Sikhs have been mistaken for terrorists and radicals and continue to suffer after 9/11 terror attacks in the US, community members feel following the attack on an elderly Sikh man in California which
Sikhs have been mistaken for terrorists and radicals and continue to suffer after 9/11 terror attacks in the US, community members feel following the attack on an elderly Sikh man in California which is being probed by the police as a hate crime.
“This is the latest episode of what Sikhs have been enduring when they are very peace-loving and hard-working citizens of this great country and not members of al-Qaeda or ISIS or any other radical group,” member of the Sikh Council of Central California Ike Iqbal Grewal said.
“Sikhs have been mistaken for terrorists and radicals and continue to suffer after 9/11,” he said. In the latest attack on Sikhs, Amrik Singh Bal, 68, of Fresno area in California, was assaulted by two white males in their 20s before dawn on Saturday morning while he was waiting for a ride to work. He also suffered a broken collar bone in the attack. Sikhs are frequently conflated with Muslims and often wind up absorbing the backlash against Islam.
“There’s nothing new about Sikhs being the targets of violence and intimidation in the US: Followers of the monotheistic faith, which originated in South Asia in the 15th century, have been on the receiving end of xenophobic intolerance since they began arriving in the Pacific Northwest to fill logging jobs in the early 20th century,” according to Simran Jeet Singh, a senior religion fellow at the Sikh Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group.
That intimidation intensified in the months after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when a wave of anti-Islamic sentiment washed over the country, leading some to confuse the long beards and turbans of Sikhs as a representation of Islam. Others viewed it simply as an opportunity to attack individuals they perceive as being “un-American”, Washington Post said.
