JERSEY CITY: Muslim Americans are pleading with Donald Trump to stop encouraging violence in demanding a "complete" halt to Muslim immigration after a New York shopkeeper was beaten in a possible hate crime.
Republican presidential frontrunner Trump's inflammatory call is part of what activists have described as an unprecedented anti-Muslim backlash following the Paris attacks and the shooting in California by a couple believed to have turned extremist.
"He's giving the right to people to hurt us," said Ahmed Shedeed, who moved to the United States from Egypt in 1980 with a degree in agricultural engineering and today runs a travel agency.
Also director of The Islamic Center of Jersey City, he spoke to AFP at a mosque, accusing Trump of provoking hate and violence. "I'm asking him, I'm begging him. It has to stop -- all these accusations. Look at the Muslim community as part of the American mosaic and we are part of America. We are not going anywhere."
Muslim Americans say they are afraid. They talk about women wearing the hijab being spat on, a Muslim taxi driver being shot in the back on Thanksgiving and a pig's head found outside a Philadelphia mosque.
Just hours before the Republican frontrunner's call for an end to Muslim immigration, community leaders from New Jersey met prosecutors asking them to take seriously alleged hate crimes against Muslims.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil liberties group in the country, says it has documented a wave of abuse, vandalism and acts of discrimination in the last month.
"It is reckless and simply un-American. Donald Trump sounds more like a leader of a lynch mob than a great nation like ours," CAIR executive director Nihad Awad told a news conference in Washington, DC.
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