anti-muslim sentiment
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DuPage County Judge Joseph Bugos signed arrest warrants and set $50,000 bonds against the players — James Cooksey, Kyler Kregel, Benjamin Pettway, Noah Spielman and Samuel TeBos — late Monday afternoon. Prosecutors charged the athletes with aggravated battery, mob action, and unlawful restraint.
Duing the Rio Olympics, images of Egypt’s athletes in full-body spandex (with player Doaa Elghobashy also wearing a hijab) competing against Germany’s bikini-clad team quickly swept through the internet. It’s only been since the 2012 London Olympics that relaxed rules allowed for such diversity of clothing. The photographs echoed narratives of cultural freedom and showed how opposites can sometimes coexist quite peacefully.
Image via Photographee.eu/Shutterstock.com
The root causes of Islamophobia are intolerance and misinformation, causes that come in all sorts of ugly packages like anti-Semitism, religious bigotry, sexism, and even racism. Islamophobia is just one way that our own insecurities, fueled by bigotry and a lack of information, come back to haunt us in a very real way.
An American flag flies at half staff outside the State Department September 12. Alex Wong/Getty Images
Muslim Americans condemned violence in Egypt and Libya that left four Americans dead, but remain concerned that the deaths could rekindle anti-Muslim sentiment just as post-9/11 resentment was starting to ebb.
U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three embassy workers were killed on Tuesday when fundamentalist protestors attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in response to a low-budget film that attacks Islam’s Prophet Muhammad, reportedly made by an Israeli real estate developer who lives in California.
Imam Talal Eid, the Islamic chaplain at Brandeis University near Boston and a former member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, predicted the violence would lead to “more resentment” against Muslims, who he criticized for not doing enough against terrorism.