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

November, 2015

1. November 1, 2015 – Two teens egg and spray-paint “USA” repeatedly on the walls of the Islamic Center of Burlington, MA.
2. November 2, 2015 – The Ocean County Police Academy in New Jersey hosts notorious Islamophobe Walid Shoebat who has called Islam “the Devil” for a “Know Your Enemy” training program. The training includes tips such as being suspicious of any Muslim learning martial arts.
3. November 2, 2015 – The Virginia Tech Police Department receives a report of graffiti in a Price Hall bathroom stating “I will be here 11/11/2015 to kill all muslims [sic].”
4. November 6, 2015 – Balwinder Jit Singh, a Sikh bus driver in Los Angeles, CA, is assaulted by a passenger who calls him a “terrorist” and leaves him with a swollen and bruised face and jaw, as well as a black eye and an eye infection.
5. November 7, 2015 – Dallas City Councilor Micky Garus posts a Facebook rant about Muslims asking “Do you feel comfortable having this growing Muslim population in our country, knowing that their ultimate goal is too [sic] cleanse the earth of all nonbelievers?”
6. November 9, 2015 – Robert James Talbot of Katy, TX, receives just 6 and a half years in jail after being arrested in 2014 for plotting to rob banks, then shoot up mosques around the country with a machine-gun.
7. November 10, 2015 – Foreign Policy publishes an article revealing that Presidential-hopeful Ben Carson’s leading foreign-policy advisor is retired Army officer Robert F. Dees, a man famous for his anti-Islamic comments, including the statement claiming that Muslims have “infiltrated” the United States.
8. November 13, 2015 – A pregnant hijabi pushing her chid in a stroller was yelled at by a man in Mission Valley, CA, before the man pushed the stroller towards her in an attempt to assault her. The woman reported that this was not the first time this same man had tried to harass her.
9. November 14, 2015 – Hours after the Paris terrorist attacks, the Islamic Society of Pinellas County in St. Petersburg, FL, receives a hateful and threatening voicemail claiming that “We are tired of your (expletive) and I (expletive) personally have a militia that is going to come down to your Islamic Society of Pinellas County and firebomb you and shoot whoever is there in the head. I don’t care if they are (expletive) two-years-old or 100. I am over your (expletive) (expletive) and our whole country is.”
10. November 14, 2015 – The Islamic Center of Omaha, NE, is targeted for a third time in four months as someone spray-paints an image of the Eiffel Tower in the middle of a peace sign, which is a symbol that emerged as a sign of solidarity after the Paris attacks.
11. November 14, 2015 – UConn junior Mahmoud Hashem returns to his room to find an addition to the name tag on his room reading “killed Paris.”
12. November 14, 2015 – 28-year-old Sara Beebe, a Navy veteran, tweets “Dearborn, MI has the highest Muslim population in the United States. Let’s f**k that place up and send a message to ISIS. We’re coming,” before deleting her twitter account and being investigated by the FBI.
13. November 14, 2015 – Multiple gunshots are fired at the Baitul Aman mosque in Meriden, CT, penetrating three interior walls.
14. November 15, 2015 – Christian protesters picket outside Portland, OR’s Rizwan Mosque, yelling through a megaphone and calling Muslims “the pawns of Satan,” and claiming that “God hates Muslims.”
15. November 15, 2015 – 55-year-old Amir Elmasri’s home in Orange County, FL, is shot at and sprayed with bullets. Bullet-holes are found in his family’s garage door and a wall inside the house, while one bullet traveled all the way into a dresser drawer in his bedroom.
16. November 15, 2015 – Christian Alexander Pean, a Mount Sinai medical student of Haitian and Mexican descent, is stopped at a movie theater in Manhattan, NY, while texting. A man insinuates that he is behaving suspiciously as he believes the Paris attackers were “guys like you texting and standing,” before attempting to reach into Pean’s jacket.
17. November 15, 2015 – Robert Jeffress of the First Baptist Dallas megachurch states that “Islam is a false religion, and it is inspired by Satan himself,” in his Sunday sermon, adding that “This weekend we saw the fruit of Satan’s destruction in the acts of these terrorists,” in response to the Paris attacks.
18. November 15, 2015 – Samson Woldemichael, an Ethiopian Christian Uber driver in Charlotte, NC, is asked if he is Muslim by a passenger before being beaten while driving the passenger to his home and told that he would be shot.
19. November 15, 2015 – 47-year-old Mark Riedel of Norman, OK, is shot and disarmed by police after threatening to shoot Muslims, saying he was “going to go out there and just start shooting anything that looks like a Muslim after what they did to France.”
20. November 15, 2015 – 2 Middle-Eastern passengers are removed from an American Airlines flight from Washington, D.C., to Boston, MA, after the flight crew worries that they are behaving suspiciously. They are cleared of all suspicion before being accommodated another flight.
21. November 15, 2015 – A young hijabi woman is followed out of a Hyde Park, OH, Kroger into the parking lot, verbally assaulted, and has her hijab pulled on by an older man and a woman before she eventually is able to get in her car and escape.
22. November 15, 2015 – Haneen Jasim, a hijabi student at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio is called a “terrorist” by a man in a car at a red light before he attempts to run her over with his car.
23. November 16, 2015 – Multiple Republican governors say they will not accept Syrian refugees into their states in the wake of the Paris attacks.
24. November 16, 2015 – Members of the Islamic Center of Pflugerville, TX, arrive at the mosque to find the door of the center covered in feces and torn pages of the Qur’an.
25. November 17, 2015 – 26-year-old Clayton Alexander Cansler of New Territory, TX, sends a direct message saying he will “shoot up a mosque” and is subsequently arrested.
26. November 17, 2015 – 38-year-old Mariano Talavera is arrested after he refuses to leave the Islamic Center of San Antonio, TX. He yelled obscenities and began wiping his boots on the prayer rugs in the mosque before being detained.
27. November 17, 2015 – Two men yell that “every Muslim is a terrorist” and that “Islam is an evil cult” at Samer Shalaby of the Islamic Center of Fredericksburg, VA, during a town hall meeting to discuss moving the mosque for expansion.
28. November 17, 2015 – Four passengers of Middle-Eastern descent are asked to get off a Spirit Airlines flight from Baltimore, MD, to Chicago, IL, moments before take-off. A fellow passenger had alerted a flight attendant of “suspicious activity,” including having carry-on luggage and watching the news on a mobile phone.
29. November 17, 2015 – Presidential-hopeful Donald Trump refuses to rule-out requiring Muslim Americans to register themselves in a database or giving them special religious-based IDs, similar to what Jews were forced to wear in Nazi Germany.
30. November 17, 2015 – An unidentified seventh-grade world history teacher in Huntington Beach, CA, custom-wrote lyrics to Rachel Patten’s “Fight Song” to include messages about Islam; while the lyrics were problematic themselves enough to the point that the teacher’s intentions are unclear, angry parents speak out against the discussion of Islam in the slightest at the next school board meeting.
31. November 17, 2015 – A Denver, CO, bookstore called “Isis Books & Gifts” falls victim to vandalism after a someone throws a rock through their window. This is the fourth time the business has been vandalized in the past several months – the front door of the store has also had its glass smashed, pink paint has been thrown across the front of the store, and the sign has been broken before.
32. November 18, 2015 – Two Palestinian Americans, Maher Khalil and Anas Ayyad, are waiting for a Southwest Airlines flight from Chicago Midway to Philadelphia when they are told they cannot board after another passenger reported feeling uncomfortable hearing them speak Arabic. They are forced to call 911 to make sure they can make their flight.
33. November 18, 2015 – Former Marine Jon Ritzheimer posts a disturbing video online announcing that he will travel from Arizona to Islamberg, NY, to “see those assholes who called me a f___ing terrorist. “We’re gonna stop at virtually every mosque along the way, flip them off, and tell them to get f__ed,” he rants in the video while cocking a handgun. He is eventually stopped by the FBI after being told he would be arrested if he brings a gun into NY.
34. November 18, 2015 – Roanoke, VA, Mayor David Bowers makes a statement praising the interment of Japanese Americans during World War II and advises taking similar action with regards to current Syrian refugees.
35. November 18, 2015 – Sedgwick County Commissioner Karl Peterjohn of Wichita, KS, presents a slideshow of people who are named Mohammed who have committed crimes as a “public warning for citizens.” He continued by stating that “In light of the most recent Muslim atrocities committed against Russian civilian aircraft and the people in Paris, including at least one American citizen lost their life, we have a, in my opinion, a clear and present danger in our own country.”
36. November 19, 2015 – Presidential-hopeful Ben Carson compares Syrian refugees to “rabid dogs,” telling Mobile, AL, supporters that “By the same token, we have to have in place screening mechanisms that allow us to determine who the mad dogs are, quite frankly. Who are the people who want to come in here and hurt us and want to destroy us? Until we know how to do that, just like it would be foolish to put your child out into the neighborhood knowing that that was going on, it is foolish for us to accept people if we cannot have the appropriate type of screening.”
37. November 19, 2015 – The United States House of Representatives passes a bill effectively halting President Obama’s Syrian refugee resettlement plan in light of the Paris attacks.
38. November 19, 2015 – A female student at SDSU in San Diego, CA, reports being battered and dragged by her scarf by a white male while being threatened with ethnic slurs.
39. November 19, 2015 – Teresa Church of Austin, TX, finds a note written on a flyer with her gym’s schedule after leaving the gym on her SUV windshield telling her to “Go away,” despite the fact that she was born in America.
40. November 19, 2015 – Following an argument at the mosque, 27-year-old Chester H. Gore forces his way into the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, VA, before throwing Molotov cocktails into the mosque’s parking lot, and detonating a fake explosive. The damage amounts to around $200.
41. November 19, 2015 – A Muslim sixth-grader is attacked during recess at Public School 89 in the Bronx, NY, when three boys call her “ISIS,” and attempt to rip off her hijab while punching her.
42. November 20, 2015 – The LAPD investigates an Instagram post allegedly made by an LAPD officer that completely inaccurately claims that Japan “keeps Islam at bay by putting restrictions on Islam and ALL Muslims.” The user captioned the post with “If that doesn’t sound ‘politically correct,’ ‘eff it. I value safety over political correctness in this instance.”
43. November 20, 2015 – The Islamic Center of South Texas in Corpus Christi, TX, receives a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad holding a sign referencing the Charlie Hebdo attacks. The letter also included a message: “Convert To Christianity Before It’s Too Late!!!”
44. November 20, 2015 – Danton Coley, a postal worker, spits in the face of and yelled ethnic slurs at a 30-year-old Muslim hijabi woman and her baby in Brooklyn, NY, yelling at her “I’m going to burn down your temple,” in addition to elbowing her.
45. November 21, 2015 – Around a dozen protestors from the Bureau of American Islamic Relations (BAIR), a notoriously Islamophobic group, stand on the sidewalk outside the Islamic Center of Irving, TX, with firearms and signs reading “Stop the Islamization of America.” The group’s spokesman said the protest was in response to Syrian refugees entering America.
46. November 24, 2015 – A student-run affiliate of the Islamic Center of South Plains in Lubbock, TX – the Texas Tech student mosque – is vandalized when someone smashed the front glass door of the building overnight.
47. November 24, 2015 – Stanford graduate, Fulbright scholar, and contributing editor at The New Inquiry Kameelah Rasheed was detained by customs agents on her way to Istanbul at Newark Liberty International Airport. Her cellphone and passport are confiscated before she is allowed to board, before eventually being removed from the plane and interrogated by the FBI for two and a half hours.
48. November 25, 2015 – Officer Alex Pino of the Hudson County Sheriff’s Office, in West New York, NJ, makes a Facebook comment filled with expletives including “F_ the Kuran [sic] F_ the Muslims F_ the terrorist. Trump for President. S_ on the mosques. Tear them all down.” He later has his weapon confiscated, and is put on administrative leave.
49. November 25, 2015 – Sana Rashid, a pharmacist in Manhattan, NY, is called a terrorist and told to get out of his country by a customer, who continues to verbally assault her until one of Rashid’s employees is able to kick him out.
50. November 25, 2015 – Just days after organizing an armed protest outside of a mosque in Irving, TX, BAIR posts a list of 60 Muslims and “Muslim sympathizers” along with their addresses who spoke out against an Islamophobic bill going through the state legislature.
51. November 26, 2015 – A Muslim taxi driver in Pittsburgh, PA, who has chosen to remain anonymous for fear of his safety, is shot after his passenger questions him and finds out that he is Moroccan before beginning a rant about ISIS. The shooter escapes.
52. November 27, 2015 – The Islamic Center of Lexington, KY, is forced to up their security and have a guard placed at their location after it receives an email stating “I’m going to kill everyone I there [sic] you Muslim f___s. Salabis is coming for you.”
53. November 28, 2015 – “Vive la France” is posted on the front page of the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix, AZ, after the “France Hack Team” briefly takes over its website.