Anti-Muslim Hate Crime Artist Victim of Anti-Muslim Hate Crime

Using "100 lines of found writings from actual reported hate crimes," Anida Yoeu Ali created a prose poem about "the exponential percentage increase of hate crimes against Arabs, Muslims and those perceived to be Arab or Muslim since the events of September 11, 2001." Ali's 1700% Project borrows its name from that massive percentage jump and takes a stance against hate crimes in terms any layperson can understand. She has combined the poem with several other artistic mediums — video, dance, audio, performance, installation — one of which (1700% Project: Otherance) was on display at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago in May ... until a vandal made the 1700% Project a site of a hate crime.

Just five days after Ali completed her work, she returned to find it had been painted over. The perpetrator drew cartoonish figures and a word bubble highlighting the phrase "kill all Arabs." None of the other works in the gallery had been touched.

The irony of an artistic response to the increase in hate crimes being the target of a hate crime itself is not lost on Ali, who said she feels assaulted and violated. She issued a response saying, "This is not just an assault on me as an artist; this is an attack on multiple communities to which the work speaks for ... The attack is an act of silencing.” Chicago’s chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations pushed the local police department to classify the incident as a hate crime, but they refused; it is recorded only as "criminal damage to property." The school's own inaction is disturbing.

Some untoward responders have blamed Ali for the incident and accused her of defacing her own work in order to attract attention. An inappropriately snarky Chicago Art Magazine writer, Fruzsina Eordogh, disavowed the act as a hate crime because, to her mind, the vandal's intention is unknown. (Hmmm ... How many ways can highlighting the words "kill all Arabs" be interpreted?) Eordogh goes on to say that it wasn't degradation, but boredom, that was the impetus for the defacement, and that Ali shouldn't be bothered by the implicit threats because "being a victim is easy," and besides, it's made her famous.

Apparently Eordogh thinks Ali should be thanking the culprits for contributing to the unease she and other Muslims in America feel, instead of being outraged at the fact that yet another attack on Muslims and Arabs is being swept under the rug. Eordogh's easy dismissal of the legitimate fears being addressed in Ali's maliciously damaged work and in her justifiable response to the attack is shameful.

No one has been identified as the perpetrator of this crime. In all likelihood, no one ever will. How much higher will the 1700% climb before Islamophobia becomes unacceptable?

Photo credit: Anida Yoeu Ali