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With the growing fear of ISIS the irrational fear of Muslims grows as well. Many people are ignorant enough to believe that all Muslims are a part of the terrorist group, thus sparking Islamophobia. Islamophobia is dangerous because it singles out an entire race as the 'bad guys', making millions of innocent people become targets for hate crimes. If awareness of the problems Islamophobia causes does not spread then the Muslim community is at constant risk of falling victim ti hate crimes.

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Confused Islamophobes Target American Sikhs: The Daily Show

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In the cartoon it is shown that these people are more concerned about a religious center being too close the the World Trade Center site than the large corporate businesses.

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This cartoon shows the double standard created against Muslims out of the irrational fear known as Islamophobia.

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"DON'T go anywhere near a mosque," I told my mother. "Do all your prayer at home. O.K.?"

"We're not going," she replied.

I am the son of Muslim immigrants. As I sent that text, in the aftermath of the horrible attack in Orlando, Fla., I realized how awful it was to tell an American citizen to be careful about how she worshiped.

Being Muslim American already carries a decent amount of baggage. In our culture, when people think "Muslim," the picture in their heads is not usually of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or the kid who left the boy band One Direction. It's of a scary terrorist character from "Homeland" or some monster from the news.

Today, with the presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and others like him spewing hate speech, prejudice is reaching new levels. It's visceral, and scary, and it affects how people live, work and pray. It makes me afraid for my family. It also makes no sense.

There are approximately 3.3 million Muslim Americans. After the attack in Orlando, The Times reported that the F.B.I. is investigating 1,000 potential "homegrown violent extremists," a majority of whom are most likely connected in some way to the Islamic State. If everyone on that list is Muslim American, that is 0.03 percent of the Muslim American population. If you round that number, it is 0 percent. The overwhelming number of Muslim Americans have as much in common with that monster in Orlando as any white person has with any of the white terrorists who shoot up movie theaters or schools or abortion clinics.

I asked a young friend of mine, a woman in her 20s of Muslim heritage, how she had been feeling after the attack. "I just feel really bad, like people think I have more in common with that idiot psychopath than I do the innocent people being killed," she said. "I'm really sick of having to explain that I'm not a terrorist every time the shooter is brown."

I myself am not a religious person, but after these attacks, anyone that even looks like they might be Muslim understands the feelings my friend described. There is a strange feeling that you must almost prove yourself worthy of feeling sad and scared like everyone else.

I understand that as far as these problems go, I have it better than most because of my recognizability as an actor. When someone on the street gives me a strange look, it's usually because they want to take a selfie with me, not that they think I'm a terrorist.

But I remember how those encounters can feel. A few months after the attacks of Sept. 11, I remember walking home from class near N.Y.U., where I was a student. I was crossing the street and a man swore at me from his car window and yelled: "Terrorist!" To be fair, I may have been too quick to cross the street as the light changed, but I'm not sure that warranted being compared to the perpetrators of one of the most awful incidents in human history.

The vitriolic and hate-filled rhetoric coming from Mr. Trump isn't so far off from cursing at strangers from a car window. He has said that people in the American Muslim community " know who the bad ones are," implying that millions of innocent people are somehow complicit in awful attacks. Not only is this wrongheaded; but it also does nothing to address the real problems posed by terrorist attacks. By Mr. Trump's logic, after the huge financial crisis of 2007-08, the best way to protect the American economy would have been to ban white males.

According to reporting by Mother Jones, since 9/11, there have been 49 mass shootings in this country, and more than half of those were perpetrated by white males. I doubt we'll hear Mr. Trump make a speech asking his fellow white males to tell authorities "who the bad ones are," or call for restricting white males' freedoms.

One way to decrease the risk of terrorism is clear: Keep military-grade weaponry out of the hands of mentally unstable people, those with a history of violence, and those on F.B.I. watch lists. But, despite sit-ins and filibusters, our lawmakers are failing us on this front and choose instead to side with the National Rifle Association. Suspected terrorists can buy assault rifles, but we're still carrying tiny bottles of shampoo to the airport. If we're going to use the "they'll just find another way" argument, let's use that to let us keep our shoes on.

Xenophobic rhetoric was central to Mr. Trump's campaign long before the attack in Orlando. This is a guy who kicked off his presidential run by calling Mexicans "rapists" who were "bringing drugs" to this country. Numerous times, he has said that Muslims in New Jersey were cheering in the streets on Sept. 11, 2001. This has been continually disproved, but he stands by it. I don't know what every Muslim American was doing that day, but I can tell you what my family was doing. I was studying at N.Y.U., and I lived near the World Trade Center. When the second plane hit, I was on the phone with my mother, who called to tell me to leave my dorm building.

The haunting sound of the second plane hitting the towers is forever ingrained in my head. My building was close enough that it shook upon impact. I was scared for my life as my fellow students and I trekked the panicked streets of Manhattan. My family, unable to reach me on my cellphone, was terrified about my safety as they watched the towers collapse. There was absolutely no cheering. Only sadness, horror and fear.

Mr. Trump, in response to the attack in Orlando, began a tweet with these words: "Appreciate the congrats." It appears that day he was the one who was celebrating after an attack.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page SR11 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump and My Fears for My Family. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Opinion | Aziz Ansari: Why Trump Makes Me Scared for My Family

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"DON'T go anywhere near a mosque," I told my mother. "Do all your prayer at home. O.K.?" "We're not going," she replied. I am the son of Muslim immigrants. As I sent that text, in the aftermath of the horrible attack in Orlando, Fla., I realized how awful it was to tell an American citizen to be careful about how she worshiped.

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THE Islamic Society of North America's headquarters sit atop a grassy hill overlooking Plainfield, Ind. The complex includes a prayer hall, a space for community events and a field house with a basketball court and playground. It is surrounded by cornfields. As the largest mosque in the Indianapolis area, it draws hundreds of families, especially during Ramadan and on holidays.

My own family was one of those. When I was growing up in the Indianapolis suburbs, we'd visit the mosque for Eid holiday prayers. After services, we'd say awkward hellos to my parents' friends, stand in line for stale doughnuts and tea and I'd try to find people my age to shoot a basketball around. In short, it is a fairly typical American house of worship. And last weekend, it became a target of vandalism. Slurs spray-painted on its brick exterior - most of them too crude to quote - suggested all Muslims are suicide bombers or members of the Islamic State.

Anti-Muslim hatred in the United States has grown in recent years. The "Ground Zero Mosque" episode in 2010 and successive anti-mosque protests across the country signaled a simmering Islamophobia. In 2015, the simmer came to a boil. That January, after a pair of terrorist attacks in Paris, pundits and conservative officials propagated a discredited myth about Shariah-run zones in European cities off limits to non-Muslims. Hashtags like #KillAllMuslims trended on Twitter. A month later, three Muslim youths were shot dead in their North Carolina apartment in what many people said was a hate crime.

An examination of anti-Muslim hatred in the last few years can easily devolve into a laundry list: armed demonstrators picketing at a mosque in Phoenix, arson at a mosque in the Coachella Valley in Southern California, a severed pig's head placed in front of a mosque in Philadelphia. But the most alarming signs accompanied the Republican presidential race, as each candidate seemed gleefully willing to one-up the others in vilifying Muslims.

Ben Carson compared Syrian refugees to "rabid" dogs. Ted Cruz called for allowing only Christian refugees to enter the United States. And Donald J. Trump, whose statements on Islam seem to be read directly off paranoid chain emails, first stated that American Muslims celebrated the horror of the Sept. 11 attacks (a discredited falsehood), then, after the San Bernardino, Calif., shooting, said that all Muslims should be barred from entering the United States. Most recently, Mr. Trump repeated a stomach-churning myth about an American general who solved a conflict with Muslim enemies by soaking ammunition in pigs' blood and shooting prisoners with it, a method of "getting tough" on terrorism.

So it was with a sense of quiet dread that I learned about the graffiti at the Islamic Society's headquarters, on the same wall in front of which I've taken countless family pictures. The wave of bigotry sweeping the country had finally crashed into the doorstep of my hometown mosque.

When I talked to family and friends in the area, I realized that the incident's timing contributed to deepening feelings of anxiety and vulnerability: Days earlier, I was told, a bomb threat was called in to nearby Anderson University when a Muslim woman was scheduled to speak on behalf of an interfaith group. The same weekend, three young men from a largely Muslim immigrant community were found murdered under mysterious circumstances in Fort Wayne, two and a half hours away.

It's easy to turn unpleasant episodes into broad feelings of doom - and that's often a mistake. The Islamic Society and the Indianapolis Muslim community found immediate support from the Indianapolis Jewish Community Relations Council and several local churches. Isolated incidents happen, and stray actors do carry out random acts of hatred.

But these hateful words stained my family's place of worship just a week after the Republican Party's leading presidential contender approvingly repeated a story about dipping bullets in pigs' blood and shooting Muslim rebels and two days before he won seven states in the primary. And all of this came in a year in which there were dozens of cases of harassment, vandalism and violence targeting members of my religion.

At a news conference, Hazem Bata, the Islamic Society's secretary general, said: "I'm not here to focus on the negative, because once you start focusing on the negative, you start to take on a victim's mentality. And as Muslims in America, we refuse to be victims in our own country." This is admirable. It's important to live without fear.

But there is a fine line between stoic resilience and irresponsible passivity. Muslims in America face a growing threat. It is up to everyone in this country to speak and act to fight the hatred and fear-mongering before it spirals out of control. Because to see words like those on the wall of my hometown mosque, at a time of accelerating anti-Muslim hatred, feels like someone, somewhere, is sharpening a knife.

Mustafa Hameed is a journalist living in New York.

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Opinion | When the Tide of Islamophobia Reached My Hometown Mosque

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THE Islamic Society of North America's headquarters sit atop a grassy hill overlooking Plainfield, Ind. The complex includes a prayer hall, a space for community events and a field house with a basketball court and playground. It is surrounded by cornfields.

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In a five minute presentation, a Kenton student talks about their religion, and how it has been portrayed in the media.

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With Western countries on high alert for terror attacks, nativist sentiment is increasing. In America, some politicians are stoking it for their own benefit

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WASHINGTON - The F.B.I. reported Monday that attacks against American Muslims surged last year, driving an overall increase in hate crime against all groups.

The data, which is the most comprehensive look at hate crime nationwide, expanded on previous findings by researchers and outside monitors, who have noted an alarming rise in some types of crimes tied to the vitriol of this year's presidential campaign and the aftermath of terrorist attacks at home and abroad since 2015.

That trend appears to have spiked in just the last week, with civil rights groups and news organizations reporting dozens of verbal or physical assaults on minorities and others that appear to have been fueled by divisions over the election.

In its report on Monday, the F.B.I. cataloged a total of 5,818 hate crimes in 2015 - a rise of about 6 percent over the previous year - including assaults, bombings, threats, and property destruction against minorities, women, gays and others.

Attacks against Muslim Americans saw the biggest surge. There were 257 reports of assaults, attacks on mosques and other hate crimes against Muslims last year, a jump of about 67 percent over 2014. It was the highest total since 2001, when more than 480 attacks occurred in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Attacks against transgender people also sharply increased.

Blacks were the most frequent victims of hate crimes based on race, while Jews were the most frequent victims based on religion, according to the F.B.I. data. But the increases in attacks on these groups were smaller than the rise in attacks against Muslims and transgender people.

Over all, 59 percent of the hate crimes that the F.B.I. recorded were based on the victims' race, ethnicity or ancestry. Religious bias accounted for about 20 percent of all attacks, and about 18 percent of attacks were based on sexual orientation.

Law enforcement officials acknowledge that the statistics give an incomplete picture because many local agencies still have a spotty record of reporting hate crimes, 26 years after Congress directed the Justice Department to begin collecting the data.

"We need to do a better job of tracking and reporting hate crime to fully understand what is happening in our communities and how to stop it," James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, said Monday. The F.B.I. regards the prosecution of hate crimes under federal jurisdiction as the top priority of its civil rights branch.

Since the election, hate crime monitors like the Southern Poverty Law Center have reported a rash of verbal or physical abuse targeting minorities and others at schools, mosques and elsewhere.

Some supporters of President-elect Donald J. Trump, however, say they too have been victimized.

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U.S. Hate Crimes Surge 6%, Fueled by Attacks on Muslims

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WASHINGTON - The F.B.I. reported Monday that attacks against American Muslims surged last year, driving an overall increase in hate crime against all groups.

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Hate crimes against Muslims in the United States shot up 67 percent in 2015 to their highest levels since the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, according to new FBI statistics.

Overall, 57 percent of the 5,850 reported incidents were motivated by race or ethnicity, while 20 percent of hate crimes were related to religious bias, t he federal law enforcement agency reported on Monday.

There were 257 incidents of anti-Muslim bias in 2015, compared with 154 the previous year. The number is second only to the surge in hate crimes following the 9/11 attacks in 2001, when 481 incidents against Muslims were reported.

While there was a huge increase in crimes against Muslims, Jews remained the most frequent target of religious-based hate crimes in the US, representing 53 percent of all those reported, the FBI said.
READ MORE: Reports of racist attacks rise after Donald Trump's win
The bureau's report also listed 1,053 hate crimes regarding sexual orientation, 19 percent of which were committed against gay males.

The report came at a time of heightened racial and religious tensions in the US following last week's presidential election.

Today, the FBI released 2015 hate crime stats, marking the 25th anniversary of the annual Hate Crime Statistics report. https://t.co/LuLkmytXFo pic.twitter.com/YH2fkyY8By
- FBI (@FBI) November 14, 2016

'Just a fraction'

Donald Trump just named a white supremacist as chief strategist. We have no reason to believe things are going to get better for the American Muslim community or other minorities any time soon.

Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR

"I think these statistics are just a fraction of what we see on the ground right now," Ibrahim Hooper, from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), told Al Jazeera.

"We witnessed a spark in the number of hate crimes against Muslims in late 2015, and this number increased further during Donald Trump's election campaign.

"We expect the situation to get worse in the future, based on the fact that Donald Trump had mainstreamed Islamophobia."

President-elect Trump's campaign had heavily focused on minorities, immigrants and Muslims, routinely painting these groups as threats to peace, the economy, and homeland security.

Famously while campaigning, Trump called for a ban on Muslims entering the US. He also promised to build a wall to block Mexicans.

In the first television interview since his election, Trump said he is planning to immediately deport or jail as many as three million undocumented immigrants.

There have been several reports of racist, Islamophobic and anti-semitic incidents since last Tuesday's election that have sparked outrage, including a mosque at New York University's Brooklyn campus being vandalised, and se veral Muslim women reporting Trump supporters attempting to rip off their headscarves.

A statement from Penn on the current events on campus. pic.twitter.com/CALK7OERup
- Penn (@Penn) November 11, 2016

Black students at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) said they were afraid to attend classes after they were subjected to racial slurs and threats of lynching following the election.

A videotaped assault in Chicago showed black men beating a white man as onlookers screamed, "You voted Trump!"

Hundreds of Americans also detailed on social media racist attacks that have taken place since the election.

San Jose State University sent an email that a woman had her hijab ripped off by a white male with such force it choked her as she fell
- Pam Howell (@BookaliciousPam) November 10, 2016

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate crimes across the United States, has counted more than 200 complaints since election day, according to USA Today.

On Sunday, Trump further ignited civil rights organisations' concerns by naming right-wing Breitbart news executive Stephen Bannon as his chief strategist and senior counsellor.

Under Bannon's tenure, Breitbart pushed a nationalist agenda and became one of the leading outlets of the so-called alt-right - a movement often associated with white supremacist ideas that oppose multiculturalism and defend "Western values".

"Donald Trump just named a white supremacist as chief strategist," CAIR's Hooper said. "We have no reason to believe things are going to get better for the American Muslim community or other minorities anytime soon."

SOURCE: Al Jazeera News And News Agencies

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FBI: Hate crimes against Muslims in US surge 67 percent

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Hate crimes against Muslims in the United States shot up 67 percent in 2015 to their highest levels since the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, according to new FBI statistics. Overall, 57 percent of the 5,850 reported incidents were motivated by race or ethnicity, while 20 percent of hate crimes were related to religious bias, t he federal law enforcement agency reported on Monday.

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For the family of junior Yasmeen Anis, 9/11 was a day when the entire world seemed to pause.

As with most American families, they knew the day the 19 Muslim extremists crashed two jumbo jets into the World Trade Center would irrevocably alter our society. But as a Muslim family, the attacks and subsequent "War on Terror" exposed them to a threat most Americans wouldn't have to deal with: anti-Islamic discrimination, a pathogen which would infect our society with increasing virulence over the next 15 years, boiling to an all-time high in 2016.

Almost immediately after the attacks, more than a decade ago now, Anis' parents began feeling the first ripples of Islamophobia. In the months following Sept. 2001, the couple-Sunni Muslims who immigrated to the United States from Pakistan and ran a gift shop in Kissimmee-experienced a stark decline in traffic at their business. People were suddenly suspicious of the middle-eastern looking couple-especially the mother, who wore the traditional Islamic hijab. Over the coming years, an alarming number of customers would begin avoiding them because of their religion.

Anis recalls how her father was glad to have put her through a private Islamic school, sheltered from religious bullying in public school systems. Her parents tried to isolate their kids from the poisonous rhetoric directed towards Muslims after 9/11, but doing so was exceedingly difficult. Even today, more than a decade since the attacks, her mother still can't walk in public without making people uncomfortable.

Anis' family is not alone in their experiences.There's been an astronomical rise in the amount of Islamophobic hate-crimes. According to the Center for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the number of attacks against Muslims has increased 600 percent in the last year alone.

For Amal Soukarieh, a Lebanese-born, Saudi-educated Muslim who came to the United States a year ago, Islamophobia is a perplexing phenomena. A freshman at Flagler College, she has already caught whiffs of the anti-Islamic pathogen.

"When we first moved into our house, it was interesting, because our neighbor was a fervent anti-Muslim who used to protest at mosques," she said.

To her, it's strange to see the social stigma Americans place on women who opt to wear their hijabs publicly. And it's strange for her to see how Americans perceive Muslims and middle easterners in general, for they are often mistakenly lumped into one, indistinguishable group-as an ignorant race of brutal tribesmen.

"In the Middle East, we grow up knowing about the whole world-Asia, Europe, Africa," she said, recounting her cosmopolitan education. "Usually Westerners are not as informed about us as we are about them."

Western ignorance about Middle Easterners, she says, is a part of a feedback loop: the more white Americans assume all Muslims are suicide bombers, and the more they are reinforced in this notion via the media and rumors, the more likely they are to discriminate against others in the first place.

I asked Amal about ISIS, the terrorist organization largely responsible for the negative image of Islam in recent years. Fringe groups like ISIS, acting since the late '90s, were the ones that sparked Islamophobia, after all.

"It makes me want to cry," she says. "They (groups like IS) are not motivated by political beliefs. They claim to be religious, but it's only to gain power. It's all about power for guys like them, nothing else."

I asked Anis the same question.

"People always forget that Islam is the Arabic word for peace," Anis said. "In the Quran, peace and love are emphasized. People need to stop portraying the whole religion based on the one bad apple."

"We have a quote in Lebanon," Amal interjects. "We always say that 'They (the terrorists on 9/11) didn't just hijack the planes. They hijacked the whole, entire religion.' "

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By Jared Olson | gargoyle@flagler.edu For the family of junior Yasmeen Anis, 9/11 was a day when the entire world seemed to pause. As with most American families, they knew the day the 19 Muslim extremists crashed two jumbo jets into the World Trade Center would irrevocably alter our society.

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Inauguration Day is only two days away. Washington is planning a huge party, speech writers are formulating their last words, and Islamophobic hate crimes are still on the rise. More than 569 anti-Muslim attacks took place over a span of 512 days in America.

Many global citizens are concerned Trump's rhetoric has only made things worse for the Muslim population. Muslim Girl (MG) compiled a list of Islamophobic attacks since August 6, 2015, the date of the first debate of the U.S. presidential election cycle.
Amount of Hate Crimes Likely to Increase During Trump Administration
MG sources include #HateHurts, The Huffington Post's Islamophobia tracker, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and numerous others. The detailed image below includes verbal, political, and physical attacks recorded until December 30, 2016.

One can assume that the list of Islamophobic hate crimes has expanded within the new year. Organizations, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, have issued statements voicing their concern due to the overwhelming amount of anti-Muslim reports they received.

FBI statistics show that anti-Muslim attacks have indeed surged since November 2016. Some political experts and analysts predict these Islamophobic instances will only worsen in the first months of the Trump administration.

Alt-Right Movement and the Muslim Community

Since the "alt-right" might be losing faith in Donald Trump and his agenda, there could be further backlash and misplaced anger against the Muslim community. What does this mean for the Muslim population in the U.S.? Has Donald Trump mainstreamed Islamophobia in America?

There are many similar questions I could ask, but perhaps the most important of all is, "What will non-Muslims do to help their Muslim neighbors feel safe?" For starters, we can no longer pretend that Islamophobia doesn't exist in America. Non-Muslims must stand in solidarity with Muslims and speak out against the rising Islamophobic verbal and non-verbal hate crimes.
Join today's #J18 Movement: Teach, Organize, and Resist
Today, #J18, is the perfect day to make your personal oath to help your Muslim neighbors feel welcome, safe, and accepted in your community.

Numerous UCLA professors are calling for universities and citizens around the U.S. to " Teach, Organize, and Resist" the discriminatory agenda Trump has promoted thus far. Students, professors, center directors, and artists will join together today, January 18.

Their message states, " On the evening of #J18, to mark the presidential inauguration, we will gather at UCLA to celebrate ongoing struggles for social justice and to affirm their urgent relevance in the face of this current national and global moment...

we intend to organize against the proposed expansion of state violence targeting people of color, undocumented people, queer communities, women, Muslims, and many others. On that day, we intend to resist the institutionalization of ideologies of separation and subordination, including white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, Islamophobia, and virulent nationalism."
Ways You Can Help Prevent Islamophobia
If you can't make it to a #J18 event, and you want to join the movement to help prevent Islamophic hate crimes in America, there are still several important things you can do which will promote tolerance of Islam and Muslim-Americans.

Learn more about Islam, Muslims, and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

Speak out against Islamophobia when you see it happening.

Attend multi-cultural events and bring your friends.

Stay up to date on policies which could negatively affect the Muslim community and, ultimately, American society as a whole.

Co-organize an "Islam 101" event and ask an imam or scholar of Islam to speak at your own place of worship, at a community center, a club, coffee house, or even a sports center.

Write letters to your local, regional, and national politicians voicing your disapproval regarding any anti-Muslim legislature.

Don't be afraid to ask your Muslim friends and neighbors pressing questions you may have.

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Addressing the Rise of Islamophobia in Trump's America

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Inauguration Day is only two days away. Washington is planning a huge party, speech writers are formulating their last words, and Islamophobic hate crimes are still on the rise. More than 569 anti-Muslim attacks took place over a span of 512 days in America.