Title is a tad bit misleading, I highly doubt I'll be posting daily in this. Nonetheless, I decided to stop filling my other books with news articles and such so I've created this one. In this book I'll be sharing articles, stories, and sometimes pi...
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The FBI's main suspect, an African-American security guard named Gerald Wallace, had already admitted he was the one who called a Miami-area mosque to declare, "I'm gonna kill you," but investigators were still shocked by what they found on Wallace's phone during their interview with him two years ago.
Wallace – a 35-year-old black man – had called the Ku Klux Klan over and over again because, he told investigators, "I do like what they're saying."
"What is the part that you like about their message?" a detective from the City of Miami Gardens Police Department wanted to know.
"What they say about Islam," Wallace insisted. "I hate [Muslims]."
Wallace's "odd" case would be "comical" -- "like something out of a 'Chappelle's Show' skit" -- if it weren't so "troubling," a U.S. prosecutor later told a federal judge, alluding to the Comedy Central character Clayton Bigsby, a white supremacist who didn't realize he was African-American because he was blind.
In a February 2017 interview with a police detective and FBI agent, 35-year-old Gerald Wallace discussed his threat to a local mosque and his "like" for the KKK's message about Muslims.
Wallace's embrace of the Ku Klux Klan, despite the group's notorious history of killing and targeting African-Americans, is an extreme example of just how potent Islamophobia has become inside the United States -- and around the world.
The two most recent years of FBI statistics reveal the highest number of anti-Muslim assaults ever recorded in America -- a three-fold jump from a decade ago.
In 2007, the FBI recorded 33 anti-Muslims assaults. In 2017, the FBI recorded 105 such assaults, and another 168 incidents targeting Muslims for practicing their religion.
One of those additional incidents was Wallace's threat to the Islamic center in Miami Gardens. He ultimately pleaded guilty to obstructing the free exercise of his victims' religious beliefs, and he was sentenced to one year behind bars. He was released last year. ABC News' efforts to reach him were unsuccessful.
In the wake of last Friday's massacre in New Zealand which left 50 Muslim worshipers dead, Americans are grappling with Islamophobia in their own communities and discussing how to stop it from metastasizing even more.
"It's absolutely necessary that we don't wait until we have horrific situations like [New Zealand] ... to pay attention to this issue," Dr. Abbas Barzeger, the research director at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said at a press conference on Friday.
Stats paint a stark picture on assaults against Muslims
Anti-Muslim assaults account for a small fraction of hate-based assaults reported to police each year, but Muslims overall account for an even smaller fraction of the total U.S. population, as reflected in findings from the FBI and Gallup Organization.
