Last week, a letter sent to a Garden Grove school affiliated with the Islamic Society of Orange County was publicly read aloud, including the part where it is alleged Donald Trump will “do to you Muslims what Hitler did to the Jews.”
A week before that, a Tustin mosque received a bomb threat.
These are among the 33 hate incidents and six hate crimes reported in Orange County over a 34-day period, according to the OC Human Relations Commission.
Yup, Muslim hating is waaaay up in the County of Orange.
But it's also happening nationwide since the presidential election, notes the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Los Angeles chapter, or CAIR-LA, which is based in Anaheim.
In fact, the letter sent to Orange Crescent School is similar to one that has been sent to several mosques and affiliated schools in Southern California and throughout the country, according to CAIR-LA.
The letter, signed by “Americans for a Better Way” (not to be confused with Normal Lear's People for the American Way), states that Trump is going to “cleanse America.”
“He’s going to do to you Muslims what Hitler did to the Jews,” the letter adds. “You Muslims would be wise to pack your bags and get out of Dodge.”
Muslim schoolkids are referred to as “children of Satan,” something Orange Crescent enrollees deny in their own letter that ends with an invitation to Trump to visit the school so he can learn about them and work with them “to make America truly greater.”
Darul Falah Islamic Center of Tustin received a voicemail the Friday afternoon of Dec. 9 from someone threatening to bomb the religious facility, prompting a Tustin Police Department investigation.
As with the hate letters, similar threatening voicemails have been left with several Southern California mosques over the past few weeks, according to CAIR-LA.
The Tustin version has a male with a bad Middle Eastern accent saying, “I was wondering where I was supposed to drop the bomb. Because I’m a good fucker and I do not know where to drop the bomb. OK, thank you. Have a lovely day worshipping your pedophilic God.”
Mazhar Zubairi, director of Darul Falah, says his mosque has received prank calls before but that the bomb threat was being taken seriously because of what happened in Simi Valley on Dec. 10. Two men yelled slurs at worshippers coming out of Jamia Al-Razzi Islamic Center of Conejo Valley, an argument ensued and a Muslim man was stabbed and hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries. Two men, one of whom was on parole, have been arrested in what Los Angeles County prosecutors called a hate crime.
CAIR-LA's executive director agreed with Zubairi's decision to take the threat seriously—and encourages leaders of other mosques to contact authorities if they receive similar treatment.
“When someone threatens to (drop a bomb) where you congregate and worship, it’s not quite the same as someone hurling racial epithets or making bigoted statements,” Hussam Ayloush said in a statement. “It’s an actual threat.”
Orange County's recent increased hating on Muslims—which has also included a hijab pulled off the head of a woman at a gas station—folds into a disturbing trend. That community joins Asians, Latinos and African Americans in increasingly being targeted with threats, rhetoric and crimes since the campaign by—and especially the election of—Trump. This has so alarmed the OC Human Relations Commission that a new #HateFreeOC campaign was launched earlier this month.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.