Muslim Women Learn Self-Defense-- Madeleine Norton, 4th period

Near Nashville, Tennessee is a community in which several women, all who wear a hijab, go to practice self-defense fighting techniques to better arm themselves against oppressors/hateful acts aimed towards them because of their religion. Many of these women have never been physically assaulted but admit to feeling unsafe and insecure about their surroundings, especially after the involvement of terrorists claiming to be Muslim (and prominently female) in the San Bernardino attacks. This has especially hurt women as of late; one of the self-defense trainees, Annette Martin, recalls how she soon began defending her religion and hijab as well as worrying for her safety soon after. Although significantly more comfortable handling a situation of nativist nature, the women should not have to focus on being confronted with such.

Kyung Lah of CNN backs up the women's story of woe with information, analyzing, "National hate crime data is self-reported to the FBI and lags a year behind. In 2014, the data showed Muslim hate crimes were second only to anti-Jewish crimes. But the FBI doesn't track whether the victims in those religious hate crimes are male or female.The Council on American-Islamic Relations says it is better able to track attacks on mosques as an empirical measure of anti-Muslim sentiment. Its latest study found that after the November 13 Paris and December 2 San Bernardino attacks, incidents targeting mosques spiked, including cases of damage, destruction, vandalism, harassment and intimidation. In both November and December there were 17 such incidents, the highest number since the organization began tracking attacks in 2009. The group says the number of mosque attacks from 2014 to 2015 quadrupled.

Frustrated by the lagging data on individual hate crimes, criminologist Brian Levin, a professor at California State University, San Bernardino, launched a hate crime study through his research group, the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. Levin confirmed and analyzed hate crimes reported in the media and by civil rights groups, using FBI hate crime reporting standards. The center found in the month following the Paris attacks, from November 13 to December 13, the rate of anti-Islamic hate crimes tripled, compared with the monthly average from the previous five years. In the week following the San Bernardino attack, there were 11 suspected hate crimes alone. 

Levin then broke his data down further, looking at who the victims were in those reported crimes in November and December. Forty percent were women, he found. What Levin doesn't know, due to limited data, is if the percentage of Muslim female victims has grown. 'They're easily identifiable and an easy target,' Levin says. 'What I worry about is we may have indeed turned a corner where women are targeted for attack in anti-Muslim hate crimes.'"

However, it is encouraging to see women taking action against such despicably unjust crimes towards their people and themselves by learning to stand up to threats. It's incredibly terrible to think that they feel the need to protect themselves in this way from others, I find it unfair as they are just as deserving of respect and citizenship as their fellow Americans.

This circumstance in general can easily be synthesized with many periods in the past, especially including genocides throughout African countries during reigns of terror, and massacres of Native Americans whilst Europeans were populating the Americas. Likewise, there was the famed Holocaust in European countries (particularly Germany and Poland) during World War Two. Throughout history we can see there is continual oppression and fear for the minorities in countries spanning the entire world.

Article link for more information: http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/18/us/muslim-women-self-defense-class/index.html