Yes, you read that correctly. A woman in Midtown, New York City was wearing traditional Muslim garb, and someone set her on fire. The unnamed 36-year-old woman had her blouse set on fire.
On Sunday, we remembered the horrific attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.
The incident happened Saturday night just before the 9/11 anniversary. The attacker didn’t talk to the woman at all. There was not any confrontation between victim and attacker. The victim was not able to identify her attacker before they fled the scene.
Ibrahim Hooper, of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said:
“[The attack is] symptomatic of the overall rise in Islamophobic sentiment in our society. That’s based on the spike across the country in hate crimes and hate incidents, in recent days and over the past year.”
The police have not designated this a hate crime yet. Unfortunately, this incident was not the only attack on Muslims this week. On Thursday of last week, two Muslim women were attacked in Brooklyn, New York City.
Emirjeta Xhelili is 32-years-old and she attacked two Muslim women who were walking with their babies. She beat up the two Muslim victims and was trying to rip the hijabs off of their heads. She screamed this at them:
“Get the fuck out of here! Get the fuck out of America, bitches!”
Xhelili is an immigrant from Albania, where the majority of the population is Muslim.
District Attorney Kelli Muse said:
“She didn’t even care for the well-being of a baby — that’s how serious this hate crime is.”
New York is not the only place that has experienced Islamophobic attacks. In Florida, the mosque where the Pulse nightclub shooter, Omar Mateen, attended was burned to the ground.
Major David Thompson of the sheriff’s office said:
“Right now, I don’t want to speculate on a motive. We all know the implications of the date and the time of year. This is the 9/11 anniversary. Is that related? I would not want to speculate, but it is in the back of our minds. This is a horrible tragedy, not only for the Islamic Center but also for our community.”
These hate crimes against the Muslim community need to stop.
Here is a news clip about the woman who was set on fire:
Featured image by Michael Coghlan via Flickr, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.
