Canonsburg family sees rise in anti-Muslim insults
U.S. Army veteran Yaareb Al Taweel and his wife, Mays, are shown in their Canonsburg home Thursday.
U.S. Army Veteran Yaareb Al Taweel and his wife, Mays, say they have been victims of discrimination in the community because they are from the Middle East.
U.S. Army veteran Yaareb Al Taweel, center, is shown with other members of the military.
U.S. Army veteran Yaareb Al Taweel and his wife, Mays, talk Thursday at their home in Canonsburg about how they are treated in the community because they are Muslim.
Yaareb Al Taweel, right, is shown while working with the U.S. military.
CANONSBURG – Most people don’t have to worry about profane insults about their religion or dress when going shopping. But Mays Al Taweel, 30, said she experiences a nearly constant torrent of disrespectful comments while she’s in public.
“Unfortunately, my wife is harassed when I am not there, because people don’t say anything when I’m around. And I wish I was, because I would know how to handle it,” said Mays’ husband, Yaareb Al Taweel, 34, an Iraqi-American and U.S. Army veteran. He said, “You can call me Al,” acknowledging how it’s difficult for some to remember his name.
“Sometimes people don’t even want to look at me because I wear a hijab. I feel sad and angry every time it happens, and it happens all the time,” said Mays, who had her husband translate most of her conversation. Mays has been taking English classes at the Literacy Council of Southwestern Pennsylvania for the past three months. The director, Kris Drach, a retired U.S. Army colonel, said she is seeing students enrolled in English classes stop regular attendance.
“This all started with Donald Trump, around September, with the rhetoric about Mexicans being rapists and drug runners. Over half of our students are Latino, but less than half are actually Mexican; there’s a common stereotype that if you speak Spanish you’re Mexican – regardless if you’re from Honduras or South America,” Drach said.
There are 120 active students, and 87 of them are “English as a Second Language” (ESL) students. There were 12 new enrollments in September, one in October and none in November. And attendance for each class has dropped by nearly 50 percent. Drach said this has not happened in her four years of leading the organization, and the feedback from tutors is that adult students are feeling more nervous.
“There’s this unspoken promise in this country that if you speak English, we’ll take you in. But right now, the students are feeling, ‘Why bother? It’s not going to help me right now,’ and they’re retreating to more comfortable places. But English still is their gateway to American life,” Drach said.
Several adult students – a Vietnamese woman, a Pakistani woman and several Christian Syrian refugees – all either denied to be interviewed or backed away from previously agreed interviews, saying they feared retaliation at their place of work or against their family.
For American Muslims, the rise in anti-Islamic rhetoric is ratcheting back up just as violent and fatal terrorist attacks inspired or carried out by Islamic-political groups around the world have left dozens dead. In Pittsburgh, Anthony Mohamed was arrested this past week for a Thanksgiving Day shooting of a Moroccan immigrant that reportedly was motivated by the taxi driver’s remarks about being Muslim.
But the Taweel family isn’t scared.
“Washington County is a safe place to be. Safety isn’t my biggest concern, it’s just the way people react to (my wife) or treat her, because she supported me and shared my burden while I was deployed,” Yaareb said.
The former Iraqi translator first started working for the U.S. Army as a civilian in 2003 in Baghdad. He eventually enlisted in the Army in 2011 after getting a special visa for his civilian service and became a U.S. citizen. He rose to the rank of sergeant and was honorably discharged after working as a linguist. Despite the cultural frustrations, Yaareb said he, his wife and three children have enjoyed their move to America. Canonsburg in 2015 is a far cry from downtown Baghdad in 2003.
“One day I got a letter on my door threatening to decapitate me, my family and my children because I was working with the U.S. Army. I called off that day and went into the street with a rifle screaming, ‘C’mon then! Kill me!’ We found the guy and his parents and confronted him,” Yaareb said. “We told him we didn’t want to kill him, so why would he want to kill us?”
Another incident was a close brush with death.
“I was driving and this car started to pass me. A few more cars pass, and the original one blows up. It was a car bomb. I was lucky. The cars between stopped the blast from hitting me, but I was in shock, just sitting there for a couple of minutes, and my phone rings. It was sad, but funny. It was my buddy. He said, ‘Hey where are you?’ I said, ‘I just survived an explosion!’ He replied, ‘Oh. OK. Good. Then you can get me my food, yes?’ It was normal,” Yaareb said.
Having lived in Iraq for nearly 28 years, Yaareb still keeps tabs on his native country – and the world – through a variety of international news networks he pipes in through cable using “IP TV,” which hosts the multilingual channels on an Internet server.
“The terrorists there, and everywhere, it’s not so much about religion. It’s about money and war. They take passages from the Quran to justify killing, but they are killing Muslims, too. It’s to recruit and keep the cycle of war going – to keep countries scared so they’ll buy weapons and, look,” Yaareb said as he paused and pointed to his home TV as two hostages were executed by terrorists’ gunfire in the kind of brutal close-up never shown on American news channels – “those two were just killed. And you don’t get the truth just by watching one channel like Fox News, which generalizes and exaggerates. It’s troubling to watch,” he said.
“But I don’t watch Al-Jazeera. They talk about Daesh using the ISIS or ISIL name and take pride in it,” he continued.
“Because you should call (politically extreme Islamist terrorists) Daesh. Secretary of State John Kerry calls the extremist groups Daesh, and they hate it.”
Daesh is an Arabic acronym that sounds like “discord” or “chaos” in the language and doesn’t honor their political, English acronyms such as ISIS or ISIL.
“I just wish more people would understand this, because there’s a simplistic understanding of how Sunnis and Shiite Muslims are supposedly fighting. And presidential candidates are tapping into that, but they’re not doing anything constructive. Just stirring up things. Let me tell you something, I’m Shiia; my wife is Sunni. We are not going to fight over religion,” Yaareb said.