Muslim and Jewish Utahns agree: We’re frightened and feel less safe than ever

Rabbi Samuel Spector no longer asks Jewish Utahns how they’re doing. The leader of Salt Lake City’s Congregation Kol Ami already knows.

“Nobody,” he said, “in my community is doing well.”

Since the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas on Israeli civilians and Israel’s subsequent bombings in Gaza, he said, the east-side synagogue has received a bomb threat and a slew of threatening calls and emails “saying just horribly vile stuff.”

Utah Muslims, meanwhile, are facing “hate at unprecedented levels,” Luna Banuri of the Muslim Civic League said, explaining that the reports of hate incidents to her organization have quadrupled in the past five weeks. This rise in Islamophobia comes despite the fact that the violence occurring in Israel and Gaza represents, she said, “a political war,” not a religious one.

Conversations with her and Spector, as well as other Jewish and Muslim leaders in the state, revealed two minority faiths reeling from the effects of individuals they say have been emboldened in their hate.

Antisemitism on the rise

Ron Zamir is the vice president of community relations for the United Jewish Federation of Utah. In addition to having family members who were killed or left in critical condition during the Oct. 7 attacks, he and other members of his Jewish community confront a level of fear when going about in public or to worship at the synagogue that they haven’t known in a long time, if ever.

“I’ve lived here 20 years,” he said. “This is the least safe it has ever felt.”

In addition to the bomb threat and hate-filled emails, Zamir said, he and others were chilled by a video, shared with The Salt Lake Tribune, that showed two women removing posters of Israeli hostages held by Hamas. The signs had been attached to trees on Hillside Avenue just south of the Capitol.

“Why are you taking posters of kidnapped kids?” the woman recording the video asks twice as the individuals come within earshot. Both of them ignore the woman — who, Zamir said, personally knows some of the hostages — and instead continue to take down the signs.

Incidents of Islamophobia

Rana Muradi was shopping at Murray’s Fashion Place Mall on Oct. 15, a scarf with the Palestinian flag around her neck, when, she said, a woman who identified herself as being Israeli began screaming at her, calling her a “murderer” and “terrorist.”

A man accompanying the woman joined in, Muradi said, shouting, “You are all human animals!” while onlookers stared.

“I genuinely feared for my safety as this was happening,” Muradi said, adding that she has since suffered from panic attacks and insomnia as a result of the encounter.

An adjunct psychology professor, Muradi teaches about bigotry at Salt Lake Community College. This kind of “hateful” language, she said, “is extremely dangerous.”

“If we view a group of people as less than human,” she said, “we shed the moral responsibility of treating them fairly and humanely, which then allows us to inflict harm on them.”

Imam Shuaib Din of Utah Islamic Center cited additional incidents he had heard from members of his West Jordan mosque, including one in which a man was accused of yelling racist slurs and spitting on a Muslim woman and her son at a TRAX station. He said another woman he knows was threatened by a man at a Costco in Murray.

“My congregation,” he said, “is definitely feeling unsafe.”

Concern for college students

Zamir and Banuri said many parents they’ve spoken to have been so concerned for the safety of their kids in college that they had taken to texting them hourly.

Especially alarming to Zamir was a sign he said appeared at a recent pro-Palestine demonstration at the University of Utah that read “from the river to the sea.” This slogan, he said, “for Jews is a clear sign for the destruction of a state where almost half of our Jewish brethren live.”

Satin Tashnizi is the executive director of the Emerald Project, a nonprofit organization that aims to combat the misrepresentation of Islam. More recently, however, her team’s focus has been tracking instances of Islamophobia in Utah, and in particular hate directed at Muslim students at the state’s universities.

Around Oct. 11 or 12, Tashnizi said, the group chat for the U. Muslim Students Association was inundated with Islamophobic content and pornographic images and that members received obscene, threatening messages and voicemails, some of which she shared with The Tribune.

She said Muslim students and those supporting Palestinians both there and at Brigham Young University, owned and operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, have been repeatedly called “terrorists” and “terrorist sympathizers” in social media comments and posts by fellow students.

Increased security, fear

According to Rabbi Spector, some members of his synagogue have stopped attending services out of safety concerns, while others have pulled mezuzahs — a small box containing Torah verses — off their door frames, or stopped wearing their kippahs, also known as yarmulkes, and other outward signs of their Jewish faith.

“At the same time,” Spector said, “we have people coming to the synagogue more now because they need that support and want to support their Jewish community. Some people are wearing kippahs because they don’t want the people trying to scare them to win, and are actually becoming more involved and present here, and are more openly sharing that they’re Jewish.”

For his part, Zamir said he has “spoken to other Israelis who won’t speak Hebrew when they go to Smith’s. They don’t know who’s waiting there to attack them.”

Whenever Zamir goes to pray Saturday morning at the synagogue, his wife asks him to text her when he arrives, confirming that a staffed police car is out front.

Banuri, meanwhile, said she has spoken to fellow Utah Muslims who have “altered their travel or outdoor activity” due to safety fears.

“Especially for men, there’s this sinister feeling that everyone is looking at them, trying to judge them whether they’re dangerous or not,” she said. “This has real long-term implications for mental health for our community.”

Din said he has boosted security at his mosque.

Tashnizi, who became emotional at times during the interview, described a deep sense of weariness she and others felt, both over their grief from the attacks on Gaza as well as a sense of displacement and alienation from the wider Utah community.

“Palestinians and their global community of supporters do not support Hamas or antisemitism,” she said. “They wish for freedom from Zionism’s apartheid, occupation and its ongoing violent territorial expansion.”

Rabbi Spector acknowledged the pain felt by others, saying “I know the Muslim community is going through a tough time, too.”

He said it was “frustrating,” however, to see some comparing his community’s experience with that of Muslims to the current violence.

“I’m not trying to dismiss any pain or trauma [Muslims] are going through,” he said. “But there’s over a billion Muslims in the world. There are 15 million Jews. Half of us live in Israel. Every single person in my community knows somebody who is in a bomb shelter, who is fighting in Gaza or is being held hostage or is one degree separated from that. And that is really, really, really hard.”

‘We feel your pain’

All those interviewed expressed empathy and compassion for members of the other religious group.

“We feel your pain because we know your pain,” Zamir said of Utah Muslims. “Because we’ve been living with that pain for a long time.”

Spector, too, voiced his remorse for the fear felt by the Islamic community.

“They don’t deserve that,” he said. “They don’t deserve to be scared. They don’t deserve to be threatened.”

Tashnizi, meanwhile, said she wished to tell Jewish Utahns that “we love you and stand for your safety as we do our own brothers and sisters. I have observed this misunderstanding that Muslims and Jews dislike each other my entire life. I have seen how hate is manufactured between Muslims and Jews; I find it repulsive and unacceptable.”

So what can Utahns do to help and to heal?

“If you hear Islamophobia or antisemitism,” Spector said, “call it out.”

Zamir emphasized this point as well, urging that no one be a “bystander to antisemitism, because I think that’s part of how we normalize the world’s oldest hate.”

Banuri offered a simple remedy, prescribing an “eruption of love and care” instead of “this eruption of hate.”