‘Campaign fuels anti-Muslim hate’
Islamophobia spikes as Republican candidate stirs prejudice
ABOUT three months ago, Sarah Ibrahim’s son came home from his fourth-grade class at a Maryland school with a disturbing question. “Will I have time to say goodbye to you before you’re deported?” he said, according to Ibrahim, a Muslim Arab American who works at a federal government agency in Maryland.
“The kids in his classroom were saying: ‘Who’s going to leave when Trump becomes president?’” said the 35-year-old mother.
The incident happened a few months after Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump – now the presumptive nominee – first called for a ban on Muslim immigrants and for more scrutiny at mosques after 14 people were killed in San Bernardino by a Muslim couple whom the FBI said had been radicalised.
Trump intensified his anti-Muslim rhetoric after last week’s mass shooting in Orlando, in which a US-born Muslim man killed 49 people at a gay nightclub, calling for a suspension of immigration from countries with “a proven history of terrorism”. He reiterated his call for more surveillance of mosques and warned that radical Muslims were “trying to take over our children”.
While Democratic and several Republican leaders have distanced themselves from Trump’s comments, many American Muslims say his stance has fuelled an atmosphere in which some may feel they can voice prejudices or attack Muslims without fear of retribution.
“What Trump did was (to) remove the shame associated with being prejudiced. People know that they won’t be punished,” Ibrahim said at a community iftar, the sundown meal during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadaan.
Trump has rejected the criticism that his rhetoric is racist, and has said he is often misunderstood by the media.
A report by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and University of California, Berkeley released on Monday said the number of recorded incidents in which mosques were targeted jumped to 78 last year, the most since the body began tracking them in 2009. There were 20 and 22 such incidents in the previous two years, respectively. The incidents include verbal threats and physical attacks.
Corey Saylor, CAIR’s director of the department to monitor and combat Islamophobia, said there had been a spike in Islamophobic incidents in the wake of Orlando, including those targeting mosques.
“Trump’s rhetoric is a direct threat to American principles. He has mainstreamed anti-constitutional ideas like banning or surveilling people based on faith,” Saylor said. “Such divisive rhetoric contributes to a toxic environment in which some people take the law into their own hands and attack people of institutions they perceive as Muslim.”
US rabbis and preachers have denounced Trump’s rhetoric. “If Muslims are not free and safe in America, then Christians and Jews are not free and safe in America,” said Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president emeritus of the Union for Reform Judaism. – Reuters