“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 Gitmo,” says American Muslim writer Shawna Ayoub Ainslie who shared her experience in a Huffington Post article.
We looked at data from the FBI on hate crimes against Muslims and found that her fear is not entirely groundless.
Looking at the figures compiled by the FBI, the number of anti-Muslim hate crime incidents jumped in 2001, from 28 to 481 incidents. The number dropped in the following years, but has never returned to levels reported before the 9/11 attacks.
Read the entire article here.
