Five American Mosques Burned This Year Amid Surge In Islamophobia
Image by Twitter
By Sam Kestenbaum May 12, 2017
The civil rights group Muslim Advocates sent a bulletin to mosques around the country detailing ways to protect their worship spaces from arson ahead of the holiday of Ramadan, which begins at the end of the month.
“You have the right to worship and be protected by police and fire departments,” the letter reads.
The notice comes as a response to a spate of fires within the American Muslim community. Since the beginning of 2017, five different mosques in Texas, Washington, Florida, and Michigan have all caught aflame, ThinkProgress reported.
Most of those incidents are still under investigation — but Muslim Advocates sees the groups as part of an increase in Islamophobia in the country.
“In just 2017, there have been five arsons or suspected arsons at American mosques,” the bulletin reads. “Muslim Advocates believes that heated political rhetoric and anti-Muslim policies have emboldened potential vandals. Anecdotal evidence from previous years suggests that the Ramadan may see increased vandalism against mosques in 2017 as well.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations counted more than 2,000 “anti-Muslim bias incidents” in 2016, ThinkProgress reported. This is a 57 percent increase from the year before.
Email Sam Kestenbaum at kestenbaum@forward.com
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
