Cops probe vandalism at Hicksville mosque as bias crime

Trash mixed with human waste was tossed into a Hicksville mosque earlier this month, an offense now being probed as a bias crime, police said Saturday.

"The incident was caught on video, showing an unknown male, and it appears that this person was shoveling garbage into the doorway" on the night of Aug. 13, a Nassau police spokesman said.

The Faizan-e-Aisha Masjid mosque did not immediately inform police until that same man returned "more than once," said community member Mohamed Nahshal. The man repeatedly made an obscene gesture to mosque attendees when he returned, Nahshal said.

"He would not engage with the people, he would not communicate, he just [delivered] his hateful message," he said.

Nahshal said he believes the chaotic and violent U.S. exodus from Afghanistan has reawakened the anti-Muslim prejudice and misinformation that he says he and other fellow Muslim Americans have faced since his years as a teenager after the World Trade Center was attacked.

"We have been dealing with this for the past 20 years, from 9/11 to this day," said Nahshal, one of whose twins, now a high school senior, hopes to attend the U.S. Military Academy West Point. "The over-policing of the community, the overcriminalizing of the Muslim community, this is … [triggering] mental health issues, PTSD."

Language difficulties may have hobbled the mosque’s first effort to report the problem, Nahshal said. Police say the defacing of the mosque was reported Thursday.

New York State law defines a bias incident as "any offense or unlawful act" partly inspired by some form of prejudice; a hate crime is a criminal act that also springs at least partly from the victim’s identity, according to the NYPD.

Nahshal said he and other Muslim Americans of the first generation post-9/11 era hope their children will be spared encounters with prejudice.

The Faizan-e-Aisha Masjid mosque — its name honors Aisha, a devout scholar and a wife of the Prophet Muhammad — hopes to open more conversations with its neighbors and other religions, he said.

"This is not something that a group of people should be ashamed of or should avoid talking about — this is kind of our problem as a nation — and we all bear the scars of this," he said.

"We want to create some kind of a forum, where we have a dialogue with our fellow Americans, we want them to come to the mosque," Nahshal said.

He criticized conservative news channels for speculating Afghan refugees will pose threats, which in turn can spur social media attacks on Muslims, he said.

Nahshal said he would like to ask those commentators: "Do you understand that you are destroying our country by spreading this narrative or pushing people to clash with one another?"

His assessment: "Dialogue, it’s our only option, it’s the best option we have."