‘Did she win?” My bleary-eyed nine-year-old had fallen asleep on our couch the previous night, as the polls closed in Florida. When she sat across the breakfast table from me, I had to break the news that, while her own state of Virginia might have (narrowly) opted for Hillary Clinton, most of the other swing states – Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan – went with Donald Trump. “So we won’t have a female president?” she asked, looking disconsolate.
I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that she, we, minority communities across the board, had bigger problems to worry about. The normalisation of racism, of antisemitism, of misogyny, but, above all else – in terms of the impact on her own life and future – Islamophobia.
How do I tell her about the Ku Klux Klan, now recruiting new members “to fight the spread of Islam”?
How do I reveal to my Muslim daughter that women who look and dress like her mother have had their hijabs torn from their heads, as part of a wave of physical attacks on people of colour since election day? Or that her fellow schoolkids aren’t inoculated from this sort of violent hatred either? A Muslim high-school teacher in Georgia was left a note on her desk telling her to “hang” herself with her hijab, which “isn’t allowed any more”. The note was signed, “America”.
How do I explain to my daughter, a proud US citizen who recites the pledge of allegiance in class every morning, that millions of her fellow Americans elected as her next president a man who claims her faith “hates” America, and who falsely accused Muslim Americans of celebrating on 9/11 and of not reporting terrorists to the authorities? On Monday, the FBI revealed that hate crimes against Muslims in the US increased by 67% in 2015, to reach a level of attacks not seen since the aftermath of 9/11.
How do I share with her that one of his signature policy plans was to prevent her grandparents, her cousins, her uncles and aunts – basically every single Muslim relative of hers living abroad – from entering the US purely on the basis of their religion? (The notorious “Muslim ban” proposal is still up on his website after having temporarily disappeared the day after the election.)
How do I break it to her that the “ban” isn’t the only Trump proposal to brazenly discriminate against peaceful, law-abiding Muslims? That the president-elect has also said that my daughter and other Muslim Americans have to be registered on a database and, when asked by a reporter how his proposal differed from the Nazi registry of German Jews, he replied: “You tell me.”
How do I talk to her about Trump foreign policy adviser Walid Phares, subject of an investigation by Mother Jones magazine. There is no suggestion that he has carried out acts of violence, but the magazine claimed that he was an official for “an umbrella group of Christian militias … accused of committing atrocities” against Muslims in 1980s Lebanon, and yet is now tipped for a senior White House role? Or former House speaker Newt Gingrich – who wants to “test” Muslim Americans and “deport” those who believe in sharia law, and has called for a new House Un-American Activities Committee to investigate “Islamic supremacists” – who is in line for a big Cabinet job under Trump? Or retired general Michael Flynn, who has tweeted that “fear of Muslims is rational”, and is now tipped to become either defence secretary or national security adviser?
Or former mayor Rudy Giuliani, who has bragged about sending undercover police into New York and New Jersey mosques, and who is now a hot favourite for the job of secretary of state? Or former Reagan official Frank Gaffney, who has called Barack Obama “America’s first Muslim president” and has been labelled “one of America’s most notorious Islamophobes” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and was appointed to the Trump transition team on Tuesday.
How do I explain to her that the best way to identify a Trump supporter in the US, according to a recent study by Hamilton College political scientist Philip Klinkner, is to ask: “Just one simple question: is Barack Obama a Muslim?” Because “if they are white and the answer is yes,” says Klinkner, “89 per cent of the time that person will have a higher opinion of Trump than Clinton”, and it is more accurate than asking people their views on the economy or even if they are Republican.
How do I tell her about the Ku Klux Klan, a domestic US hate group traditionally known for white nationalism and anti-black racism, but now recruiting new members “to fight the spread of Islam”? The KKK officially endorsed Trump’s presidential bid while former Klan leader David Duke bragged that “our people” played a “huge role” in getting him elected to the Oval Office. Next month, an emboldened KKK is planning a pro-Trump celebration parade in North Carolina. How do I show her pictures of that?
I can’t put it off much longer. At some stage soon I have to have the conversation with my daughter that all Muslim parents dread. The “Islamophobia conversation”. The discussion in which you have to ask your child to be restrained, to be careful when they talk about their faith and their beliefs in public because, unbeknown to them, there are people out there who see them as a threat; who fear Muslims and loathe Islam.
How do I tell her that one of those people now includes her own president?
Categories: America, Americas, Interfaith America, United States
A Muslim is a citizen of this tiny global village. The whole world belongs to Muslims. What do you expect from a so called civilised Yanks? Yanks must learn to respect and tolerate those who are different. Western society and schooling is the home of institutional racism. Cynthia Ramsey, a math teacher at Camden County High School in North Carolina, allegedly told a student that if she only had 10 days left to live, she would kill all black people. Attention racists: think what you want, be careful what you say in public. That woman is SUPER STUPID. She should be fired, she has NO common sense.
Since racism is so endemic and so deep rooted in American culture , should we be so shocked, baffled and surprised when we become aware of these statements? To me the teacher is just living out her life training and experience; this is what she hears daily in her social interaction with other racists behind closed doors. I am not shocked or surprised; on the contrary, I think it is the norm. If this behaviour was not normal how could the root report so many of these situations on a daily basis? I have given up on trying to change white America. Now that black people in her school district have become aware of her behaviour I expect her to be dismissed as a teacher and black people’s tax dollars not be used in the future to pay her salary, irrespective of where she is employed next. and in which ever profession she works.
Racial tension has been on raw display in recent months across Europe. Reports from non-governmental organizations such as European Network Against Racism (ENAR) confirm a dramatic increase of racist violence in recent years. More than 5,000 hate crimes were reported in Sweden in 2012 of which 74 percent were related to racism and xenophobia. Muslims, Roma, and asylum seekers are some of the most vulnerable groups throughout Europe, especially Muslim women who wear the headscarf.
A recent example is when riots broke out in Trappes, outside of Paris, in July after a routine police check on a woman who was asked to remove her face veil (as is required under French law). Officials of all political stripes defend France’s secular law, called the Burqa ban, which prohibits women from covering their entire face in public spaces. After the incident in Trappes, Interior Minister Manuel Valls said that the 2010 law “must be enforced everywhere,” according to the Economist because it’s in the “interests of women.”
But women (and some men) across Sweden are donning headscarves and posting pictures of themselves on Twitter and Instagram in protest. They are not Muslim immigrants fighting to protect their cultural norms. Rather, they are politicians and TV personalities staging a “hijab outcry” to show solidarity with Muslim women.
The protest comes after a pregnant woman wearing a veil was assaulted two weekends ago in Sweden. Police spokesman Ulf Hoffman said an unknown assailant had attacked the woman in the suburb of Farsta by banging her head against a car. The attacker then reportedly tore off her headscarf and shouted racial insults.
Veiled campaigners said they want to draw attention to the “discrimination that affects Muslim women” in Sweden, and that the goal of the “hijab outcry” is to demand that the government “ensure that Swedish Muslim women are guaranteed the right to … religious freedom.”
The initiative has inspired similar actions in other places such as Brussels. Lately, acts of public resistance against intolerance have also occurred in Germany and the Czech Republic.
Some people have an opposite opinion about the matter. Hanna Gadban, a feminist Muslim commentator, believes the campaign is counterproductive.
“We talk naïve about human rights. Should we give men power and confirmation that they have the right to force their women and children to veil themselves?” she told the Swedish news site, Aftonbladet. “This reinforces racism I see the veil as a cultural, religious, sexual and political symbol. How many women choose to veil themselves? In my experience, it may be around 10 percent who choose it without pressure.”
It’s a delicate, controversial issue: how to demonstrate one’s Muslim faith and tradition in western European countries such as Sweden, France or Great Britain, particularly in an increasingly hostile environment for immigrants generally, and especially Muslim immigrants, in those places. But people need to stop acting like it’s Muslim women’s fault for getting attacked.
Muslim or not, women should be able to walk down the street without being subjected to verbal and physical violence. I respect the Swedish campaigners for promoting that.
IA
http://www.londonschoolofislamics.org.uk
Then maybe if Islamic women want to walk down the street (as they cannot do under sharia law) then maybe they should adapt to the way and culture that they now decide to live among or resort to a country that they can.