aAlmost every week, Rafat Issa flies a Palestinian flag on a pedestrian bridge in Durham, North Carolina. But on July 28, a man wearing a baseball cap pulled out a knife and cut the flag off the iron railing. Issa said the man taunted him and his family before brandishing a knife at him and his family. They had seven children, including Issa’s four-month-old daughter.
“He told us, ‘Go back to where you came from,'” Issa says. “It was scary… We weren’t doing anything wrong. We were peacefully protesting.”
Issa is a 42-year-old Palestinian-American barber who has lived in North Carolina for over 10 years. His parents and siblings are in the West Bank, where settler violence against Palestinians is escalating. His experience is one of many examples of anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim hatred documented by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CARE) since October 7 of last year. “We’re seeing an increase in violent vigilante responses to peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters,” said Nicole Fauster-Bradford, Care’s director of community advocacy.
Advocates say the aftermath of Oct. 7 in the U.S. expanded the surveillance powers the government wielded primarily against Muslim and Arab communities, echoing post-9/11 fears as hate crimes against them skyrocketed. It is said that there is a response.
“Islamophobia appears in cycles, often tied to something in the news,” says Corey Saylor, director of research and advocacy at CARE. The past year has “highlighted the enormity” of anti-Muslim hatred, he continued.
Meanwhile, the past year has also seen a movement for Palestinian rights whose scale and visibility was unprecedented. “This is not a community that was targeted for retaliation after 9/11. It’s much stronger now,” Saylor said. “There was some fear early on, and I would say that turned into complete resilience.”
FBetween January and June this year, Mr Keir reviewed around 5,000 complaints of suspected Islamophobia. This is an increase of more than two-thirds compared to the same period last year. The volume of incidents was particularly bad in the immediate aftermath of October 7th. In the last three months of 2023, Care received more than 3,500 complaints. This was an increase of almost 180% compared to the corresponding month in 2022.
Keir defines Islamophobia as fear, hatred, or prejudice against Islam or Muslims that is perpetuated by people or organizations. Many of the incidents last year involved anti-Palestinian censorship and discrimination. Keir said he was counting these incidents because anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian prejudice are often conflated. Experts say the origins of anti-Muslim sentiment actually lie in anti-Palestinian discrimination. Arab Americans who organized on behalf of Palestine in the 1960s and ’70s were monitored by the government, and some of the country’s first anti-terrorism laws were developed in response to Palestine’s liberation. Struggling.
Some of last year’s most violent incidents included the stabbing of 6-year-old Wadea al-Fayoumeh in Chicago and the shooting death of three Palestinian college students in Vermont, one of whom was a 21-year-old. There was an incident in which Hisham Awartani was paralyzed. But far more common is what supporters see as censorship and punishment of students and employees for being pro-Palestinian.
“After 9/11, the response was more like typical bigotry in grocery stores targeting hijabi Muslims. It was reactionary and the kind of discrimination we were used to. ,” said Abed Ayoub, national executive director of the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee. He added that the targeting of students and employees since October 7 feels systematic.
Of the approximately 5,000 complaints received by CARE in the first half of this year, 19% related to immigration and asylum, 14% to employment discrimination, 10% to education discrimination and 8% to hate crimes and similar incidents. announced that it was doing so. Keir said immigration cases – where people from Muslim-majority countries often face special scrutiny – have long been the most common complaint they receive. .
What’s new is that people are being targeted at their schools and workplaces “in personal ways we’ve never seen before,” Saylor said. This could include, for example, students or employees facing disciplinary action for social media posts supporting Palestine. The group says these cases are because the rules are often inconsistently enforced, such as workplaces and schools punishing employees with different political views for sending pro-Israel emails. considered to be discriminatory.
Palestine Legal, a nonprofit organization that has filed more than a dozen complaints with the Education Department alleging anti-Palestinian discrimination, says rules are often ignored when it comes to pro-Palestinian speech. “(Students) are being dragged into disciplinary hearings without any due process. They are suspended before the disciplinary hearing has concluded,” said Dima, the organization’s founder and director.・Mr. Halliday says.
Like CARE, the Palestinian Authority for Justice has been inundated with cases in the three months since October 7, receiving more than 1,000 requests during that time. (That’s four times the number of requests received in all of 2022.) Both organizations note that the tally may be an undercount.
Alongside these incidents, anti-Semitism is also on the rise. Anti-Semitic hate crimes increased by nearly two-thirds in 2023, from 1,122 documented incidents to 1,832, according to FBI data released in September. It was not immediately clear how many of those incidents occurred after Oct. 7. The Anti-Defamation League has also recorded a spike in anti-Semitic incidents, but its data has been questioned for conflating anti-Semitism with criticism of Israel.
aAdvocates argue that rhetoric conflating Arab Americans with terrorism has become commonplace, a pattern reminiscent of the post-9/11 environment. Last month, Republican Sen. John Kennedy repeatedly suggested, without evidence, that Maya Berry, director of the Arab American Institute, supported Hamas and said it should “hide its head in a bag.” That same month, National Review published a cartoon depicting U.S. Representative Rashida Tlaib holding an exploding pager. This came days after pagers exploded across Lebanon in an operation widely believed to be carried out by Israel, targeting Hezbollah.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, numerous laws were enacted to justify law enforcement actions against Americans in the name of fighting terrorism. Although the post-October 7 environment has not reached such a climax, civil rights groups have found themselves opposing many initiatives over the last year for conflating legitimate anti-war activities with terrorism. A coalition of more than 120 organizations, including the ACLU, Amnesty International USA, and CARE, recently issued an open letter warning against measures to strip nonprofit status from organizations deemed to support terrorism. Pro-Palestinian student organization.
Ramzi Kasem, co-director and founder of Clear, a legal nonprofit and clinic at the City University of New York, said his organization has seen an increase in complaints from people approached by the FBI and police in the last year. He said that Other agencies involved in protests, such as door knocking, protests at airports and borders, and when applying for immigration benefits. They include not only Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims, but also people from other backgrounds who support Palestinian rights and oppose current policies of the United States and Israel.
History shows that progressive movements that challenge the status quo are often met with scrutiny and disruption by U.S. law enforcement, he says. We are now witnessing it again. ”
But none of the hostility from neighbors, school administrators, and policy makers seems to have dampened what has become a mass movement for the liberation of Palestine. On August 22, a few weeks after Issa’s flag was cut down, he returned to the American Tobacco Trail Bridge with a friend. Issa said another stranger approached them and told them to take down the sign — this time with a gun. The two friends followed the man to write down his license plate, but retreated when he threatened to shoot them.
Issa reported both incidents to police, but law enforcement has so far declined to press charges. Meanwhile, Issa can’t imagine not protesting. He’s going back to the bridge. “We have to feed our families. It’s not safe, but it’s no more dangerous than what they’re going through,” he says. “We must continue. It is our duty.”
