My neighborhood of Chevy Chase is a leafy and peaceful slice of Northwest Washington. But this week, the news here is of a woman assaulted outside the local Starbucks by a Donald Trump supporter, she says, for the sin of being Muslim.
Police on Monday released surveillance video showing a heavyset white woman shouting at, and then pouring a bottle of liquid onto, a woman in a Muslim headscarf as she sat outside the coffee shop. Police are investigating a possible hate crime.
The victim said the attacker called her a “worthless piece of Muslim trash” and a “terrorist.” And the attacker said she was supporting Trump because he would send the Muslims “back to where you came from.”
“She mentioned this man’s name to me as a way of saying he’s going to put all of you out of this country,” the woman, who asked not to be identified, told me Tuesday.
But this is her country. She’s African-American, born in Minneapolis, reared in Chicago and now living in D.C.
Trump won the Indiana primary easily Tuesday night, giving him an almost certain grip on the Republican presidential nomination. Now Republicans across the country will be forced to make a moral choice: Do they associate themselves with the grotesque things that Trump and his supporters have said and done? Or do they refuse to allow such things to be said and done in their names?
A Center of Christian-Muslim Engagement for Peace and Justice: 