Medcalf: Recent attacks against Minnesota mosques, Muslims are unsettling. Does anybody care?

With his daughter playing in the background, I could hear Jaylani Hussein’s concern expressed over the phone days after Dar Al-Qalam, a mosque in northeast Minneapolis, received more than a dozen threatening calls over the weekend. The person who called the mosque also texted a video of the New Zealand mass shooting that killed 51 people when a mass shooter opened fire at two mosques in 2019. Those threatening calls are the latest in a startling trend of hateful acts targeting Minnesota’s Muslim community in recent months.

But as Hussein and I talked Thursday, I paused when the local Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-MN) executive director mentioned this state’s breathtaking status after logging more than a half-dozen incidents of violence and intimidation against Muslims in the last 12 months.

“By the way, this is a record for the nation,” he said. “There is no other state that has eight attacks against mosques in one year.”

The string of headlines regarding violence against our Muslim community has been unyielding. Earlier this month, Lino Lakes City Council Member Chris Lyden praised an email that called Islam a “declared enemy” amid a proposal to build a Muslim-focused development that would include a mosque and housing. In May, a Minneapolis man driving a minivan struck a pedestrian in the parking lot of a mosque. Last year, two Minneapolis mosques were set on fire days after a St. Paul mosque had been vandalized. And those were not the only documented crimes against the Muslim community over the last year.

But the care Hussein said he had hoped to see from Minnesotans in the wake of these incidents never arrived.

“No one is reacting,” he said. “I mean, very little reaction that we’re seeing. Meaning, the typical emails, the phone calls. ‘What can we do? How can we help? Is there money that’s needed? Can we provide you with some support? We’re sorry.’ You know, that’s typical. It may not take you far, but at least it shows there is a concern.”

That’s unacceptable. Too often, our “that’s awful” reactions do not translate to tangible action. And members of marginalized communities in Minnesota know how difficult it is to sustain the continuity of any support received in these situations.

The truth? People stop caring. And that can’t happen.

The Muslim community is a part of the larger community of Minnesotans. As such, its fears should also belong to the rest of us when dangerous individuals threaten to harm any one of us.

While the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder showcased the power of solidarity amid tragedy, it also exposed another problem. Sometimes, Minnesota needs to see a body before it feels compelled to believe marginalized groups when they announce their pain. Stitched into that truth, however, is also the fact that some Minnesota communities receive more acknowledgment and validation than others.

I told Hussein I am certain that if a group of Black churches in Minneapolis had endured the same violence and threats of violence against its people and institutions over the last year, more people from the larger community would have responded and reacted. But we should not pick and choose which humans to support when hatred looms.

We are all vulnerable and worthy of care when attacked.

“When hate happens, the first thing you should do is just be responsive,” Hussein said when I asked him about what real alliance and support means. “Find out what the community needs. Show up and be present. And we’ve seen that before. It’s not like it hasn’t happened, you know? And I mean, the neighbors who live near that mosque, community leaders, nonprofit organizations, faith leaders, elected officials … there is a sense of duty to respond when a community is hurting and feeling unsafe. So it’s not like we’re asking people to do anything new, we’re just asking them to give us the courtesy that they would give any other community.”

In July, I packed my whole family — sisters, kids, parents — into a large SUV and drove to Mississippi for my father’s family reunion in his small hometown. On that trip, I learned more about our family’s past.

We drove past the land where my grandfather was a sharecropper. The white family that owned the land then still owns the land now. And I also discovered more details about the day my grandfather left town, moved to Milwaukee and didn’t see his family for three years.

An enraged white man in that little town — a Ku Klux Klan member and local police officer — had sent him a message. Leave town or else.

This is the same sentiment that surrounds our Muslim community in Minnesota today.

Hatred is a garden. It is planted, protected and watered before its flowers bloom.

Every form of Islamophobia is sunshine for that garden. The calls, fires and violent attacks did not sprout from barren soil. And that’s what we have to address, as a community awaits more support — support it deserves and needs — in a difficult chapter.

Because it is one thing to feel unloved but it is equally detrimental to feel ignored.