When a 17 year-old finds her mother unconscious and beaten up next to a note that says “Go back to your country, you terrorist,” and claims that some people are entitled to be Islamophobic still persist, then this world really needs an intervention.
On Wednesday, Fatima Al-Himidi found her 32 year-old mother, Shaima Al-Awadi, beaten with a tire iron repeatedly on the head in her home in California. When she arrived at the hospital, she was brain dead. Three days later her family decided to take her off life support.
The news caused outrage througout El Cajon, California home to one of the biggest Iraqi communities in America. Interestingly, or rather annoyingly, the police are very reserved in their statements pertaining to this obvious hate crime. In a strange way, it seems, they’re trying to calm things down by shrugging off claims that the attack was backed by blatant racism as long as they could.
Al-Awadi had received a threatening note several days before being killed but didn’t report it because she considered it a prank. Yet, despite this and the note left beside her dead body, the police stated, “The minute you rule out a possible motive, you start to get tunnel vision. As of now, we have not ruled out any of the motives for why people kill people."
Also, according to the Los Angeles Times yesterday, the police said that no matter what the motive is, it’s still “an isolated event.” This, to me, only makes them seem more concerned with making things appear normal and stable rather than being concerned with condemning such a heinous crime. The statements seem apathetic. I would be willing to bet the statements would have been much different if the attack had affected a Jewish family.
After 9/11, Islamophobia became somewhat expected as a normal reaction in the West. For 10 years since then, Muslims around the world have the need to defend themselves and to assert that the vicious attack on the Twin Towers contradicts their core beliefs. Muslims too were killed in 9/11. But social discrimination is still reported often.
Remember the mayhem caused due to the Islamic Center that was going to be built two blocks away from Ground Zero in 2010? Protests broke out against it and, unfortunately, anti-Muslim political campaigns were rendered normal — and even commended by many. For instance, an ad objecting the Islamic Center depicting a plane flying towards the World Trade Center as it burned while the mosque was on the right was set to be featured on New York buses, according to CNN in August 2010.
In another incident in 2010, members of a Tea Party group in Temecula, California, took barking dogs and anti-Muslim banners to Friday prayers at a neighborhood mosque. Protesters were enraged by plans to build a new mosque in a nearby area.
And this is the problem: the lack of condemnation of Islamophobia and its use to win public opinion is infuriating on so many levels. Presidential political debates basically revolve around which Arab country full of those those backward Muslim people to bomb first. But this is not normal, this is racism.
Sadly, Al-Awadi now is nothing but an example. A mother, a wife and a daughter has become an example for us to list in articles objecting to hate, which will still remain unheard, unrecognized and dismissed. How long will Muslims of the world keep defending themselves against crimes some of them were actually killed in?
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