Brazen, Unprovoked Attack On Three Palestinian College Students: What Is Happening in Vermont?
By
Jesse Wegman
Dec. 1,
2023
The first
sign that something was amiss came in the form of three police cruisers idling,
unbidden, in the lot behind the Islamic Society of Vermont, the state’s largest
mosque, last Saturday night in South Burlington. Usually there would be only
one cop, paid for by the mosque during gatherings like the community potluck
being held that evening.
An asphalt path leading to a parking lot.
A footpath in South Burlington, Vt., connects the Islamic Society of
Vermont and the Congregation of Temple Sinai.Credit...Jude Domski for the New
York Times
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“We said,
‘Something fishy’s going on,’” Fuad al-Amoody, the vice president of the
society’s executive board, told me. Then he started receiving text messages
about a shooting in Burlington, about 10 minutes up the road. “We ended up
putting two and two together.”
The brazen,
unprovoked attack on three Palestinian college students, who were walking down
a quiet residential street while visiting relatives here over Thanksgiving,
shook the area’s tight-knit community of Muslims. On Monday, authorities charged
Jason Eaton, a 48-year-old white man who lived on the street, with three counts
of attempted murder. He has pleaded not guilty and is being held without bail.
For many in
Vermont, the horror of the shooting was compounded by its violation of the
state’s self-image as a uniquely welcoming place. Vermonters pride themselves
on their neighbourliness, taking in waves of refugees from across the globe.
“This brave little state says no to hate” is a popular if unofficial slogan on
yard signs. It’s also one of the safest states in the country, although it has
seen increases in crime since the pandemic.
“By far,
Vermont is the best place to live,” said Mr. al-Amoody, whose day job is as a
semiconductor engineer, ticking off the other states he has lived in since he
came to the United States from Kenya a quarter-century ago. “It is very
peaceful.”
A man standing with his head bowed in a large room at the Islamic
Society of Vermont.
Fuad al-Amoody Credit...Jude Domski for the New York Times
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It is also
very white — nearly 94 percent, according to the 2020 census. My family and I
bumped that number a few notches higher when we moved here in 2020. Coming
directly from New York City, we were startled as much by the racial uniformity
as the farm equipment rumbling by our house at dawn every day. We had somehow
missed the “Saturday Night Live” skit from 2018 in which several
neo-Confederates rail against America’s racial diversity and debate founding a
new homeland — somewhere with “no immigrants, no minorities,” the group’s
leader declares. “An agrarian community where everyone lives in harmony,
because every single person is white.”
“Yeah, I
know that place,” one pipes up. “That sounds like Vermont.”
The
audience laughs, but today the sketch lands chillingly. The students told the
police that they were wearing their kaffiyehs and speaking a mix of Arabic and
English when they were shot. Vermont’s overwhelming homogeneity is always
apparent to people of color here, and it can create a persistent sense of
insiders and outsiders, no matter how well intentioned the efforts to push past
it.
The
authorities have not yet added a hate-crime enhancement to the charges against
Mr. Eaton, who moved to the neighbourhood a few months ago and has struggled
with depression, according to his mother. Still, it’s hard to ignore the
current atmosphere of tension and vitriol surrounding the ongoing war between
Israel and Hamas, which has led to clashes and hate incidents around the
country.
This week I
walked down North Prospect Street, where the shooting occurred. The street runs
along the edge of the city’s Old North End, just off the University of
Vermont’s main quad. Wide sidewalks pass by rambling old colonial revivals and
multiunit houses like the one where Mr. Eaton lived. Within a couple of blocks
of the shooting there is a large synagogue and a Quaker meeting house, in front
of which a makeshift sign was decorated with a green heart and the words
“Neighbors stand against hate.” I went in the chilly early evening, around when
the attack took place, and all seemed quiet and calm, as I imagine it had to
the young men in the moments before their world exploded.
In front of the Islamic centre, a sign reading, "More ISVT parking
at Temple Sinai if parking lot full."
The mosque and synagogue are next door to each other and share a parking
lot. Credit...Jude Domski for The New York Times
A white-painted house with a porch.
The shooting took place outside of 69 North Prospect Street. Credit...Jude
Domski for The New York Times
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It was this
juxtaposition — between the state’s welcoming nature and its monochromatic
reputation — that led me to reach out to Mr. al-Amoody. As a white guy who has
the luxury of not having to look over my shoulder when I’m walking down the
street, I was hoping to get a better sense of what life is like for Muslims and
Arab Americans in a state like this, where rural roads are dotted with “Black
Lives Matter” signs and gun shops in equal measure.
Mr.
al-Amoody estimated there are roughly 5,000 Muslims state-wide, the vast
majority of whom live in and around Burlington, the largest city in a state
with about 650,000 residents. Until recently, those looking for a place to
worship outside a private basement or garage had one choice: a corner of a
building that was once, among other things, a former cavalry post for the U.S.
Army.
It was
repurposed for Islamic prayer in 1999, but as the community grew, its members
needed more space. They found it in a former church in South Burlington, which they
bought in 2019 from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Today the
mosque counts roughly 350 families as members. It sits next door to a
synagogue, which shares its parking lot on Fridays to help accommodate Muslim
worshipers on their holy day. (The mosque returns the favour on Saturdays.)
There were
more examples of generosity, Mr. al-Amoody said. Among the hundreds of emails
he received in the days after the shooting were numerous offers of help,
including one from a non-Muslim woman in the college town of Middlebury, about
an hour south of Burlington, offering lodging and a car to the students, who
are from out of state, while they recover. “It has been like this all along,”
he told me.
I heard
versions of that sentiment from others. Farhad Khan has lived in Middlebury for
most of his 30 years in the state. When he first arrived, he said, “we were so
out of place, we opened the Yellow Pages and looked for names — Abdul, Mohammed
— and we’d call those numbers.”
Today he
sits on the town’s select board and owns and runs a local dollar store with his
wife, Amtul. He finds Vermont one of the most inclusive states in the country
but said he still faces racism, usually of the subtle type: a customer’s
seemingly stray comment about Amtul’s hijab or complimenting him on his
English. The number of such incidents has gone up in recent years, he said,
especially since Donald Trump’s election.
For others,
the attack came as no surprise, and not because of Mr. Trump.
“Just like
the U.S., Vermont likes to think it’s exceptional,” said Mia Schultz, a Black
Vermonter and the president of the Rutland-area N.A.A.C.P., who is not Muslim.
“Which is why when violence happens like this, people are shocked. But the
thing is, people of color are not.”
I brought
up the state’s enormous white population as a demographic curiosity when she
stopped me.
“Why do you
think that is?” she asked. “I don’t think it’s an accident. There are people
who want to live here, but it becomes so incredibly suffocating. You’re met
with smiles, this idea of kindness,” she said, and yet behind it there is an
isolation, an insidious feeling of not being seen as equal. That’s not counting
the more openly racist acts or the encounters with law enforcement and other
authorities that serve as a constant reminder of one’s status as a permanent
suspect. Vermont’s problem is not in recruiting people of colour, she said, but
in retaining them.
“I know
about people who go back to the South because, they say, ‘At least I know what
I’m encountering,’” she said. “I know how to navigate people who are outright
hateful.”
Ms. Schultz
has not left, though she said she has been tempted. Instead, she recently
accepted an appointment to Vermont’s new Truth and Reconciliation Commission,
which the state established last year to begin dismantling institutional,
structural and systemic discrimination in Vermont. “The fact that they want to
examine themselves, for me, feels hopeful,” she said.
Still, she
acknowledged it can be hard to find support in a place as underpopulated and
spread out as Vermont. “You come here as a person of color, and you’re, all of
a sudden, isolated. You don’t have a community to affirm what you’ve
experienced,” Ms. Schultz said.
I thought
back to something Mr. al-Amoody told me. The first thing he did after learning
of the shooting was drive to the hospital, offer assistance to the relatives of
the victims and send a message to the mosque’s mailing list — to confirm the
facts he knew and dispel rumours that had begun to circulate. It sounds simple,
and yet that’s how you take outsiders and make them a community.
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Jesse Wegman is a member of the editorial board,
where he has written about the Supreme Court and national legal affairs since
2013. He is the author of “Let the People Pick the President: The Case for
Abolishing the Electoral College.”
Source: What
Is Happening in Vermont?
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