Prosecutors, judges, former Vice President Mondale speak out at forum.

By Stephen Montemayor

Asma Jama, who was attacked by a woman at a local Applebees, was one of four panelists who spoke of their experiences of racial attacks during a forum about I

Bearing the scars of having a glass mug shattered across her face, Asma Jama looked out at an audience of 200 people and again told her story: How she was attacked in a Coon Rapids Applebees by a patron who flew into a rage because she spoke a foreign language.

The attack, she said, was unlike anything she has encountered in her 15 years living here. Now she fears she will be targeted each time she steps outside, she said.

“This time it’s not going to be a beer mug,” Jama said. “This time it’s going to end my life.”

Jama was one of four panelists Wednesday morning at a forum on Islamophobia, and her audience represented the latest sector to consider the issue’s hold on Minnesota’s large Muslim-American population: its legal community, including former Vice President Walter Mondale.

U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger, also attending the forum, said he wants to create a committee that would bring together groups including the Federal Bar Association and North American Somali Bar Association to focus on Islamophobia. Solutions could range from additional community dialogues to exploring civil or criminal legal remedies.

Left unchecked, Luger said, “Islamophobia is going to destroy the social fabric of this state.”

Wednesday’s discussion, at the office of the Minneapolis law firm Dorsey & Whitney, was part of more than a dozen such panels led by federal prosecutors around the country this month, Luger said.

Mondale told the audience that the answer to the “ugly face of hatred and bigotry” lay in the state’s instincts of human decency and kindness. He later said that what many Muslim-Americans endure resembles previous trials that confronted the immigrant groups of prior generations.

“We know that our future depends on us solving this problem,” Mondale said.

The panel was the latest in a series of discussions between federal officials and a Somali-American community grappling with twin challenges — an ongoing investigation into young men tempted by foreign terrorist activity and residents dreading the latest sound bite from a highly divisive presidential campaign.

Chief U.S. District Judge John Tunheim said he fears that recent examples of national rhetoric — including presidential candidates who called for police to patrol Muslim neighborhoods — incites Islamophobic actions. In Minnesota, such incidents have included Jama’s attack and a local lawyer who was confronted at a football game by a fan asking if he was a refugee.

“Our country has a vast experience with horrible bigotry,” Tunheim said. “I think looking back, the more important lesson we can take from our experience … is that good people cannot let things like this happen.”

Deepinder Mayell, a local attorney of Indian Punjabi descent who was confronted at the Vikings game, later agreed, saying the silence of other fans worsened the situation. “Do they agree with this person?” he said he remembered thinking.

Haju Yusef, whose Unitecloud Facebook group helped influence a change in the state’s policy on personalized license plates, said the image of an anti-Muslim license plate that went viral was sent to him by a teen who wanted to get the word out.

“There are people around us — they have no name, but when it matters they speak up,” he said.

Lul Hersi, a St. Cloud mother of four, said she fears the political climate is counterproductive to efforts to thwart radicalism among potentially disaffected youth.

“You’re pushing these children to a point where they will not come back,” she said.

Speaking after the event, FBI special agent in charge Richard Thornton likened the climate of Islamophobia that has followed recent terror attacks in the U.S., Paris and Brussels to the anti-Muslim backlash that erupted after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

“There shouldn’t be a cause and effect,” Thornton said. “That shouldn’t be a cause for anybody to lash out.”

Source: StarTribune