DALLAS _ A North Texas Muslims group is "unnerved" this week after it was threatened and taunted late last week _ and it believes it's because Donald Trump won the Nov. 8 election.
Alia Salem, executive director of the Center for American-Islamic Relations DFW, told FOX 4 that people wearing masks on motorcycles and pickup trucks circled CAIR's Dallas office on Friday. Salem said they were waving flags, flipping them off and shouting expletives.
The next day, Salem said the group was targeted again during a community meeting on race relations at a coffee shop when someone called and asked if it was "where the terrorists are meeting," Salem told FOX 4.
In August, a Watauga man called a nearby mosque and threatened to cut the heads off everyone in the mosque, according to Watauga police. After the suspect, James Nicholas Smithey, 36, was arrested, Salem and other local religious leaders held a news conference at the Masjid Al-Sahaabah mosque and expressed worry about rising "anti-Muslim sentiment in the country."
Salem said then that a pattern of discrimination was "particularly in response to recent rhetoric from elected officials and people who are running for office of the president of the United States."
During his campaign, Trump pledged that he would ban all Muslims temporarily from entering the country if he won, but later suggested he may ban people from countries linked to terrorism instead of using religion as a criteria.
The weekend before the election, Salem posted a video on social media saying that the FBI was targeting Muslims around the country and in North Texas for interviews about an alleged terrorism threat for the day before the election. She urged Muslim residents to decline to do interviews without a lawyer, and she worried that it would keep some Muslims from voting on Election Day.
"The unintended consequence of this is voter suppression," Salem said.
