In Trump’s America, Muslim women turning to self-defence training

WASHINGTON: The Muslims women are now gearing up for the self-defence in the United States as the racial attacks since the Election Day have been on the rise.

Kalimah Azeez, a Muslim activist in Memphis, is urging her community to take extra precautions amid a national spike in bias-related attacks since Donald Trump won the presidential election.

She met with Memphis police officials to plan a self-defense course at a local mosque where martial arts trainers will teach “escape and evade tactics.” She’s also preparing a video tutorial to introduce Muslim women to an emergency-response app called Cell 411. It records an attack, sends the information to the cloud for safe storage and automatically alerts the authorities.

Some non-Muslims might view such steps as alarmist, but Azeez calls it prudence.

“We can look at the climate of the country, look at the map and see how red it is, we can hear the rhetoric and look at the individuals and see in their faces the anger and frustration. It’s real,” Azeez, program director at the American Muslim Advisory Council told mcclatchydc.com.

“We protect ourselves,” she said. “As Muslims, as women, we have to be ahead of the curve.”

In separate interviews, Muslim women in five states said self-defense initiatives had become a priority for mosques as hate-crime trackers report an outbreak of incidents since Election Day. Imparting basic protection skills is one tactic imams and activists are turning to in the struggle to comfort their terrified communities as the Trump campaign’s anti-Muslim rhetoric inches closer to policy.

Trump’s first Cabinet picks signaled that there would be no reassuring gestures to the nation’s 3.3 million Muslims. Sen. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s preference to lead the Justice Department, Michael Flynn, his national security adviser pick, and Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kansas, the CIA director nominee, have made anti-Muslim statements. Flynn has suggested Islam isn’t a religion.

Muslim women – especially those easily identifiable because of their headscarves – say such moves give political cover to attackers targeting them because of their faith. The takeaway, they said: They’re going to have to rely on themselves for protection.

“Ever since Wednesday, the 9th of November, I’ve had two universities reach out to me, one women’s organization, a handful of individuals and a family member in Florida wanting to fly me out there to teach women,” said Uzma Shariff, a Chicago-based practitioner of jiujitsu and Krav Maga martial arts. “So you can imagine that concerns are very heightened.”

The worries aren’t baseless. Since Election Day, the Southern Poverty Law Center has recorded more than 701 bias-related incidents, including many against Muslim women. In 2015, according to the FBI, hate-related incidents targeting Muslims jumped 67 percent from the previous year, and there are fears that the statistics for 2016 will be even more chilling.