A now-deleted passage on Donald Trump’s website banning Muslims from the United States has disappeared, but we are living with the impact. Mairah Teli is a 24-year-old language arts teacher at Dacula High School in Dacula, Georgia. On Friday, Nov. 11, 2016, she received a note that read, “Your head scarf isn’t allowed anymore. Why don’t you tie it around your neck and hang yourself with it.”
She posted the note on her Facebook page. In the update, she writes, “I’m a high school teacher and sadly this anonymous note was put in my classroom today.
“As a Muslim, I wear a headscarf as a practice of my faith. I want to share this to raise awareness about the reality and climate of our community.
“Spreading hate isn’t going to “make America great again.” She added the hashtags “Donald’s America” and “Here to stay.”
“I feel children feel safe making comments that are racist or sexist because of him,” she tells The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “We are living in a time when there is a lot of disagreement, a lot of conflict. It’s important to teach them how to disagree (respectfully).”
Gwinnett County Schools spokeswoman Sloan Roach writes in an email that the district is “doing all it can to identify the person who wrote and left this note.”
Trump’s passage was posted on December 7, 2015, a few days after Rizwan Farook, a U.S. citizen, and his Pakistani wife Tashfeen Malik murdered 14 people in San Bernardino, California on December 2, 2015. The president-elect called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
As of November 8, 2016, the online anti-Muslim passages are history.
Trump announced in June that as president he would “suspend immigration from areas of the world when there is a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe, or our allies.”
In July, in a joint interview with his vice presidential nominee, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, Trump said in response to a question about barring Muslims that he would call his ban one on “territories and terror states and terror nations.”
