AUSTIN, TX — In response to the threats made against Muslims and Jews at a Houston place of worship and the attack on a mosque in San Diego, Texas House Minority Leader Rep. Gene Wu, Rep. Salman Bhojani, and Rep. Suleman Lalani issued the following statement:
“When elected officials and public figures spend their time casting Muslims as a threat, neighbors and community members hear permission to treat Muslim families as targets.
“In Texas, as our leaders have peddled Islamophobic hate, a man has been charged after allegedly threatening to kill Muslims and Jews at a Houston place of worship. In San Diego, three men were murdered at a mosque in an attack police are investigating as a hate crime. The details are different, but the message Muslim and Jewish families receive is exactly the same: you are being watched, blamed, hated, and made unsafe in places that should be sacred.
“This hatred does not come from a vacuum. It is fed and allowed to fester by politicians like Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton, by the online figures who launder bigotry into content, and by the leaders who know exactly what they are doing when they talk about Muslim communities as an invasion, a conspiracy, or a threat to Texas.
“To Muslim and Jewish families in Houston, in San Diego, and across America: we stand with you. Law enforcement must fully investigate these threats and acts of violence, and the leaders who feed this rhetoric must be held accountable for the climate of fear they have created. Every family, of every faith, has the right to walk into a house of worship and walk back out again, and we will not stop fighting until that right is real for every Texan.”
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