A 6-year-old Muslim boy was stabbed 26 times in the US on Saturday.
Washington:
In the days following Hamas’s bloody attack on Israel, many Arab and Muslim Americans have worried about signs of a return to the atmosphere of distrust that hung over their communities in the United States after September 11.
Those fears were brutally underlined when a boy of Palestinian descent was stabbed to death in Illinois.
Six-year-old Wadea Al-Fayoume was stabbed 26 times by his family’s 71-year-old landlord on Saturday, police said, accusing the attacker of hate crimes.
The man shouted: “You Muslims must die” at the child’s mother, who was seriously injured in the attack, according to text messages the mother sent to the slain boy’s father while he was in hospital and quoted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. CAIR).
Police said Wadea and his mother “were targeted by the suspect due to their Muslim status and the ongoing conflict in the Middle East involving Hamas and the Israelis.”
President Joe Biden, who has expressed unwavering support for Israel, said he was “shocked and sickened” by the attack and stressed that he rejects Islamophobia.
The little boy “paid the price for the atmosphere of hatred, otherization and dehumanization,” said Ahmed Rehab, head of CAIR’s Chicago office.
“We have warned that we should not repeat the same mistake we made after September 11,” he said. “But here we are.”
Tension
Sarah Suzuki Harvard, 30, grew up in Plainfield, Illinois, where Wadea Al-Fayoume was murdered.
“We are returning to the Islamophobic levels of September 11 – and it will only get worse,” she said on X, formerly known as Twitter.
The former journalist and comedian, whose father is Moroccan and mother Japanese, told AFP she remembers a difficult environment in the years after the September 11, 2001 al-Qaeda attacks in New York and Washington, and the “intimidation” she faced witnessed as a child.
The situation was so bad, she said, that her family decided to change their surname to avoid discrimination.
When she heard about the little boy’s murder, she said she felt “so much pain and sadness.”
“Then I got scared because my family lives there,” she said.
“I texted my dad: ‘Be careful when you go to the mosque. I love you. Make sure you tell my aunt and uncle.'”
Zenjabela, a 23-year-old New Yorker of Palestinian descent who preferred not to give her full name, said she had felt “hostility” toward her in recent days, adding that she had seen people in her neighborhood being verbally abused for being said: “as-salaam alaikum” – an Islamic greeting that means “Peace be upon you” in Arabic.
“I have never felt so concerned about the perception of Muslims, Palestinians and Arabs in general,” she told AFP.
‘All anti-Semitic’
Against this backdrop of rising tensions, some U.S. elected officials have released statements that many have called inflammatory.
“The United States should have no role in providing aid to Gaza for the same reason the US did not provide aid to Nazi Germany. Aid to Gaza will only prolong Hamas’ rule,” Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas wrote on social media.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is running in the Republican party primaries, stated that the United States cannot accept refugees from Gaza because “they are not all Hamas, but they are all anti-Semitic.”
“How incredibly destructive and dangerous that rhetoric is,” Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told CNN.
“We just had a six-year-old boy stabbed 26 times … because of that kind of rhetoric,” she said. “It is unacceptable. It is reckless and no leader in the United States of America should send such a message.”
Aya Hijazi, a 36-year-old American social justice activist born to an Egyptian mother and a Lebanese father, said she feels “silenced and demonized.”
“It’s actually like having to prove that you’re not a terrorist,” she told AFP.
“I like to wear the keffiyeh,” the black and white scarf that symbolizes the Palestinian cause.
But, she said, “now I think twice and thrice” before putting it on.
“I’m a mother now,” the Virginia native said. “Am I putting my daughter in danger?”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
