![]() ![]() “We’re not listening to each other,” said Omar Aziz, who directs the Middle Eastern Student Center at UC Riverside, which provides support to about 2,000 students. And their complaints about “the other side” aren’t just similar they’re almost identical, down to the word. People connected to all sides of those debates suggest the end result has been frustration, not two-way dialogue. 7, several Southern California campuses – UC Riverside, UC Irvine, UCLA and Cal State Long Beach, among others – have seen heated, not violent, discourse. ![]() “But the things I’ve been hearing in the past few weeks, it sounds a lot like the arguments we escaped from,” he added. So I don’t think that’s happening yet,” said Ahmed Bilal, an engineer whose family left Syria in 2017 and wound up in Buena Park. “In Syria, the killers don’t announce themselves. That was 14 more such incidents than during the same two-week stretch of 2022.įor some people caught up in the maelstrom – including refugees from people who arrived in Southern California in recent years after fleeing years of shooting wars in their home countries – the rhetoric and rising anger looks familiar. 7, with reports of 49 hate crimes during that period directed at Jews or Muslims. On the same day that Cornell called off classes, the Council on American Islamic Relations in Anaheim issued a report the group leaders said detailed a surge of Islamophobic incidents and threats directed against children in Southern California.Īnd while hate crimes have been rising all year in Los Angeles County, the LAPD tracked a jump in the two weeks following Oct. 2, Cornell University in upstate New York called off classes after an anonymous online poster wrote they were “gonna shoot up” the Jewish Living Center on campus, an idea that elicited supportive messages from users with online handles such as “jew evil” and “kill jews.” Similar threats had been made earlier against the Jewish student center at Columbia University. Lone offenders, motivated by a range of violent ideologies, pose the most likely threat. ![]() “As the Israel-Hamas conflict continues, we have seen an increase in reports of threats against Jewish, Muslim, and Arab communities and institutions. That, in turn, has caught the attention of agencies that handle national security threats.Ī recent directive from the Department of Homeland Security included: It’s not just theoretical, and it’s not just local.Īntisemitic and anti-Muslim threats around the country have prompted a wave of calls to law enforcement agencies. “If I were 19 years old right now, I’d be afraid.” Threats, similar words “But from the perspective of a 19-year-old, who might not understand what their actions might lead to, the things people are saying now – and the lack of meaningful dialogue – is concerning to me in a way that’s not just about frustration. Probably the highest emotion I have right now is frustration, if that’s an emotion. Or, Eran, the adult leader of a Jewish student group at UC Riverside put it: “I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody gets killed,” said Jamar, a student at Long Beach State who said he supports “justice for Palestinian people, and for everybody else” and doesn’t want to disclose his last name because he fears for his family’s safety. 7 is less about short-term right and wrong than it is about long-term survival. Locals with relatives in Israel and Gaza and other parts of the Middle East say the anger that’s risen locally since Oct. ![]()
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