Muslims See Trump Rhetoric as Fueling Hate

About three months ago, Sarah Ibrahim’s son came home from his fourth-grade class at a Maryland school with a disturbing question. “Will I have time to say goodbye to you before you’re deported?” he said, according to Ibrahim, a Muslim Arab American who works at a federal government agency in Maryland.

“The kids in his classroom were saying: ‘Who’s going to leave when Trump becomes president?’” the 35-year-old mother said.

The incident happened a few months after Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump – now the presumptive nominee – first called for a ban on Muslim immigrants and for more scrutiny at mosques after 14 people were killed in San Bernardino by a couple whom the FBI said had been radicalized.

Trump intensified his anti-Muslim rhetoric after last week’s mass shooting in Orlando, in which a US-born man killed 49 people at a nightclub, calling for a suspension of immigration from countries with “a proven history of terrorism.”

He reiterated his call for more surveillance of mosques and warned that radicals were “trying to take over our children.”

While Democratic and several Republican leaders have distanced themselves from Trump’s comments, many American Muslims say his stance has fueled an atmosphere in which some may feel they can voice prejudices or attack Muslims without fear of retribution.

“What Trump did was make these hidden thoughts public. He gave people permission to speak out loud, he removed the shame associated with being prejudiced. People know that they won’t be punished,” Ibrahim told Reuters at a community iftar, the sundown meal during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

Trump’s campaign did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment. Trump has rejected the criticism that his rhetoric is racist, and has said he is often misunderstood by the media and his opponents.

A report by the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the University of California, Berkeley released Monday said the number of recorded incidents in which mosques were targeted jumped to 78 in 2015, the most since the body began tracking them in 2009. There were 20 and 22 such incidents in the previous two years, respectively. The incidents include verbal threats and physical attacks.

Corey Saylor, CAIR’s director of the department to monitor and combat Islamophobia, said there had been a spike in Islamophobic incidents in the wake of Orlando, including those targeting mosques.

“Trump’s rhetoric is a direct threat to American principles. He has mainstreamed anti-Constitutional ideas like banning or surveilling people based on faith,” Saylor told Reuters.

CAIR says the last big spike in incidents targeting mosques was seen in 2010 following the controversy over locating an Islamic center near the site of the Sept. 11 attacks in New York.

It said that lent “additional weight to the argument that levels of anti-Muslim sentiment follow trends in domestic US politics, not international terrorism.”