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Join on Telegram Rabat – Mock Muslims, humiliate them, deter them from infiltrating our country, vandalize their mosques—these are some of the lessons an American mum is teaching her kids. She steadily maintains in her now infamous Facebook live videos that this name-calling and Islamophobia is her way of “teaching her kids to be Patriots”.
While many Americans are pleading with president Trump to build bridges, not walls, two mums in Tempe, Arizona, are intent on wagging personal vendettas against all Muslims in America, whom they accuse of invading the country with “their Islamic laws.”
In three obnoxious footages that recently leaked online, Facebook users Tahnee Gonzales and Elisabeth Dauenhauer are shown in a car giving racist and inflammatory lectures to three unidentified kids in the background. “Muslims use our constitution against us and get everything for free, such as food, assistance, and housing,” Gonzales is heard saying. She pauses, turns towards ‘her’ children in the back of the car, and then says, referring to Muslims: “They don’t even work”, something to which a little girl in the background answers, again referring to Muslims: “They smell like goats.” And they all burs out laughing, as they continue their ecstatic mockery of Muslims.
“Look at this ugly mosque here,” says Gonzales, the trip’s cheer leader, as their car arrives on site at one mosque they intend to vandalize that day. She points to how “massively” and “illegally” Muslims are “invading” America, adding: “Muslims are nothing but evil Satan worshippers.”
That day’s car trip, Gonzales says, is an excursion to a nearby mosque in Tempe, Arizona, where, as part of her “attempt to expose the evil that is happening in our backyards,” she’d be showing her children what Muslims “truly are like”, and how they [Muslims] intend to invade and occupy America. At the Tempe mosque, Gonzales cheers up her kids as they loot and vandalize the mosque’s funeral van and some parts inside the mosque. “Look at these patriots,” she says, pointing to the kids as they keep on vandalizing the cult place.
Gonzales, who misses no opportunity to tell her numerous Facebook live viewers the sense of her actions, says that the trip to the mosque was “to collect as much information”, to expose mosques, and teach the children how to be true American patriots. “We’re coming after you. We, the people. We’re exposing you. You guys stand for evil and nothing but evil”, Gonzales is heard addressing a worshipper at the Tempe mosque.
At which point a little girl is heard telling a boy: “be careful because Muslims are waiting to rape you.”
Although Tahnee Gonzales and Elisabeth Dauenhauer have been arrested by local police and charged with “felony third-degree burglary”–with “hate crime” a possible crime for which they may be convicted, observers have been raising serious concerns about how this is not an isolated incident.
To them, the freedom and entitlement that people such as Gonzales now feel in publicly expressing such hateful speeches is an indication of how increasingly difficult it has become to be a Muslim or a minority in Trump’s America. The “litany of disinformation” and hate speech, the anti-Islam campaign, none of this is new, they say. Instead, what is new and “jarring” is how kids are being thought, in the public eye, to hate fellow Americans based on their religion.
“What really affected me the most is seeing those young children getting real-life lessons in hate… Those innocent 5-, 6-year old children are now really learning hate from their parents. It’s really disheartening,” said an acting imam at the Tempe Islamic Centre.
Some local reports have revealed that the two women are members of the Patriot Movement AZ, an alt-right activist group said to be fueled and energized by Trump’s foul language, especially his anti-immigrants and Islamophobic ramblings.
In February 8, this year, The Guardian ran a long piece entitled The fight for the right to be a Muslim in America. In it, the reporter decried the disheartening double standards and the institutional exclusion that American Muslims deal with on a daily basis, especially in recent years where people who dislike Islam and Muslims feel more entitled to do so because of a president keen on praising and maintaining America’s Christian roots.
With public vilifications of Muslims such as the one recently experienced in Tempe, it seems that being Muslim in Trump’s America is indeed a right that is fiercely fought for, especially considering the stigma that the president puts on Muslims in his public speeches.
