.
“People who believe a faith of over 1 and 1/2 billion people are homogenously evil or a cancer are not fit morally or strategically to serve in national office,” he added.
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