Hell No! Muslim Children Gassed in Dayton

I’m a couple days late with this, but this needs to be posted, y’all. Here’s one of my Racialicious contributing cohort, Thea Lim, laying it down (originally posted at Shameless Blog and republished at Racialicious)

From Daily Kos:

Muslim Children Gassed at Dayton Mosque After “Obsession” DVD Hits Ohio

On Friday, September 26, the end of a week in which thousands of copies of Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West — the fear-mongering, anti-Muslim documentary being distributed by the millions in swing states via DVDs inserted in major newspapers and through the U.S. mail — were distributed by mail in Ohio, a “chemical irritant” was sprayed through a window of the Islamic Society of Greater Dayton, where 300 people were gathered for a Ramadan prayer service. The room that the chemical was sprayed into was the room where babies and children were being kept while their mothers were engaged in prayers.Recently I’ve heard a lot of talk about how the deaths and abuse of women and children of colour are not taken as seriously as the deaths and abuse of white women and children.

Why We Want Our Kids Back Too From Racialicious

There were no crush of grief counselors when our 11 year olds got shot by strays or on purpose. There were no pundits filling column space and air time when our girls got raped or became pregnant too soon. And when our children came up missing… when our children came up missing…I saw enough missing and dead black kids coming up that it taught me something about black folks, or at least the way black folks are perceived: Black children are disposable expectations.

Justice Delayed, Denied, Disgraceful From TransGriot
 

It seems that no matter where we live or what decade we’re talking about, when the justice system concerns transwomen of color, justice is delayed, denied, and disgraceful.

The argument – that the media and the public in general respond more when a white woman suffers – used to give me some pause. While I know, for example, that the numbers of missing and murdered Aboriginal women is collosal, the numbers of women in general who experience violence in Canada are just as shocking:

Half of Canadian women (51%) have experienced at least one incident of physical or sexual violence since the age of 16; Every minute of every day, a Canadian woman or child is being sexually assaulted; One to two women are murdered by a current or former partner each week in Canada. (Source: Canadian Women’s Foundation).

But if racism is not a factor when it comes to reporting acts of violence against women and children, why are there virtually no stories in major North American media about last Friday’s attack on Muslim babies and children?

If you have a blog, if you are a journalist, if you just have a lot of friends on your email contact list–write about this. It is completely abhorrent to me that almost no one, so far, is talking about this. Let’s prove to ourselves that our society is not as horrifyingly racist as it appears to be.

And here’s one of my other Racialicious posting cohorts, Fatemeh Fakhraie, who is editor-in-chief at Muslimah Media Watch, laying it down on on some of the underlying and unspoken reasons why some folks feel they can act so ugly toward Muslims:

Islam is represented in mainstream media as South/West Asian brown-skinned people who are bearded and turbaned or veiled and hidden: this racializes Islam. Now, before you start typing a response that there are non-West Asian Muslims and that Muslim isn’t a race, re-read what I just wrote. There are Muslims in every country in the world, and they are all colors and sizes. But Western media representation of Islam and Muslims simplifies this world-wide group of people into one picture: that of a brown guy with a beard and a keffiyeh. His female counterpart is a brown woman with a veil. Reducing an entire group of people to these static images that have to context or historycreates flat attributes (such as the incorrect assertion that West Asia=Muslim) that can be applied to anyone deemed in the “Muslim” category.

And, though the Dayton police refuses to call this act by its name–a hate crime–that’s exactly what it is.

(Hat tip to Muslimah Media Watch)