On Tuesday, we covered the latest, in a growing pattern of disturbing incidents of young people being attacked for trying to wear a hijab in public spaces in Europe and the United States, specifically on the campus of Evergreen State College in Washington State, which is the latest incident where someone who tried to wear a hijab was viciously attacked by their attacker, who yelled slurs and other hate speech at the student before attacking her.
The attack on the student who tried to wear the hijab was filmed by numerous people in the vicinity, and one of them was the daughter of a professor at Evergreen, who published her own article on it and revealed that she had contacted her father, but the police and the college were both refusing to interview or arrest the man who had attacked the woman.
That professor’s daughter, who herself wears a hijab, wrote:
After my initial disbelief and dismay, I began to think and look for possible explanations for why he would do such a thing. He could have been mentally ill. He could have been under the influence of alcohol. He could have been reacting to another student in a conflict. It could have been a random attack. Or it could have been racism.
But then she came to the “it could be racism” possibility, and she is absolutely correct, it could very well have been racism. As the article from the Gatestone Institute reports:
Evergreen State College is located in Washington State, and is a public university. Evergreen is now being compared to the University of Missouri at Kansas City, a public school with an enrollment of 30,000 and an official tolerance policy on campus. It was last year at this same school that a black student, Jonathan Butler, was violently assaulted by a mob of white students while he was holding up a sign protesting racism. In that case, no arrests were made, despite video evidence showing that Butler was on the bottom of the violent assault and the official university policies that ban hate speech and discrimination. Like the mobs of white students at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, many of the Evergreen State students have organized Facebook groups to openly discuss racism and white supremacy. For example, a Facebook group called “Defend Evergreen” has more than 3,300 members. The majority of the discussions on this group concern white supremacists threatening violence at Evergreen State, and calling for the removal of the president of Evergreen State.
The article continued:
Evergreen State has been repeatedly compared to Nazi Germany, yet none of the attackers were prosecuted for their actions. Meanwhile, the attacks and harassment are creating a dangerous campus environment where students of color are being made to feel unwelcome.
The Gatestone Institute pointed out that Evergreen is “currently being investigated by the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S. Department of Education, which has now placed Evergreen on its ‘growing list’ of colleges with civil rights investigations.”
Earlier this week, a student in the university was reportedly assaulted by campus police on campus, supposedly for having “a screwdriver in his backpack.”
While the school is not as yet calling it a hate crime, the Gatestone Institute is saying it believes that there is good reason to think that it should be considered a hate crime, saying:
The same thing happened two years ago at Penn State University, where at least two women were sexually assaulted in off-campus apartments by men who were students at the University. According to news reports, the university administration made little attempt to prosecute the men who attacked these students. The Penn State story was documented in a movie titled “The Hunting Ground,” which was made by a film company that is closely affiliated with Evergreen State College, to which I received a reply from the college in May 2014 saying: “I can assure you that this film will not be shown on our campus.”
The article pointed out:
It is difficult to tell whether the current attacks at Evergreen State are racially motivated, as most of the attacks have not been videotaped. However, the Evergreen administration has refused to cooperate with a white college student who has been recording videos on campus in order to document and prevent these attacks.
That student’s website reveals that she came to that decision because she too had once been attacked for the color of her skin:
As a white student who supports Evergreen’s mission to help foster an environment of social and racial justice, I want to offer support to people of color at Evergreen and to help fight the rise in hate on campus. And it’s not just on campus that I’ve experienced the rise of hate. As a white woman, I have been racially attacked on numerous occasions. …
There have been moments when I’ve felt a lack of support from those on campus. I never know what to expect in conversations with fellow Evergreen students. During freshman year I was racially attacked and verbally attacked because of the color of my skin. Evergreen claims to be a tolerant campus, but incidents of hate on campus go unreported and unpunished. …
“We need to be able to walk through the hallways feeling safe and comfortable without constantly being on alert for potential racially motivated violence from other students, faculty, or staff.” …
However, Evergreen’s lack of action is concerning. The university says that the school will now have more security on campus, and that they “will do more to protect the safety of our students. …“ The school’s director of communications says that it is important for administrators to listen and take action to incidents such as the video of the student being assaulted for wearing a hijab in public:
… Evergreen has taken additional steps to protect the safety of students since last November’s racist and anti-Semitic incidents, including adding more campus police officers and adding counseling resources. Evergreen remains committed to serving its students, faculty and staff, and strengthening the campus community.
“When the safety and well-being of our students is at stake, we work tirelessly to create a safe environment for all. The incident last November caused us to step up our efforts, and it is now our top priority. We recognize that racism continues to exist in our country and will continue to work to combat all forms of racism on campus.
That is the same as the President of the United States telling us: “when the safety and well-being of our students is at stake, we work tirelessly to create a safe environment for all.” However, as long as the words are from Donald Trump, we are supposed to just trust him and think that everything is good. When Donald Trump says the right things, then that’s a good thing, and anything he says otherwise is a bad thing. That’s not how it works, and that’s not how it should work.
That should be the standard that everyone applies to Donald Trump when it comes to telling us whether he’s doing his job or not, but Donald Trump is in so far over his head, so deep down the morass of political correctness, that he’s not even a real politician, because he’s not doing his job as the leader of the free world. His only interest is in his brand and in pandering to the lowlife racist mob in his base, while throwing the rest of us to the wolves in order to appease his base.
Here is more from her article:
According to police records from the night of the attack at Evergreen State, the student who was assaulted told police she was wearing “a scarf or hijab” while running when she was suddenly “struck from behind.” The impact caused her to fall into the street. When questioned, the assailant admitted that he was the one who assaulted her. “He stated that ‘he came up and grabbed her off her feet,’ after she had seen him.”…
The day of the attack, after the assault on the student for wearing the hijab, she was treated by a nurse. When she was questioned by campus police about the assault, she “could not give a detailed description as she was blinded by [the assailant] from his fist to her face.”
That student also reportedly told police “that her attacker had her head forcefully slammed into the sidewalk or road by him while also strangling her with his arm around her neck in a chokehold.”
At no point, did Evergreen refer to the case as a hate crime or racial assault.
The college’s student newspaper published an article about the incident:
On April 3rd, 2018 at 7:30pm there was a racist and prejudiced assault that took place on the campus of Evergreen State College. It was reported that a black Evergreen State student was assaulted while trying to defend herself by pulling out a pen because she was surrounded and felt threatened by her white attackers. … Although we have spoken with multiple witnesses, they did not want their identities to be revealed because they are afraid of retaliation from the white people present and/or they fear being called out in class for speaking out.
We have all witnessed the increasing attacks against minorities by people who self-identify as “social justice warriors” who believe that there is no such thing as real racism, despite the real-life experiences and personal testimonies of those who live and work in majority-minority communities across this country.
When Donald Trump took office, I was excited that I would finally get to see a real leader in the White House, instead of a blowhard blowhard like Obama, who was not a leader at all. Instead, Obama was
