Reuters, San Francisco :Mirvette Judeh began covering her hijab with a hoodie two weeks ago while in the car with her young children. Someone might want to hurt their mother, she explained to them, because the head scarf easily identifies her as Muslim.”Now I have to have these conversations with my kids,” said Judeh, 39, who lives in southern California. “That’s what breaks my heart – to tell my kids that a choice I made to stand up for my religion could make me unsafe.”As anti-Muslim sentiment swells following the Dec. 2 massacre in San Bernardino, California, by a young Muslim couple inspired by Islamic State, many Muslim parents and their children say they fear for their safety and are struggling with their American and Muslim identities.Judeh, for instance, said she has told her children that their actions may face extra scrutiny because they are Muslim.She teaches her 8-year-old son to never utter the words “blow up” at school, regardless of the context, and to never pretend he is playing with guns, even if his friends do. Her son has asked if people hate him and his family, Judeh said, a question she can find difficult to answer after receiving hateful comments and threats because of her hijab.The problems have gathered pace since gunmen loyal to Islamic State killed 130 people in Paris on Nov. 13.But even before the Paris violence, anti-Muslim sentiment was on the rise, swept along by rhetoric from U.S. presidential candidates – from Republican Ben Carson’s comment in September that Muslims were unfit for the presidency to billionaire Donald Trump’s recent call for a ban on Muslim immigration.Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, a Republican whose presidential campaign has struggled in recent months, has said the United States should only allow in Syrian refugees who can prove that they are Christian – a tiny fraction of the millions driven from the war-shattered country.Some Muslim families say they fear a rising tide of hate crimes directed against their faith, such as when a pig’s head was found outside the door of a Philadelphia mosque on Dec. 7, an incident that made national headlines. Pork and pork byproducts are haram, or forbidden, in Islam.Some discrimination goes largely unnoticed, such as when a woman threw hot coffee at a group of Muslims praying in a park in California on Dec. 6. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, which tracks such incidents, says the scale of vandalism, damage and intimidation at American mosques this year is the worst in the six years it has kept records.
