Officer Aml El Sokary is crying. From shock and also from anger. “I believe that Allah will help us. To all my sisters. I am with you, day and night,” she says. The New York police officer was out and about in Brooklyn with her 16-year-old son. She wore a traditional Muslim headdress, a hijab. “Get out of your country,” yelled a man. “I’ll cut your throat, you IS terrorists.” Then he set his attack dog on the American woman.
“Go back to your country? This is your country!”
New York Mayor de Blasio appalled: “Are you going back to your country?” he quotes the now arrested attacker. “This is her country. She is American. New Yorker. She is at home here. We must not allow this hatred to spread.”
This hate. These are so-called “hate crimes”, racially motivated attacks. The statistics are alarming and the connection – at least for the New York authorities – abundantly clear. Since the election night that Donald Trump won, the number of racially motivated attacks in New York City has risen 115 percent.
“I felt sick when I heard that one of our policewomen was attacked and cursed only for her belief.” Mayor de Blasio points his finger at Donald Trump. His hate speech from the election campaign would have created this mood in the city but also across the country. The New York police are seeing more and more swastika smearings. Ku Klux Clan leaflets were distributed in two metro stations. Promotional brochures from the racist organization that Donald Trump recommended for election.
“I am accusing Trump of using hate speech in the election campaign. Absolutely,” says de Blasio. “He said terrible things about Muslims, about Americans of Mexican descent. It happened, part of our history. He must now make this country come together again. And he must do more.”
900 Muslims work for the New York Police Department
The hate and Trump. In New York, the authorities are seeing the first consequences. Another Muslim subway worker, insulted as a terrorist. A man pursued her, pushed her down the stairs. A black woman in Queens being bullied when she got on the bus. “Blacks are back in the back now,” shouted the two whites.
The threatened policewoman – in 2014 she received an award for rescuing two people from a burning building. Now she has to let herself be insulted as a terrorist. The New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, with a promise to the city and the country: “No New Yorker should ever be afraid because of his beliefs. This hatred, this behavior should never be considered normal.”
But what is normal in these times? Mayor de Blasio, he had just been to Donald Trump for a one-on-one conversation. He explained to him that 900 Muslims alone worked as police officers for the city. That they and all other Muslims are a legitimate part of New York and part of the United States. But – the frustrated mayor of the immigrant city of New York also says: You can’t elect a man for president who excludes individual groups without having consequences for society.
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