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569 Islamophobic Attacks in 512 Days

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

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May, 2016

  1. May 2, 2016 – A Bangladeshi-born store clerk at the Savanna Superette gas station in Savanna, OK, is stabbed by Larry Johnson in the chest and head.
  1. May 4, 2016 – In midtown Sacramento, CA, letters are left on cars titled “Hundred Little Death Camp Policy,” and calling on white people in the area to kill Muslims and Mexicans. “If you have not secured a body dump site, do so now!…Kidnap, rob, torture for information and execute all Muslims and Latinos. Leave no survivors.”
  1. May 9, 2016 – 17-year-old Bayan Zehlif is listed in the Los Osos High School yearbook as “Isis.” The principal of the Rancho Cucamonga, CA, school contacts Zehlif, but tells insists it was a typo. She is further harassed after the national media takes notice.
  1. May 10, 2016 – 17-year-old Sana Hamze is denied the right to wear her hijab as a part of her uniform at the Citadel, a military college, in Charleston, SC.
  1. May 12, 2016 – About a dozen protestors gather outside a meeting of Rutland, VT lawmakers to speak against accepting Syrian and Iraqi refugees into the town. One protestor explains that he fears that “what they’ll do is they’ll get in a community and they’ll just group together and they won’t blend. They go by Sharia. Sharia law. And they’ll actually destabilize the community.” He clarifies that he would be ok with Christian refuges, but that there is no way to separate the two.
  1. May 15, 2016 – The American Bikers United Against Jihad group attempts a rally to protest the existence of Islamberg, NY, a town of about 25 Muslim families.
  1. May 15, 2016 – Bill French (who also goes by Bill Warner), an anti-Muslim extremist and former Tennessee University professor, is invited to talk at the Moore Republican Women’s Club in Pinehurst, NC. The talk is called “Understanding the Threat of Political Islam.” He has previously has stated that a “war on Islam” is necessary.
  1. May 16, 2016 – A customer cancels her cake order after finding out the owner of Sweetcakez in Grand Rapids, MI, Zeinab Mohamed, and her husband, are Muslim. The customer leaves a message reading: “Hey actually were [sic] going to order our cake somewhere else my husband just found out your [sic] Muslim. And I’m not against it but he is because he was in Iraq fighting for our country against your people. He even changed his new doctor because the new one he was referred to was Muslim and he just said somethings [sic] and said he doesnt [sic] feel comfortable having you make our cake. I’m so sorry.” Mohamed’s husband is actually also a war veteran himself.
  1. May 16, 2016 – 72-year-old Jackie Hammock of Lake Wales, FL, steps out naked into his yard and lets loose his five larger dogs, who proceed to attack neighbor Azard Baksh’s small poodle. The poodle dies, while Hammock yells to Baksh that he is a “Muslim terrorist.”
  1. May 16, 2016 – Michelle Flaherty of Naples, FL, writes a letter to the editor that is print in The Naples Daily News claiming that “the Quran is not a book of peace and faith, it is a plan for complete world domination, to return to a tribal mentality left over from hundreds and hundreds of years.”
  1. May 19, 2016 – Local Republican precinct chair, an aide to a Houston City Council member and chaplain for the Harris County GOP in Houston, TX, Trebor Gordon, stands up and attempts to block a man named Syed Ali from serving as precinct chair because he is Muslim. When challenged, he argues that Islam is not a real religion, and that he thus cannot be accused of engaging in religious discrimination.
  1. May 19, 2016 – Former director of the Pentagon intelligence agency Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, who advises Presidential-hopeful Donald Trump, tells Al Jazeera that he supports Trump’s proposed Muslim ban.
  1. May 19, 2016 – Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says on Fox News that he believes the “first test…ought to be, are we dealing with people who believe in Sharia and who want to impose Islamic supremacism?” when hiring airport workers.
  1. May 19, 2016 – Sarah Alzu’bi of Murfreesboro, TN, is driving alongside a man who begins spitting at her car, calling her a terrorist, and yelling other profanities.
  1. May 21, 2016 – 49-year-old Serajul Khan is punched 10 to 15 times by a passenger he is driving in his cab in the Bronx, NY. The man also yells “I’m going to kill you, you Muslim a____!” before stealing Khan’s wallet and phone, while Khan climbs out of the cab to safety.
  1. May 21, 2016 – Laurie Bartlett, a Republican Candidate for the Florida State House, hosts an event called “Understanding the Impact of Refugee Resettlement” at the Vision Church in Santa Rosa Beach. The event features a plethora of anti-Islamic speakers, one of whom says “The only home for America is the church.”
  1. May 21, 2016 – Members of the Heart of Texas white supremacist group hold a “Stop Islamization of Texas” protest outside the new Islamic Da’wah Center in Houston, TX. One protestor says “The darker our population gets in color, the worse off we are.”
  1. May 22, 2016 – A protest and counterprotest break out after a sign outside the Belmont Drive Missionary Baptist Church in Hood River, OR, that reads “Wake up Christians, Allah is not our God, Muhammad not Greater than Jesus.”
  1. May 23, 2016 – Ricardo Belalcazar and Danny Barrientos, bosses at Temco Services Industries in New York City, NY, allegedly drag their Muslim employee, Saeed Aobad, into their office and confront him, saying “What are your people doing in Brussels?”, telling him that he looks like one of the terror suspects in Belgium, make him swear he has no connections to ISIS, and hurl all kinds of racial slurs sat him, including “sandn____,” “Jew killer,” and “Middle Eastern homo terrorist.”
  1. May 23, 2016 – Investigators find that former SeaTac, WA, city manager James “Donny” Payne had “stated an interest in knowing with a great deal of specificity (to the neighborhood, house, and even person) where Sunni and Shiite Muslim residents lived” due to concerns about potential for terrorism.
  1. May 23, 2016 – Nura Takkish and Malaak Ammari, two hijabis who are eating at Andrew’s Ice Cream and Dessert in Orange County, CA, are yelled at by a man who says “I don’t want them near my country” as he is thrown out by the shop owners for being racist.
  1. May 23, 2016 – A man emails a member of the Islamic Center of Golden, CO, that “In my pockets I carry two extra magazines — even so I would run out of bullets before you ran out of Muslims…There is power in the blood of Jesus!”
  1. May 23, 2016 – An 11-year-old girl named Khaoula is harassed by anti-Muslim protestors while trying to speak at an event organized by the Florida Atlantic University Muslim Students Association on Islamophobia in Boca Raton, FL.
  1. May 23, 2016 – Members of the Dudley Town Meeting in Dudley, Massachusetts, vote to buy a piece of land that the Islamic Society of Greater Worcester had hoped to purchase for use as a Muslim cemetery after expressing anti-Muslim sentiments at previous meetings surrounding the topic.
  1. May 24, 2016 – Notorious Islamophobe James Simpson of Rutland, VT, gives a speech to a standing room only crowd about “radical imams” and jihad and warns against the town’s Muslim refugee resettlement plans.
  1. May 25, 2016 – Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee notice that H.R. 5203, the Visa Integrity and Security Act of 2016, “without any exception for age or any other factor…singles out a handful of majority Muslim countries thereby dehumanizing entire populations by treating all of their nationals as potential terrorists.”
  1. May 26, 2016 – BAIR members train to kill Muslim with pigs’ blood and bacon grease-coated bullets in a video published by AJ+.
  1. May 27, 2016 – A Friendly Mini Mart owned by Indians in Salem, MA, has “Arab I.E.D. Sleeper Cell” spray-painted on its windows.
  1. May 27, 2016 – Usama Dakdok, the founder of the Straight Way of Grace Ministry, speaks at the Granite City Baptist Church in St. Cloud, MN, and says that Islam is a religion aimed at taking over the world.
  1. May 30, 2016 – 47-year-old Davinder Singh, an Indian immigrant who’d been in the U.S. for 25 years, is shot to death outside his gas station in Newark, NJ, likely for wearing a turban as part of his Sikh faith.