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Muslims and Palestinians in the U.S. are reporting a wave of Islamophobic incidents amid the Israel-Hamas war.
“This is reminding me a bit of how it felt post-9/11,” Palestinian activist and policy analyst Laila El-Haddad told Religion News Service on Tuesday afternoon (Oct. 17).
Thousands of civilians have died in Israel’s retaliation airstrikes on Gaza in the days following Hamas’ attack on southern Israel on October 7.
Some Palestinian Americans have spent their days worrying about their loved ones in Gaza and making sure they are safe. In the interim, they have observed that some people who express solidarity with the stranded Palestinian residents in Gaza have faced defamation or personal threats.
In Pennsylvania, a man was arrested after yelling slurs and wielding a gun at a pro-Palestinian protest. In Los Angeles, UCLA students attending a webinar on the crisis in Gaza were reportedly threatened and called terrorists by a small group of unidentified men.
In Boston, the Palestinian Cultural Center for Peace was spray-painted with the word “Nazis.” And with the horrific killing of 6-year-old Wadea Al-Fayoume, a Palestinian American boy stabbed inside his home in a Chicago suburb, all threats are being taken seriously. The landlord of the boy’s mother has been charged with his murder.
It’s not just Palestinian Americans who are being impacted, according to Selaedin Maksut, executive director of the New Jersey chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, who said threats have extended to all Muslims, or people who might be perceived as Muslim or Arab. For example, he said, a South Asian Muslim restaurant owner in South Jersey woke up Friday morning to the Quran being torn apart and scattered in front of her restaurant.
“Because we are so inundated, and the demand is so high, we’ve bypassed our usual intake process and are just trying to help people the best we can for the sake of time,” Maksut said about incidents in New Jersey, where Muslims make up about 3% of the population.
Corey Saylor, the director for research and advocacy at CAIR, confirmed that “without a doubt,” CAIR is seeing a surge of anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim incidents across the U.S. “I think that’s part of what’s particularly depressing about this moment,” he said. “Recognizing that it is so easy for the Islamophobia switch to go back on.”
