A gurdwara in the state of California in the United States has been vandalised with hate messages written on the walls, with one of them calling to "nuke" Sikhs. The incident took place at Los Angeles' Vermont Gurdwara, which is also known as the Hollywood Sikh Temple.
A man named Karna Ray saw the vandal writing long messages on the white wall of the gurdwara and recorded the incident on his cell phone. The video footage showed the vandal walking away from the gurdwara without any explanation, NBC Los Angeles reported.
"I said I was going to call the police on him at which point he said he felt threatened," said Ray, who hails from New York and was visiting a friend in the city. The Hollywood Police are investigating the case.
"I caught this man vandalising the Hollywood Sikh Temple in Los Feliz. I'll leave a photo of what he wrote in full, but before he walked away he wrote '10,000, 24,000 fucking nuke Sikhs'... I pursued him to ask him his name and why he did what he did, and after a few blocks he flashed a razor and threatened to slit my throat," Ray wrote in a post on Facebook, along with pictures and a video of the vandal.
According to Fox 11, Ray was particularly upset over the comments that called for "nuking" Sikhs. He said the messages of hate on the walls of the gurdwara stand against everything the Sikh community represents.
A member of the gurdwara wished to invite the attacker to a service to give him a chance to experience what the Sikh community believes in and stands for. "I would love to invite the person in the temple, make him, show him what he is missing," Sarab Gil was quoted by NBC Los Angeles as saying.
"This particular incident isn't a matter of swastikas and 'go home, ragheads,' which we get sometimes. This seems to be a diatribe by someone who may or may not be mentally imbalanced," Nirinjan Singh Khalsa from the Sikh Council of California said.
Rise in hate crimes against Sikhs in the US
The incident in California is the latest in a series of hate crimes against Sikhs in the US. Crimes against the community have been on the rise since the 9/11 attacks that took place in 2001.
In March 2017, a gunman allegedly walked into the driveway of a Sikh man named Deep Rai in the East Hill neighbourhood of Kent and shot him in the arm telling him to "go back to your own country."
Jasmit Singh, the leader of the Sikh community in Renton in Washington, had said at the time that the Sikhs living in the US' Puget Sound area have reported an increase in verbal abuse and uncomfortable encounters, "a kind of prejudice, a kind of xenophobia that is nothing that we've seen in the recent past."
Singh told the Seattle Times the rise in incidents aimed at targeting members of the Sikh faith recalls the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in 2001. "But at that time, it felt like the [presidential] administration was actively working to allay those fears. Now, it's a very different dimension," Singh said.
In March 2016, a "naked" man had vandalised and desecrated sacred items in a gurdwara in Washington. He was arrested wearing only a sheet taken from the gurdwara's furnishings. He was also holding the ceremonial sword of the place of worship.
In December 2015, a gurdwara in Los Angeles' Buena Park was vandalised with anti-Isis graffiti painted on the walls of the place of worship. Words like "F*** ISIS" and "Islam", along with reference of other gangs and anti-Muslim phrases were seen on the walls of the gurdwara. A truck belonging to a community member was also vandalised.
Apparently, the attackers confused Sikhism with Islam. "I think mostly because of the turban that we wear and the long beard that we keep, people think we are related to terrorist groups. They think the worst because of our beards. They get confused," Jaspreet Singh, the gurdwara board member, was quoted by the New York Times as saying.
In September 2015, a Sikh-American from a suburb in Chicago was assaulted by a man who called him a "terrorist" and "Bin Laden" and asked him to "go back to your country." In August 2012, a white supremacist gunman walked into a gurdwara and shot dead six Sikhs in Oak Creek in Wisconsin before shooting himself in the head.
In 2009, the Sikh Coalition had conducted a study on the number of hate crimes against the Sikh community in New York City. The study revealed that 41 percent of Sikhs said that they had been called names like "Osama bin Laden" or "terrorist" within a span of 12 months.
Around 9 percent of those surveyed said that they had been physically assaulted since the 9/11 attacks due to their religious identity.
