LAPD, FBI to address threatening letters sent to California mosques

Rasa - The Los Angeles Police Department, along with the FBI and leaders from the local Muslim community, will hold a news conference Monday to discuss threatening letters sent to Southern California mosques last week.

News ID: 425377

Date: 28 November 2016 - 23:31

RNA - The Los Angeles Police Department, along with the FBI and leaders from the local Muslim community, will hold a news conference Monday to discuss threatening letters sent to Southern California mosques last week.

The news conference, which will also include the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and leaders from the local Muslim community, will be held at 12 p.m. at the Islamic Center of Southern California in Koreatown, police said.

Letters that threatened the genocide of Muslims and praised President-elect Donald Trump were sent to multiple California mosques, prompting a call last week by the Council on American-Islamic Relations for stepped-up police protection.

The letters were sent to the Islamic Center of Long Beach and the Islamic Center of Claremont, CAIR’s greater Los Angeles chapter said in a statement. The same letter was also sent to the Evergreen Islamic Center in San Jose.

The letter was addressed to the “Children of Satan” and called Muslims a “vile and filthy people.”

“Your day of reckoning has arrived,” the letter states, according to CAIR-LA. “There’s a new sheriff in town — President Donald Trump. He’s going to cleanse America and make it shine again. And, he’s going to start with you Muslims.”

The letter, signed only by “Americans for a Better Way,” said Trump was “going to do to you Muslims what Hitler did to the [J]ews.”

Both the Los Angeles and Bay Area chapters of CAIR have called for increased cooperation with law enforcement agencies to protect mosques.

Anti-Muslim incidents jumped 67% in 2015, according to newly released FBI hate crime statistics. There were 257 reported bias crimes against Muslims last year, compared with 154 in 2014.

A spate of bias incidents that followed Trump’s election victory has drawn serious concerns from police and human rights activists.

The Southern Poverty Law Center reported 701 incidents of harassment since Trump’s win, with most occurring in the first three days following the election. Of those, 206 incidents were anti-immigrant and 51 were anti-Muslim.

There also were 27 reported anti-Trump incidents, according to the SPLC.

In an interview with The Times, Hussam Ayloush, executive director of CAIR-LA, said the “irresponsible, hateful rhetoric” of the Trump campaign has fueled “a level of vulgarity, vile hatred and anger among many self-proclaimed Trump supporters.”

“I’m not saying [Trump] created racist people,” he said. “He normalized it. While he might say he’s not responsible, and I respect that, I remind President-elect Trump that he has a responsibility to act as a president for all Americans.”

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