From Gawker
by Camille Dodero
When Anum Hussain heard about the Boston Marathon bombing, she immediately panicked, worried that the culprits would be like her. The 22-year-old Muslim was in the offices of Hubspot, the Cambridge marketing-software company she works for. As her coworkers frantically rushed to call loved ones who’d been out watching the marathon that day, she was glued to the TV, fearing what she might learn about potential suspects. “My heart was beating fast, just praying that this person didn’t turn out to be Muslim,” she recalled. “I knew that if they were, all hell was going to break loose.”
Her concern was warranted. That same afternoon, on the Boston subway, a second-year Muslim student at Northeastern University who wears a headscarf phoned her parents to report her safety; as she spoke to them in Arabic, a stranger pushed her so hard she fell to the ground. Later, one of Anum’s male acquaintances, someone with brown skin, was riding the MBTA when he realized that he was weirdly alone—all the other passengers on his car had moved away from him, as if he was a threat. Two mornings later in Malden, a town of about 60,000 that’s five miles away from Cambridge, a 26-year-old Syrian woman in a headscarfwas walking down a main street, pushing her nine-month-old daughter in a stroller, when an angry man punched her in the shoulder, cursed “Fuck you Muslims,” and screamed, “You are terrorists, you are the ones who made the Boston explosion.”
These incidents happened before two Muslim suspects had been identified, before anyone knew the names Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, even before the New York Post splashed two completely innocent brown “Bag Men” on the front cover. As it was, not even two hours after the bombing, WorldNutDaily goon Erik Rush had been glibly lashing out at the Saudis on Twitter, then firing back at someone who asked if he was already blaming Muslims for the Marathon Bombing, “Yes, they’re evil. Let’s kill them all.” (“Sarcasm, idiot,” was how he later backed out.)
“We could all feel it coming,” said Hussain, the daughter of Pakistani immigrants and first person in her extended family born in the United States. Growing up in Windham, N.H., among a local community of more than 100 others who shared her faith, she was was only 10 on September 11, 2001. New England was the only home she’d ever known. So it was both confusing and upsetting when people started calling her “terrorist” at school, or when kids would make jokes about her “Uncle Saddam.” Or when, on a field trip, a student from another class told her to go back to own country. “That was the most confusing taunt,” she said. “This is my country.”
