Voice Mail Left At Mosque Says Muslims Are “The N*ggers Of The World”

The Ohio chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) demanded on Thursday that threatening anti-Muslim voice mails to a mosque be investigated as hate crimes. CAIR wants state and federal authorities to investigate several voice mails left at the Masjid Omar Ibn El-Khattab mosque in Columbus, Ohio. The messages are rambling and hard to understand, but a male voice clearly says, “You motherfuckers are pieces of shit, garbage trash,” and “You are the n*ggers of the world.”

“These threats must be taken seriously and investigated as the hate crimes they are,” CAIR-Ohio Staff Attorney Romin Iqbal said in an official CAIR statement released Wednesday. “American Muslims, like all Americans, deserve to practice their faith without threats of violence targeting their houses of worship.”

In the aftermath of a brutal murder of three Muslims in North Carolina, activists are calling on law enforcement authorities to ramp up their awareness of Islamophobia and hate crimes against Muslims in the U.S. Police have responded to several reports of hate crimes nationally in the past few weeks, CAIR said in a separate statement on Wednesday.

Someone left death threats Tuesday on slips of paper in public spaces in Revere, Massachusetts, a city with a large Muslim population. They made such threats as “All Muslims will be killed.” Just last weekend, someone spray-painted Islamophobic remarks like “Now this is a hate crime” and the word “pigs” on the Islamic School of Rhode Island in West Warwick. And last week, an Islamic center burned down in Houston. The homeless man who allegedly set fire to the building was reported to have told a clerk at a convenience store that the Muslims got what they deserved.

To prove a hate crime in Ohio, you have to establish that someone committed an act motivated by prejudice and intolerance toward a person because they associate them with a certain ethnicity, religion or culture. Hate crimes aren’t tried as stand-alone offenses, according to the Ohio State Bar Association. Rather, they’re filed in parallel with other crimes.