Muslim Americans continue to report risings acts of Islamophobia in the aftermath of the Paris and San Bernardino attacks and increased anti-Muslim sentiment on the campaign trail. A Muslim store owner in Queens, New York, said he was beaten by an attacker who reportedly said, “I kill Muslims.” Other incidents include racist hate speech directed at two Muslim women in an Austin café, and a group of boys punching a Muslim girl in New York and pulling on her hijab. At a rally on Wednesday against Donald Trump’s call to ban Muslims from entering the United States, Khalid Latif of the Islamic Center at New York University said anti-Muslim racism today could be even worse than after 9/11.

Khalid Latif: “As these voices speak unchecked, we see a rise in anti-Muslim sentiment that is arguably worse than even the backlash experienced immediately after September 11th. They give rise and justify to those who have in recent weeks have burned down and vandalized mosques all over this country, who have pushed down women wearing headscarves onto train tracks, shot cab drivers, and even in our own city validated for three young men their beating of a sixth grade Muslim girl in Harlem as they punched her, beat her, tried to rip the scarf off of her head and called her ISIS over and over and over. That is not OK. We have to be better than that.”