Is It in My Head?

motherjones.com

The last time she was called a terrorist, Eman* was drinking coffee in a to-go cup and waiting for the train at the Powell Street BART Station in San Francisco. It was rush hour, and dozens of morning commuters stood near the Mission High School senior from Yemen.

She froze in fear when an older commuter in a suit and tie started yelling at her for wearing hijab and drinking coffee. "Why do you drink this? This is not your culture," she recalls him saying first. "Eat your own food if you want to wear the scarf!" The anti-Islam insults worsened, continuing until the train came, she says. Not one adult near her said anything to the man in the suit.

"Maybe they didn't hear it?" I ask Eman, who today is wearing a light blue headscarf with silver stitching around the edges. "They heard it," she assures me. "The man was yelling, and most people were looking at me. One person was even smiling."

Maybe it's because, unlike the Mission High seniors in Mr. Velez's class, more than 50 percent of Americans know little or nothing about Islam, the Pew Center found last year. Maybe it's because high-ranking government officials—like House Homeland Security Committee chairman Peter King (R-NY)—spew the hateful lies that "Muslims aren't "American" and "over 80 percent of mosques in this country are controlled by radical Imams." (ThinkProgress' Scott Keys looked at the best research on the topic, and says that such claims are wrong.) Despite this, there is some silver lining for students like Eman: the number of reported crimes targeting Muslims nationally has gone down since the uptick post-9/11.

adailyriot:

redguard:

Check out the uber-creepy Tea Party email below, released by no less than teaparty.org.

In it, the Tea Party folks argue that America is exclusively “Judeo-Christian” and that Islam should be “expelled from our shores.”

And that’s just for starters.

The rest of the email displays a fundemental disdain for a pluralistic America and reveals chilling levels of Islamophobia and hatemongering.

It poses the freakish question: “Will ‘blanket tolerance’ be the downfall of the Judaic/Christian basis of the American society?”

It quotes select passages from of the Quran out of context, a game that can just as easily be played with the Torah or the Bible.

It then suggests to its members that Muslims at large — not terrorists, mind you, but Muslims at large — plan for the “complete annihilation of the west,” for “our demise,” for “our destruction,” and that they are “working dilligently” to “celebrate the day America will be no more.” It warns that “the United States Judaic/Christian roots are being ‘God Shocked,’” and wonders if “the courts should hand down a litmus test” for religions before they are “expelled from our shores.”