In an incident on November 12, last year, a 23-year-old Oregon woman allegedly ripped hijab off a 24-year-old Saudi exchange student. She was charged with hate crime and a warrant was issued against her on Friday. There has been a rise of Islamophobia, resulting in hate-crimes, in the United States, especially since a right-wing President was elected to the White House in 2016.
Details of November 12 incident
On November 12, at a railway station at Portland, Oregon, a 23-year-old Jasmine Renee Campbell snatched hijab from the head of a Portland State University exchange student and attempted to choke her with it, the Multnomah County District Attorney's Office said in a statement on Friday, NBCNews reported. The exchange student from Saudi Arabia hasn't been named.
Campbell subsequently stripped naked and rubbed the religious garment all over her exposed body. "Court documents allege that Campbell used the hijab and rubbed it on and across multiple exposed sexually intimate parts of her body," the officer said. It was then, that shocked bystanders and they called the police.
'She [Campbell] was fighting and playing around, [saying] that she wanted to be a stripper, that she wanted to show the victim that she did not have to be a Muslim, that people don't have to be black or white, and she wanted the victim to know that religion doesn't define her,' the court documents state. The exchange student told authorities that she no longer feels safe wearing a hijab, a head covering worn by Muslim women. Too afraid to wear hijab, she now covers her head with a knit caps or a scarf.
Charges levelled against Campbell
The 23-year-old Oregon resident has been charged with two counts of bias crime, one count of attempted strangulation, one count of harassment and one count of criminal mischief, prosecutors said.
A warrant was issued against her because she did not appear in court Friday, the office said. In a 2017 incident in Portland, two men were fatally stabbed after they intervened to protect a Muslim teenager and her friend who was being intimidated by a white nationalist. The white nationalist told the girls to 'go back to Saudi Arabia', to get out of 'his country', and 'said they were nothing and they should kill themselves'.
