This article appeared in the February 21, 2019 edition of the Monitor Daily.

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A counter to hate

Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP/File
As anti-Muslim sentiment has become more visible in the United States in recent years, so too has interfaith support for Muslim communities.
Noelle Swan
Weekly Editor

This morning, mourners gathered in Indianapolis to remember Mustafa Ayoubi, who was killed on Saturday during a traffic dispute. Witnesses told police that the assailant hurled Islamic slurs at Mr. Ayoubi just moments before shooting him twice in the back. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has urged the FBI to investigate the incident as a hate crime.

Around the world, anti-Muslim rhetoric and attacks have been on the rise in recent years. But Yusufi Vali, executive director of New England’s largest mosque, has been tracking another surge: interfaith support.

On Feb. 10, 2017 – just days after a gunman in Quebec City opened fire in a mosque killing six people – a group of compassionate Bostonians hailing from “all faiths and no faith” surrounded Mr. Vali’s mosque in a silent human chain of peace.

Watchdog groups have expressed alarm as a long-present undercurrent of intolerance has crested into more overt acts of hatred since the 2016 election. Still, Vali has in some ways seen a positive aspect to the exposure of such anti-Muslim sentiment.

Many Americans are confronting for the first time a strain of intolerance that Muslim Americans have silently endured for decades. That reckoning, he says, is the first step toward societal healing.

Now on to our five stories for today.


This article appeared in the February 21, 2019 edition of the Monitor Daily.

Read 02/21 edition
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