On Saturday, three college students of Palestinian descent were shot in Burlington, Vermont, an incident authorities are now investigating as a possible hate crime. The shooting took place as fears have grown about rising anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim sentiment, as well as rising antisemitism, amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict.
Following the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 and the subsequent Israeli military onslaught on Gaza, civil rights groups have expressed concerns about an uptick in reports of assault, verbal harassment, and intimidation targeting Muslim and Arab Americans as well as Jewish Americans. As Vox’s Fabiola Cineas previously reported, the FBI has yet to release updated hate crime figures documenting these trends, but organizations including the pro-Israel group the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Muslim advocacy organization the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) have chronicled an increase in incidents of harassment and threats targeting Jewish Americans and Muslim Americans since this past October.
[Related: “History repeating itself”: How the Israel-Hamas war is fueling hate against Muslims and Jews]
CAIR is among the groups that have called on law enforcement to review whether bias played a role in the college students’ shootings in Vermont. “We encourage law enforcement to file state and federal hate crime charges if the evidence confirms that anti-Palestinian racism motivated this attack,” the organization’s executive director Nihad Awad said in a statement. “We also call on elected officials to reject and condemn the rise in anti-Muslim bigotry and anti-Palestinian racism that has led to hate crimes.”
The 20-year-old students — Hisham Awartani of Brown University, Kinnan Abdalhamid of Haverford College, and Tahseen Ahmed of Trinity College — were walking down a major street in Burlington on their way to visit a relative of one the men for the Thanksgiving holiday when they were…
Read the full article here
