Americans should wear hijabs to show solidarity with Muslim women who fear being attacked for wearing the religious head covering, CNN anchor Alisyn Camerota suggested on Monday, just hours before an Islamic radical stabbed students at Ohio State University.
“Maybe there will be a movement where people wear the head scarf in solidarity. You know, even if you’re not Muslim,” Camerota said during an early-morning broadcast on CNN’s “New Day.”
“Maybe it’s the way people shave their heads, you know, sometimes in solidarity with somebody who is going through something,” she added.
Camerota was responding to a CNN segment about Muslim women who say they live in fear of being verbally or physically attacked for wearing head scarves.
The segment tied a spate of alleged incidents in which Muslim women have been targeted for wearing hijabs to Donald Trump’s presidential win.
“The Trump Transition: Fearful Muslim women take steps to be safe,” read the chyron that CNN chose for the segment.
“I hope I can wear it one day again. I hope I can feel safe enough to do so,” Marwa Abdelghani, a Muslim-American woman, told the network.
The piece did not note that some of the alleged hate incidents in the aftermath of Trump’s win have been found to be hoaxes. An 18-year-old University of Louisana-Lafayette student was charged with filing a false report after she claimed that a group of white Trump supporters hurled racial slurs at her and stole her hijab several days after the election.
Ironically, hours after the CNN segment aired, an 18-year-old Somali refugee named Abdul Razak Ali Artan attempted to kill students at Ohio State University.
Artan, who was killed by a campus police officer after stabbing numerous students with a butcher knife, reportedly complained online before the attack about the treatment of Muslims throughout the world. And in an interview with Ohio State’s student newspaper earlier this year, Artan complained about the lack of prayer rooms on campus. (RELATED: Ohio State Jihadi Complained About A Lack Of Prayer Rooms On Campus)
“I wanted to pray in the open, but I was kind of scared with everything going on in the media,” he said in that interview. “I’m a Muslim, it’s not what the media portrays me to be.”
During the CNN segment, Camerota’s co-host, Chris Cuomo, suggested another solution for Muslim women who fear being attacked.
“I think self-defense training is good for everybody,” he said. “Prepare yourself for whatever can come.”
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