4 Jan - USA:

Although more than one in three Muslim students said they had been hit with ethnic slurs in the past year, only one in six said it happened in school.

More than 600 students from 90 public schools participated in the three-year study conducted by Columbia University's Teachers College.

Most of the Muslim students said that although they still face bias, it has gotten better since the first few years following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Still, 36% of the students said they a faced at least one "discriminatory verbal incident" in the past year.

The study found 28% of Muslim students said they or a relative have been stopped by police as a result of "racial profiling," 12% reported they or a relative had been turned down for a job based on discrimination, 11% had property destroyed and 7% said they or a family member had been physically assaulted.

Link

05 Dec - Houston, TX, USA:

A northwest Harris County family said they were treated like criminals after their home was burglarized, KPRC Local 2 reported Thursday.

On the night before Thanksgiving, Raman Deep Sinth said thieves broke into his family's bathroom window and ransacked his home. He said about $15,000 worth of stuff was stolen.

Sinth said he called the Harris County Sheriff's Office for help.
"That night we were actually robbed twice," Sinth said. "Once by the actual burglars, who we don't know who they were, and secondly by the sheriff's department, who we knew who they were."

He said he believes the deputies were troubled by his turban. He wears it as a member of the Sikh faith. He said he also believes the deputies were also afraid of his sister's kirpan, another religious symbol.

[...]

Sinth said soon, he, his sister, mother and another relative were in handcuffs. He said he was locked up in the back of a sheriff's cruiser.

Link

03 Dec - UK:

Saleca Faisal-Parkar, 31, was harassed, overlooked for jobs and training and was even branded "lazy" after she became seriously ill while pregnant.

The abuse was led by Stephen Jones, then head of litigation at the leading law firm Shakespeares, who also referred to her as a "flipping nun".

He was also a deputy district judge and a member of the Solicitors Disciplinary Panel, but has resigned both positions in the light of the scandal.

Mrs Faisal-Parkar, who has a young daughter, joined Shakespeares in 2002 as a legal assistant.
Not long after she started, she found out from a fellow worker that she had been nicknamed "Mother Teresa" because she wore a hijab, which covers her head.

Over the course of the following months, she said Mr Jones - who made the derogatory comments in emails - harassed her, refused her training requests and potentially reduced her annual salary increase by the type of work he gave her.

Link

From November 21:

A Halifax County man was turned away from a local mission when he refused to remove his turban while trying to make a donation.

Gary Khera, who is a Sikh with U.S. and Indian citizenship, went to the Union Mission this week to donate cash or food, The Daily Herald of Roanoke Rapids reported Thursday. Khera said he had previously mailed in his donations but wanted to visit the site in person.

The mission has a rule - explained in large lettering on the mission's door - asking all males to removed headcoverings inside the facility, and mission directors asked him to remove the turban. Khera refused to do so because he wears it all day as part of his religion.

Link

A San Joaquin County Superior Court judge says a Sikh man facing trial over the murder of his daughter's former boyfriend will have to appear before jurors without his turban.

Judge Charlotte Orcutt says that the long fabric pious men use to wrap their hair could hide a weapon or be used as a noose. [Link]

If Barack Obama were British, racism would keep him from becoming prime minister, said the head of Britain's Equalities and Human Rights Commission.

That racism is not among the British electorate, but among the leaders of the political "machine," said Trevor Phillips, adding he believes the public would embrace a black leader.

"I would be very surprised if even somebody as brilliant as him (Obama) would have been able to break through the institutional stranglehold on power within the Labor Party," Phillips told The Daily Telegraph in a story published Saturday.

Despite Obama's success in U.S. politics, Phillips said he believes the United States remains more divided on racial issues than the United Kingdom.

"Here it's more about class. It is about culture, a different way of life and speaking," Phillips said, noting the U.K.'s Muslim community suffers greater discrimination.

"If you asked British voters whether you could have a Muslim prime minister their mouths would drop open, but not with a black one," Phillips said. [Link]

Sukhdev Singh Bainiwal, a 42-year-old software engineer from the Evergreen area of San Jose, knows what it's like to feel less American than others. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he was accosted by strangers and told to "go home" because, as a Sikh, he wears a turban.

But Bainiwal senses that America has become a more tolerant place since those scary days. And he was thrilled when his 17-year-old son, an Obama supporter, went to work as a poll worker, wearing his turban.

With Obama's election, Bainiwal said, "more barriers will continue to fall. People will vote for people based on the skills and knowledge that they have and what they stand for — and not because of the way they look." [Link]

A Hempstead, N.Y.-based chain of retail discount stores, National Wholesale Liquidators, Inc., will pay $255,000 and agree to injunctive relief to settle a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the agency announced today. The EEOC had charged that the company subjected employees to a hostile work environment based on their race, national origin and religion and sexually harassed an employee.

In its lawsuit, the EEOC said a National Wholesale Liquidators store manager subjected South Asian workers to taunts about their national origin and religion. The EEOC also charged that the store manager sexually harassed a female employee. The woman, a Sikh, was told by the manager to remove her turban because she “would appear sexier without it.”

“The EEOC hopes this settlement encourages employers to take steps to educate their managers and employees,” said Margaret A. Malloy, the EEOC trial attorney assigned to the case. “Harassing employees based on national origin, sex or religion is unacceptable and will not be tolerated.”

EEOC New York District Director Spencer H. Lewis said, “This case should remind employers to take seriously allegations of harassment, especially where managers in positions of authority are involved in the misconduct.” [Link]

It's all about the veil.

The hijab is a flowing slip of fabric Muslim women wrap scarf-like around their heads, tucking their hair beneath it so that not even a wisp escapes. They wear them pulled down to cover much of their foreheads, as well.

Long before she arrived on the Fairfield University campus as a freshman, Nargis Alizada, an Afghan refugee, donned a hijab in California when she became a teenager.

A motorcyclist spotted Alizada strolling down a San Diego street with her younger brother and drove off the road, onto the sidewalk, cursed her out as a "[bleep]ing Muslim. You're killing our people," and ripped her hijab off her head before knocking her down. The time was two years after the 9/11 attacks. "I was running as fast as I could," Alizada said. "I was so scared."

The experience left Alizada, her family and friends -- Muslim and non-Muslim -- shaken. Alizada's a petite, small-boned teenager with a waif-like look. It belies the dangers she's faced growing up in a fundamentalist country where it's illegal -- even a capital crime -- to teach a girl, or how her grandparents paid a tutor to educate her in secret in a basement of their home. Or how her dad paid smugglers $20,000 to sneak Alizada, her mom, sister and brother out of Afghanistan into Iran, hunched down under piles of hay and blankets in farm trucks and other vehicles.

"All of my friends figured I would stop wearing my hijab," Alizada said. "They told me that they understood if I didn't want to anymore."

Wearing a hijab is "part of our religion and our Quran's teachings to dress modestly," she said. "But I know many Muslim women who are devout who choose not to wear them." [Link]

The head of the Crown Prosecution Service in West Yorkshire is to undergo “training” in the wake of an employment tribunal that saw a Muslim solicitor awarded a record £600,000 payout for racial discrimination.

Chief Prosecutor Neil Franklin is among a number of senior managers involved in the case who will be given “further guidance and training.”

Halima Aziz was suspended from work by the CPS after joking at Bradford Magistrates’ Court that she was a friend of Osama bin Laden. Earlier this month, an employment tribunal found that there was “not a shred of evidence” to support the treatment of Miss Aziz by the CPS.

The lawyer was working at Bradford Magistrates in October 2001 – a month after 9/11 – when she was accused of blaming the terror attacks in the US on “Jews”. Miss Aziz denied making that comment, saying that she joked, as she was going through a security check at the court, that she was being treated like a friend of Bin Laden.

She was suspended from duty while a complaint from the court was investigated and she was cleared of all allegations in 2002.

The Employment Tribunal found that senior officials at the CPS were guilty of racial discrimination for the way they handled her case and that a previous inquiry run by chief executive Peter Lewis was a “whitewash”. And it identified Mr Franklin as one of the “principal discriminators”.

The CPS said it accepted the recommendations in the judgement and has now revealed that it will provide further guidance and training for the managers involved.

But the CPS does not accept certain elements of the judgement and is seeking a review and appeal on those.

The CPS said the specific elements it was appealing against were the references to the CPS withholding material from the Tribunal, the Employment Appeals Tribunal and the Court of Appeal. [Link]

Within a week of this new school year, fellow Muslim friends and I had already experienced a couple instances of Islamophobia. Both were derogatory slurs yelled from a moving vehicle, ensuring anonymity and suggesting cowardice....

Many of my Muslim friends can relay stories of name-calling and crude looks—and from fellow members of the Queen’s community too. Yet there is a Muslim ethos of making excuses, so these stories rarely make it out of friend circles. And although most of the cases of Islamophobia on campus have been petty, it’s important these things are acknowledged and discussed, especially if it’s going to persist.

It is thus important that opinions about a religion or religious peoples are addressed head-on so sound discussion can take place. University is not a place for censorship, but rather a place for expression and the healthy exchange of ideas and opinions. As members of this community, we are not required to agree with the customs and beliefs of others; critical thinking is, in fact, encouraged. However, mutual respect is mandatory in order for everyone to have a positive learning experience in an environment that they feel safe in. Yelling something offensive and driving away is too easy an escape. It’s time to own up to prejudices.

And the onus falls upon us, the students. We can pretend discrimination doesn’t exist, especially at an institution of higher learning. Surely everyone knows better than to associate anyone who wears a headscarf with the Taliban. Islamophobia, just like all other types of discrimination, is a thing of the past, at least for the more civilized amongst us. Unfortunate as it is though, these are real views that a minority of people on campus do indeed hold....

And although such incidents are more trivial in nature, the fact remains that there are people who feel it’s necessary to express stronger views. This past weekend, a [Muslim student organization] sign was defaced with comments that called for the death of Muslims. I can only hope incidents like this help to open our collective eyes to the larger problem. [Link]

A Somali Muslim leader said the state commission that handles discrimination complaints needs to investigate concerns at a Grand Island meatpacking plant, not educate the community.

Somali Muslim advocate Mohamed Rage said the state Equal Opportunity Commission needs to investigate and take action against the JBS Swift and Company plant.

Muslim workers at the plant have pushed for accommodations with break times to allow prayer at sunset. The issue has sparked proaests [sic], walkouts and mass firings.[Link]

A state commission responsible for investigating discrimination claims says it plans to reach out to a community caught up in a prayer dispute.

Muslim workers at Grand Island's JBS Swift & Co. plant have been asking for accommodations with break times to allow prayer at sunset. The issue has sparked protests by Muslim workers and counterprotests by non-Muslim workers upset about preferential treatment. It also has led to mass firings.

The Nebraska Equal Opportunity Commission says it has a responsibility to educate all Nebraska residents. It expects to be doing outreach in Grand Island over the next few weeks. [Link]

North Texas has half a million Muslims among its population, many of them working in engineering and information technology jobs. According to a recent report in the Dallas Morning News, their employers are starting to recognize and accommodate those employees' religious requirement of praying five times a day facing Mecca.

In Dallas, Texas Instruments has made a prayer room available, American Airlines is allowing use of a multipurpose room for Muslim prayer, and Nortel offers several quiet rooms for the purpose. In Plano, Electronic Data Systems also has a prayer room available. Until now, according to the paper, employees in these workplaces would use tactics such as ducking down into their cubicles to pray, or finding an empty stairway.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which enforces the nation's employment discrimination laws, recently released a comprehensive guide for employers on avoiding religious bias in the workplace. On the question of allowing devout Muslims a place for their daily religious observance, the guide states that if an employee needs to use a quiet area for prayer during break time, the employer should accommodate the request unless it would pose an undue hardship. If the employer allows employees to use the facilities at issue for nonreligious activities not related to work, it may be difficult for the employer to demonstrate that allowing the facilities to be used in the same manner for religious activities is not a reasonable accommodation or poses an undue hardship. [Link]

Muslim union workers at the JBS Swift & Co. meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colorado have filed grievances and wrongful termination claims stemming from alleged employment conflicts with their observance of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Initially there were attempts to work out a deal with Swift that would allow night shift workers to take a meal break before 9 pm to accommodate their fasting from sunrise to sunset. On September 5, when requests for a break at sunset were denied, approximately 220 workers coming mostly from Somalia and other African nations staged a walk-out in protest. All of the protesters were suspended and a large percentage were later fired. According to an official from Swift, the number of workers fired was 101....

In 2007, Swift dealt with a similar issue at a meat-packing plant in Grand Island, Nebraska, where approximately 120 workers abruptly quit after they were denied the opportunity to pray at sunset. Workers at that plant had said they were verbally and physically harassed, which led some to file complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), raising provisions of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, religion, gender, or national origin. The dispute in Colorado follows a situation at a Tyson Foods plant in Shelbyville, Tennessee, where last month the company agreed to give workers the Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitr as a paid day off instead of Labor Day. [Link]

It's been seven years since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, and many young American Muslims are convinced that much of American society views them with growing hostility. They're right.

A 2007 Zogby poll discovered that 76 percent of young ArabAmericans report experiencing discrimination. A CNN poll from the same year found that 53 percent of Americans believe conflict between Islam and Christianity is "inevitable," up from 45 percent in 2003.

These hardening attitudes affect the job opportunities of American Muslims. One study from 2004 sent out 6,000 fictitious resumes — all similarly qualified but with different, ethnically identifiable names — to employers across California. If your name was Heidi Mackenzie, you had the best chance of being called back. And the worst name to have? Abdul-Aziz Mansour.

It's not surprising, then, that earnings of Arab and Muslim men have declined relative to the general population since 2001.

And profiling continues to be a problem. The Justice Department is seeking to enshrine its practice in national security investigations, allowing the FBI to invade the privacy of Americans and open cases against people without the benefit of evidence or probable cause. Such a policy would disproportionately affect the Arab and Muslim American communities, but we should all be concerned.

The hostility toward young American Muslims is unwarranted.

Do they seethe with resentment and hatred of the United States? Are they dire threats to our national security? A terrorist recruiter's dream? Not at all. After three years of research on this issue, I can tell you that I heard young American Muslims talk about a great many things, but not once did I hear them express support for Osama bin Laden, wish harm on their fellow Americans or plot the takeover of the United States — all accusations leveled with startling frequency at the American Muslim community.

Young Arab Muslim Americans spend their time and energy worrying about landing a good job, finding a mate and getting married, achieving happiness and fulfilling their potential.

Most are critical of American foreign policy (as are many other Americans). Among the more pious, topics in Islam occupy a good deal of conversation, and these discussions often center on how best to refute the stereotypes and misconceptions people have of their faith.

At the same time we also need to record the victories and successes. In many corners of the country, Islam is increasingly understood as an American religion. Reps. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., and Andre Carson, D-Ind. — both Muslim — have been elected to Congress. There is more genuine interest in the Arab world than ever.

The young people I talk to feel this push-and-pull of acceptance and rejection clearly.

Where does that leave us, seven years after Sept. 11? In some ways, we seem to be teetering on the cusp, ready to tilt toward a society that recognizes the bedrock principle of equality for all or one where discrimination is not just tolerated in the workplace but enforced through the law.

Osama bin Laden is responsible for the terrorist attacks, and for that he should be brought to justice. But we are the ones responsible for deciding what kind of nation we want to live in.

That choice is ours. [Link]

The nation came together after 9/11. Unfortunately, it came together to discriminate against its perceived enemies.

"I stand for America all the way," shouted 42-year-old Frank Roque as he pulled up in his pickup truck on Sept. 15, 2001 and shot Balbir Singh Sodhi five times at a suburban gas station in Arizona.

What did Sodhi do to deserve such an end?

He wore a turban and sported a beard.

Sodhi wasn't a Muslim. He wasn't Arab. He was a Sikh from the Punjab region in India and as a Sikh he was following religious law by wearing a turban and keeping a beard.

Sept. 11 hurt this nation deeply. It shook the country's foundations to the core and changed the course of American history. Our foreign policy began to take on a different tone and the attack forced Americans to think about their place in the world community.

But 9/11 changed things for Sikhs like me in a different way.

It was as if overnight we became fundamentally different. And we felt it.

Suddenly stares and dirty looks became commonplace. People began to whisper around us when we walked by. Some taunted us with racial slurs. Others thought it would be better to vandalize our temples or honk at us while driving. Some like Roque took to murder.

I was only in sixth grade at the time, but I was starting to feel the changes in my own home as well.

That day itself we were flooded with phone calls by relatives and family friends advising one another to stay at home and not venture out unless absolutely necessary. If there was anything to be done, any place to go, my mom would go and my Dad and I would stay at home. We put baseball caps in our car so just in case "anything goes wrong" my dad and I could take off our turbans and put the caps on.

Sikh community leaders immediately released press statements condemning the brutal attack on their nation. We began to hold inter-faith conferences where we could explain to the public that we were Sikhs and had nothing to do with the terrorists behind 9/11.

We are not Muslim. We are not Arab. We are not from the Middle East. Our religion is different as is our home country and language.

But even if we were Muslim, it shouldn't matter. People of a certain faith or skin color shouldn't be blamed for an attack carried out by a small number of extremists.[Link]

The outcome of a complaint filed by a Tulsa Muslim teenager against Abercrombie & Fitch may never be made public.

The girl ... filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission last month alleging that the popular clothier's Woodland Hills store refused to hire her because she wears a religiously mandated head scarf....

EEOC attorney Michelle Robertson said her office cannot comment on any charge that is still open because of confidentiality requirements of the Civil Rights Act, and cannot even confirm that the case was filed.

In general, she said, when a complaint is filed, it is assigned to an investigator who gets information from the employer and elsewhere and makes a recommendation to the area director.

In 5 percent of the cases, there is enough evidence to determine that discrimination occurred, she said.

Nearly all of the cases with evidence of discrimination are settled out of court and remain confidential.

Only 1 percent of those 5 percent wind up in court, where they become public, she said. [Link]

When Ahmad Waizy from Lindome tried to complete an international payment transaction on Skandiabanken’s website, he was unable to complete the payment as the bank rejected his first name.

After ringing the bank, he was told that Skandiabanken’s online payments system has a bar against names that could be of Muslim origin. Over 4000 people have Ahmad as a first name in Sweden today.

The Ombudsman against ethnic discrimination (DO) has asked Skandiabanken to justify its policy. Skandiabanken’s head of press Lena Hök told Svenska Dagbladet newspaper that the bank was only following the European Union’s sanctions list. This means that certain common Arabic names such as Hussein and Mohammed are affected.

However, Hök said that Skandiabanken welcomed the official report to the Ombudsman as they need a clear directive on the current status. [Link]

As the war in Iraq continues and as a man with a "funny name" (his words) runs for president of the United States, there is an undercurrent — fast becoming a riptide — of negative feelings toward Muslims based mainly on old stereotypes and renewed prejudices.

Egged on by the voices of right-wing commentators who constantly harangue against "Islamist extremists," real and imagined, more and more Americans find it easy to discriminate against Muslims in general as well as their fellow citizens who happen to practice Islam....

There is no surprise that many Muslims in this country expressed discontent with the country's war on terrorism since, according to 53 percent of them, it has become more difficult to be Muslim in America since 9-11....

Only one-fourth of Muslim Americans said they had been victims of discrimination in the United States, "while 73 percent say they have never experienced discrimination while living in this country," according to survey results. [Link]