Portland Woman Accused of Snatching Hijab Is Charged With Hate Crimes

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/06/us/hijab-hate-crime-portland.html

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Authorities in Oregon charged a woman with hate crimes for pulling off another woman’s hijab, trying to strangle her with it and “intentionally desecrating” it, prosecutors said on Friday.

Jasmine Renee Campbell, 23, of Portland faces several charges, including two counts of bias crime in the second degree and one count of attempted strangulation, the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office said in a statement. All of the charges Ms. Campbell faces are misdemeanors.

Prosecutors said Ms. Campbell snatched the hijab of the woman, a 24-year-old foreign exchange student from Saudi Arabia, while at a transit stop in Portland in November.

Ms. Campbell, who did not know the victim, approached her from behind and grabbed the hijab before trying to choke her with it, the district attorney’s office said, citing court documents.

After the woman pushed Ms. Campbell away, Ms. Campbell forcibly took the hijab, prosecutors said. According to court documents, Ms. Campbell then “rubbed it on and across multiple exposed sexually intimate parts of her body,” the district attorney’s office said.

The victim, who attends Portland State University, told the police that since the attack, she “no longer feels safe wearing a hijab in public and is relying on alternative methods to cover herself,” prosecutors said.

Ms. Campbell, who was arrested in December in an unrelated matter, was scheduled to appear in court on Friday but did not show up, prosecutors said.

Phone calls and messages left for a phone number listed under Ms. Campbell’s name were not immediately returned on Sunday night. She did not appear to have a lawyer.

Zakir Khan, the board chairman of the Oregon chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, called the incident a “tremendous tragedy.”

“It’s a terrible reminder of how Muslim women are being targeted, not only here in Oregon, but also all throughout the country,” he said on Sunday.

Mr. Khan said hate crimes affect not just the person being attacked, but the person’s community as well.

“There’s a lot of talk about protecting,” he said, adding that hate crimes have created an environment where “there’s a lot of people dealing with trauma, and we as a country need to come to grips with how we’re going to be dealing with that trauma for years to come.”

In 2016, the F.B.I. reported a rise in hate crimes, fueled in part by attacks on Muslims.

For Muslim Americans, Mr. Khan said, “there’s a lot of Islamophobia that’s coming in, there’s a lot of hatred that’s being bred in places all around the country.”

“It really impacts the safety of Muslim Americans,” he added. “We need to be a country that really strives to protect that safety, but also helps people feel at home here.”