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Seattle Workshop Fights Islamophobia

SEATTLE – Seattle Muslims have organized a workshop to counter rising Islamophobic crimes targeting Muslim women in the US, promoting women safety and teaching them how to cooperate with police to protect themselves.

“We don’t know what our right, we don’t know what to do,” Farhiya Mohamed, executive director of the Somali Family Safety Taskforce, told q13fox on Sunday.

Mohamed is referring here to the new workshop called “Hijabs + Harassment” hosted on Sunday, March 25, in Seattle.

The idea of the workshop came to Mohamed’s mind when many women in the community started posing questions about what to do if someone yells a racial slur while they’re at a bus stop or physically attacks them because they’re wearing hijab. “So, I decided it was time to put together an educational workshop to address those concerns,” she explained.

The workshop organizers themselves have similarly experienced such Islamophobic assaults.

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“For my mother and my sisters that cover, you see that they are Muslim walking down the street, so they’re an easier target than myself who chooses not to cover or Muslim men who don’t have outward signs of their faith,” the education program manager of One America, Nimco Bulale said.

As a Somali Muslim girl, Bulale says Muslim women are feeling a heightened sense of anxiety with more negative rhetoric and extremism against Muslims since the American President Donald Trump took office in 2017.

Detective Elizabeth Wareing, the bias crimes coordinator of Seattle Police Department confirmed that “2017 was the highest year rate for incidents against all groups.” Evidently, the city reported 418 bias crimes in that year for all groups.

Mohamed and Bulale cooperated with Seattle Police Department and invited Wareing to lecture and teach the workshop attendees how to report the Islamophobic crimes and collaborate with the department to fight religious terrorism against Muslims.

“I teach these women how to report a crime, why that’s important, how the dispatch system works and what to expect when a police officer arrives to their call,” the police official explained her role.

Wareing believes that “unlike problems like property crime, hate crimes are more challenging to solve using traditional methods.”

She continued, “We can throw more officers at the area or change our patrol patterns and it changes the patterns of incident, like for property crimes, but with bias crimes, we’ve noticed they happen all over the city at time frames that are random.”

Moreover, the police official informed that it’s critical for these women and anyone affected by hate crimes to report them because “police don’t know it’s happening they can’t act to mitigate it.”