Sonoma County Muslims say bias remains, even 20 years after attacks

It was news Mohammad Jabbari wasn’t expecting to hear.

An engineer at a high-tech company in Sonoma County, he’d survived two prior rounds of layoffs and was reassured by a high-level manager that his contributions to the company were valued. Because of this, he believed he’d be among the last to be dismissed, should it come to that.

But, just a few months after the al-Qaida attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which led to a backlash of sometimes violent anti-Muslim sentiments in the U.S., which also became known as Islamaphobia, he was let go.

Jabbari, who is Muslim, said he offered to fill other vacant roles at the company that he knew he was capable of doing, but he was told no.

“I had a good feeling that it was getting even, on me, even though I had nothing to do with (9/11),” said the Santa Rosa resident, who has since retired.

Now, two decades after the attacks, Jabbari and other Muslims in Sonoma County say that while much of the discrimination and violence some experienced early on in this region has waned, negative biases against those who follow Islam or hail from Arab countries remain ingrained in U.S. culture.

These needling concerns or nagging discomforts have taken the forms of repeated security checks at airports or unsolicited comments from strangers about Islam, they said.

All of which were reignited and elevated with the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump, they said.

During his campaign, Trump repeatedly warned of “radical Islamic terrorism” and said he would consider closing down mosques if he were to win election. He later called one of his policies that barred people from several Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. a “Muslim ban.”

In 2016, the year Trump was elected, assaults against Muslims surpassed those in 2001, according to FBI hate crime statistics.

“They say time heals, but the perceptions are still there,” Jabbari said. “That animosity may have subsided to some degree, but the perception of Muslims are still the same. They associate Islam with violence, which is not the case.”

Hanan Huneidi, a Penngrove resident who doesn’t attend a mosque, but identifies with aspects of the religion, said the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks placed a magnifying glass over a community that “didn’t want to be noticed.” The Muslim culture, she said, espouses humility and a broad disinterest in assimilation.

“After 9/11, you couldn't really do that,” Huneidi, 43, said. “People always wanted to know who we were.”

Following the attacks, the negative attention on Muslims in America manifested itself immediately in Huneidi’s life. Her boss at the restaurant where Huneidi worked as a server, at the time, told her not to come in because he was concerned for her safety.

When Huneidi eventually did return, she heard co-workers and customers making disparaging remarks about Arab people, sometimes without realizing she is Arab, Huneidi said.

A cousin who lives in New York told Huneidi that someone confronted her at her job, yelling: “Your people did this,” Huneidi said.

“All my friends were Muslims, so we started hearing about our friends being profiled or followed,” Huneidi said. “(Since 9/11), I’ve never gone to an airport without being pulled aside.”

Now a teacher in Marin County, Huneidi said she wears a hijab — the traditional head covering worn in public by some Muslim women — on the anniversary of 9/11, though, she doesn’t typically wear the garment in her daily life.

She lets her students know they can ask her anything about Muslims or Arabs, a tradition Huneidi started about seven years ago, when she was a special education and English teacher at Petaluma High School, she said.

“I felt it was really important to let students know what Arabs were really about,” she said. “I think one of the first questions I got then was, ‘Why are Muslims terrorists?’ so I got to talk about my perspective about that.”

Celeste Winders, 49, of Sonoma, had not yet converted to Islam when 9/11 happened. But after she did, the lasting Islamophobia she has experienced has had a definite impact on her life, she said.

Winders said she first learned about Islam at 14 years old, while attending a Catholic school in Napa that taught a course on world religions.

She liked the religion’s tenets, such as helping others, and continued to learn more about Islam throughout high school and college, when she befriended other Muslims.

“It aligned with core beliefs that I already had,” Winders said of the religion. “For me, it wasn’t so much a shift, it was more like it gave a name to things I already believed.”

In choosing to adopt Islam 18 years ago, Winders also began wearing a hijab when in public, which symbolizes modesty.

She said the practice has made her a target of Islamophobic comments on a handful of occasions. However, because she is white, and because she doesn’t wear her hijab under her chin and covering her neck as is done traditionally, her experiences as Muslim may be different from those of other Muslim women.

“I think that plays a lot into the fact that I don't receive as many engagements,” Winders said, referring to unsolicited comments about her hijab.

Still, there was the instance about 11 years ago when a man at her grocery store told her she “didn’t have to wear” the head covering because she’s “in America,” Winders said.

Her sons have also faced discrimination at school, including a comment from another student about how she was “going to blow up the school,” Winders said.

In addition, Trump’s so-called “Muslim ban” put her at odds with people she had previously considered friends, who tried to justify the policy by saying “Well, he didn’t ban you … he’s just banning the ones that are coming here,” Winders added.

“You’re trying to split racist a hair and that doesn’t work for me,” Winders said.

She said Trump’s victory, despite his disparaging comments about Muslims during his campaign, showed more work needed to be done to understand people from immensely diverse religions.

“I don’t think in the last 20 years that the U.S. has really evolved much in our ability to have global thought and critically think and view this community as people we actually know,” Winders said.

The Trump presidency and the rise of violence against Muslims in 2016 was what prompted Jabbari, the retired engineer, to start Sonoma County United In Kindness, a group intended to counter the acts of hatred, he said.

So far, nearly 50 local, secular and nonsecular groups, including the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors and other municipalities, have signed the group’s pledge, which proclaims freedom from hate speech, bullying discrimination and violence a human right, and includes a commitment to foster and sustain acts of kindness.

“I cannot change the world, but I can inform my friend,” Jabbari said of the pledge.

He said people generally don’t go out of their way to learn about different cultures and religions on a personal level, therefore their understanding of others is limited to what they hear on the news, which tends to focus on negative events.

That might be one of the reasons many Americans paint Muslims with a broad brush, he added.

“It will take people talking to each other, learning from each other,” Jabbari said in order to counter that. “Don’t shut down. Go and reach out.”

You can reach Staff Writer Nashelly Chavez at 707-521-5203 or nashelly.chavez@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @nashellytweets.