On January 7, the Islamic Center of Lake Travis, in Austin, Texas, which had been under construction, caught on fire. A week later, on January 14, the Islamic Center of Eastside, in Bellevue, Washington, burned.
Two weeks after that, on January 27, several hours after President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries, a fire destroyed the Islamic Center of Victoria, in Texas.
Then, this past Friday, February 24, a small blaze broke out at the front entrance of the Daarus Salaam Mosque, near Tampa, Florida.
Authorities have ruled that three of the four fires were caused by arson. An official at the Travis County Fire Marshal told BuzzFeed News that the investigation into the cause of the fire at the Islamic Center of Lake Travis remains open.
“We’ve never seen four mosques burned within seven weeks of each other,” said Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups around the country. “It’s part of a whole series of dramatic attacks on Muslims.”
The mosque fires come amid increased fear about hate crimes against minority religious groups. In recent weeks, scores of bomb threats were called into Jewish community centers and schools around the country and graveyards in Jewish cemeteries in three states were vandalized. On Sunday, somebody threw a rock through a window of the Masjid Abu Bakr mosque in Denver. In Redmond, Washington, vandals destroyed the Muslim Association of Puget Sound mosque’s entrance sign on two occasions within two months of the election. In January, a white nationalist fatally shot six people at a mosque in Quebec City, Canada. Last week, a white man shot two Indian men, one fatally, at a Kansas bar after making racial slurs, questioning their immigration status, and shouting, “Get out of my country.”
“The short answer is we haven’t seen anything like this in the past,” Potok said, referring to the overall surge in reported hate crimes across the country. “This is my 18th year here and I haven’t seen anything remotely like this.”
To have three mosque fires ruled arson within six weeks is highly unusual, said Corey Saylor, director of the Department to Monitor and Combat Islamophobia at the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “In normal times, I will see one to two mosque incidents of any type per month, and rarely is it arson,” he said. “I can tell you for sure I have not seen levels of violence like this since I started tracking this stuff” in 2009.
Source: https://www.buzzfeed.com/albertsamaha/four-mosques-burn-as-2017-begins?u…
