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569 Islamophobic Attacks in 512 Days

[UPDATED] Hate Crime Watch: 569 Islamophobic Attacks in 512 Days

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April, 2016

  1. April 2, 2016 – An Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) student associated with Students for Justice in Palestine is targeted by a poster campaign that has resulted in her face being plastered all over campus with the caption calling her a terrorist. The university does little to nothing to help her.
  1. April 4, 2016 – “I hope when Trump gets into office he turns this wicked building into a 7-11,” says street preacher Ruben Israel outside the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix, AZ. “Muslim religion is tearing down America,” Aden Rusfeldt, another protestor says, before Israel rips pages out of the Qur’an.
  1. April 4, 2016 – The Arizona State Muslim Students Association reports that its signs for Islam Awareness week have been torn off and thrown in the garbage. The signs costs $650 to print and had been hung up all around the Tempe, AZ, campus.
  1. April 4, 2016 – At Idaho State University in Pocatello, ID, an unknown person leaves DVDs of anti-Muslim propaganda on car windshields. When examined, the DVDs are revealed to be tapes of anti-Muslim preacher Tommy Robinson, who calls Muslims “terrorists” and the Qur’an a “terrorist manual.”
  1. April 4, 2016 – Unknown persons graffiti “STOP ISLAM” across the front of the University of Massachusetts’s campus in Amerhest, MA.
  1. April 4, 2016 – Clare Lopez, a National Security Adviser to Presidential-hopeful Ted Cruz, says that there are “no-go zones” for polices officers in Muslim neighborhoods, meaning that there are areas that are too dangerous for police officers to venture, while on the “Ox In the Afternoon” radio show. She continues on to say that Islam “has actually conquered every single other major civilization it’s ever gone up against, from the Buddhists to the Byzantines to the Middle East Christians to the Middle East Jews to the Hindus to the Persians, conquered every last one of them, some of them might, sophisticated civilizations at their peak, conquered them all. There are only two left standing: the Han Chinese and whatever’s left of Western civilization. That is a sobering reality.”
  1. April 4, 2016 – “Choose 1 Pro-Islam<>Pro Women’s & Gay Rights” is chalked at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, KS.
  1. April 5, 2016 –  Representative Susan Lynn (R), distributes copies of the DVD America’s Mosques Exposed! Video Evidence They Are War Factories in the Tennessee General Assembly, in Nashville, TN. The summary on the back of the DVD case reads: “Chilling and urgent insider video catches treason in the act against God and Country by Muslims using American Mosques as war factories and by our own U.S. Government, burning Bibles as trash yet ordering Muslim Qurans to be ‘handled like a delicate piece of art.”
  1. April 6, 2016 – UC Berkeley senior Khairuldeen Makhzoomi is sitting on a Southwest Airlines flight from Los Angeles, CA, to Oakland, when he finishes a phone call with his uncle with “inshallah,” and instantly is reported to the flight attendants, who alert security and have him taken off the flight. A female passenger had heard him and thought he had said “shaheed,” the Arabic word for “martyr.” Southwest Airlines refused to apologize. The 26-year-old is an Iraqi refugee who attended a dinner with Secretary General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon the day before.
  1. April 7, 2016 – More chalkings appear at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI, this time reading “No Turkey, Qatar, Saudi, Pakistan,” “No more Muslim violence,” “Trump 16,” and “F__k SJWs.”
  1. April 7, 2016 – Televangelist Pat Robertson calls Islam an “infection” on an episode of The 700 Club, saying, “But there comes a time if the infection is allowed to spread, and it will spread rapidly when the invader overtakes the healthy body, at which point there is sickness and then ultimately death.” He calls unassimilated Muslim immigrants a danger, saying that it’s not too late to save cities with Muslim immigrants, but that “it’s going to take violence. They’ve got to move in with the police dragnets.”
  1. April 9, 2016 – Peter Zieve, the founder and president of Electroimpact, sends out a number of postcards to the residents of Mukliteo, WA, as anti-mosque propaganda. “You may be interested to know Mukilteo has received a complete planning application for the construction of a mosque. If you would like to receive notifications about the mosque as information becomes available, send an e-mail to mukilteostaysafe@gmail.com.” Though he claims to have regretted sending the cards, he is also discovered later to have formed a “mosque watch group.”
  1. April 11, 2016 – An anonymous customer pays Robert Harry Jr., of St John’s Outdoor Advertising to put up a giant billboard off of Seashore Avenue in St. Augustine, FL, that reads “ISLAM BLOODY ISLAM and “DOOMED BY ITS DOCTRINE.” The lettering is designed to look bloody; Harry declines to disclose who is behind the board and defends it as free speech.
  1. April 12, 2016 – Karen Wright is appointed to the Montoursville, PA school board, although the board is fully ware of her public, regular anti-Muslim rants on Facebook. “I am officially against Muslims,” reads one; another reads, “I have seen nothing good from the Muslims faith” and “we don’t want them in America.” Only one board member says he regrets the decision to vote for her appointment.
  1. April 13, 2016 – Somali-American Hakima Abdulle is escorted off a Southwest Airlines flight from Chicago Midway Airport to Seattle, WA, with seemingly no basis, after mutually agreeing to switch seats with another passenger.
  1. April 18, 2016 – Frank Gaffney, Foreign Policy Adviser to Senator Ted Cruz, criticizes Congress for allowing the United States Council of Muslim Organizations to participate in Capitol Hill’s Muslim Advocacy Day. In the editorial he writes for The Hill, he accuses the group of being “the latest in a long series of front organizations associated with, and working to advance, the agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States” – an agenda he says also includes carrying out “civilization jihad” and “destroying Western civilization.”
  1. April 18, 2016 – Anti-Muslim extremist and a National Security Adviser to Presidential-hopeful Ted Cruz, Retired Lt. Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin, tells “Sandy Rios In The Morning” that the Muslim Brotherhood is gaining a foothold in America and repeats the already discredited conspiracy that “sharia courts” have been popping up across the country.
  1. April 18, 2016 – James Stachowiak and Pastor Terry Jones hold a two-person “United against Islam and Islamic immigration refugee rally” outside the capitol in Atlanta, GA. They wear shirts that say “BAN ISLAMIC IMMIGRATION,” carry guns, and destroy Qur’ans.
  1. April 19, 2016 – Mike Voyard of Queens, NY, walks into the Jamaica Muslim Center high on multiple drugs, claims to be the Prophet, demands a Qur’an, and yells anti-Muslim slurs before punching and kicking people praying at the mosque.
  1. April 19, 2016 – Eric Knutson writes a letter to the editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, MT, titled “Real Muslims won’t really assimilate?” which includes a number of attacks on the character of the Prophet Muhammad, and also says that “Islam is out to convert the world to Islam, and they go as far as killing infidels, as prescribed in the Quran, and also the practice of Taqiyya, lying for the purpose of advancing Islam. How do we know anything they say isn’t a lie?”
  1. April 21, 2016 – A white woman calls a Black hijabi a “worthless piece of Muslim trash” and dumps an unknown liquid on the hijabi’s head at a Starbucks in Washington, D.C.
  1. April 22, 2016 – Elmwood Park, NJ, School Board Trustee Gladys Gryskiewicz resigns after evidence emerges of hateful posts she made in January and February. The posts include statements such as “stay in your desserts[sic] and follow your religion in your own countries,” “we cannot allow Islam to take over,” and, “Why now are we giving into[sic] the Muslims way of life? The French told them to get lost. This is what our President should be emulating.”
  1. April 24, 2016 – A group of hijabis is singled out and told to leave the Urth Caffe in Laguna Beach, CA, after staff tell them there is a policy that they may only keep their table for 45 minutes, despite the fact that there are plenty of open tables and another group of white women that has been there longer is allowed to stay. The police are called, and the women leave, but decide to file a lawsuit.
  1. April 25, 2016 – At a rally in Deicke Auditorium in Plantation, FL, U.S. Senate Candidate from Florida, Carlos Beruff, states, “I don’t think it is safe to allow anybody from the Middle East into this country.” When asked by a reporter how he would pull off the ban, he answers that it would apply to “pretty much anybody that’s got a terrorist organization in it, which is pretty much all of the Middle East.” He later clarifies that an exception will be made for Israel.
  1. April 26, 2016 – Michael Kochalian points a gun on a Black hijabi and her child on North Champlain Street in Burlington, VT, and calls her a “terrorist.”
  1. April 26, 2016 – A Muslim woman goes to the Jefferson Parish, LA, Traffic Court to pay a ticket from a car accident and is told to remove her hijab by Judge Raylyn Beevers. When she refuses, she is escorted to sit in the lobby for an hour.
  1. April 26, 2016 – The University of Central Florida, in Orlando, FL, goes on lockdown after someone mistakes what “may have been a Muslim student wearing a hijab, praying in the stairwell with a Quran in hand,” for a gunman or woman of “Middle Eastern” descent in the library and calls 911.
  1. April 27, 2016 – Daljeet Singh, who is a practicing Sikh and therefore wears a turban, and Mohammed Chotri are speaking in Punjabi to each other on a Greyhound Bus traveling from Phoenix, AZ, to Indianapolis, IN, but when the bus stops in Amarillo, TX, they are suddenly approached by armed police officers and handcuffed. They are detained for 30 hours, and later discover someone had filed a false report against them for a bomb threat.
  1. April 27, 2016 – Tom Angel, the Chief of Staff to the Los Angeles County, CA Sheriff Jim McDonnell, resigns a few days after making a noncommittal apology for forwarding “jokes” via email at his previous post in the Burbank Police Department; included in these jokes was a list of reasons “Muslim terrorists are quick to commit suicide,” such as “rags for clothes [and] towels for hats,” and “your wife smells worse than your donkey.”
  1. April 27, 2016 – 3 men, one of whom was chanting “ISIS,” attack a 19-year-old man walking in Astoria, in Queens, NY, by punching him. They also possessed a baseball bat and a pipe.
  1. April 27, 2016 – San Diego State University President Elliot Hirshman neglects to condemn posters hung by anti-Muslim extremist David Horowitz across the San Diego, CA campus. The posters displayed the names of Muslim students who supported the Boycott Divest and Sanctions movement, and claimed that these students were allies of “terrorists.”
  1. April 27, 2016 – Deputy Federal Security Director at the Transportation Security Administration David McMahon is implicated by Andrew Rhoades, one of his assistants, who testifies to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that McMahon had ordered him to profile Somali Americans who came to the TSA office, as well as local imams.
  1. April 27, 2016 – Hellgate High School in Missoula, MT, becomes the site of protests after it screens The Muslims Are Coming!, a satirical documentary about Islamophobia. One of the signs at the protest reads ““ISLAMIST TURKEY JUST SEIZED ALL CHRISTIAN CHURCHES – DECLARING THEM ‘STATE PROPERTY.’ THIS IS TRUE ISLAM… SUBJUGATION AND OPPRESSION.”
  1. April 28, 2016 – Anti-Muslim extremist Ryan Mauro is allowed to present two lectures to at least 700 tactical law enforcement personnel in Verona, NY. The lectures are closed to the press and general public.
  1. April 28, 2016 – Presidential-hopeful Donald Trump, for the second time on the campaign trail, repeats a hoax recounts a completely false tale about General Pershing supposedly shooting Muslims with bullets dipped in pigs’ blood as a warning to other Muslims. The re-telling of the hoax is met with raucous applause at the Costa Mesa, CA rally.