On September 11, 2001, the United States faced the largest attack on its soil since Pearl Harbor. In an attack orchestrated by the terrorist organization Al Qaeda, hijacked commercial planes struck the World Trade Centers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. Nearly 3,000 lives were lost that day. In the aftermath of the attacks, a lot changed across the United States. Airport and public transportation security was significantly increased, our military was mobilized and sent to the Middle East, and strong islamophobia and stereotyping developed toward Muslim Americans as a result of 9/11.
“I was afraid to go outside. If I stayed inside, I couldn’t mess up, except maybe with my words, which I policed carefully. I couldn’t speed, I couldn’t frighten anyone, I couldn’t break any law — no matter how tenuous — and therefore couldn’t be thrown in Guantanamo,” said American Muslim writer Shawna Ayoub Ainslie. Ainslie’s fears were voiced after a Muslim American was killed just days after 9/11 on the 15th of September. Events like this began to happen nationwide and Muslim Americans feared for their safety as hate crimes skyrocketed, according to data from the FBI. Obviously, the initial event was the major source of this issue, but as movies and new documentaries have come out through the years the islamophobia found itself to have new spikes across the United States.
So how was this issue combatted by Muslim Americans, and other Americans from Middle Eastern descent? Multiple civil rights groups organized movements to prevent hate crime trends from continuing to increase and leading the way was South Asian Americans Leading Together, or SAALT. This organization sought to limit the backlash toward Muslim Americans by beginning a campaign to explain to Americans that they stand with them in fighting back toward the radical Islamists who carried out the attacks. The campaign titled, An America for All of Us, is best explained in the attached video, and drastically helped ethnic Americans plead their case to end racial profiling and hate crimes. As previously stated, campaigns such as this one created by SAALT are widespread, but even today, 19 years after the attacks, islamophobia is still a very real thing in the United States undoubtedly because of the attacks on September 11, 2001.http://https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/911-10-america-all-us
References:
“Data: Hate Crimes against Muslims Increased after 9/11.” The World from PRX, www.pri.org/stories/2016-09-12/data-hate-crimes-against-muslims-increased-after-911.
The View of Muslims and Arabs in America Before and After September 11th, www.csun.edu/~sm60012/GRCS-Files/Muslims-post-9-11.htm.
“9/11 At 10: An America for All of Us.” Open Society Foundations, www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/911-10-america-all-us.
I am very grateful for your speech. Because I know very little about religion, I didn’t even know that Islamophobia and discrimination would happen in the United States before reading this article. And this kind of discrimination has produced such a bad incident. If this stereotype is not revised in time, it may lead to more and more bad events in the future.