In the weeks and months following Hamas’s brutal October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, and Israel’s devastating campaign in Gaza that followed, the world’s attention turned away from the West Bank. 

Over the past three years, however, the situation in the Israel-occupied territory has worsened as Israeli settlers have carried out more violent attacks on Palestinians.

The attacks can range from acts of daily harassment and trespassing to a major mob assault in the West Bank village of Jalud that overwhelmed Israeli security forces and blocked a displaced Palestinian family from returning home. Last week, Israeli settlers shot and killed a Palestinian man.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has largely dismissed violent West Bank settlers as an issue, blaming the Jalud attack on a “handful of rioters” and referring to settlers as “juvenile delinquents” in a speech to the UN last month, in which he argued that the world should focus on violence committed by Palestinians instead.

But even as he downplays the problem, human rights organizations have documented a record level of Israeli settler violence in the West Bank. The International Committee of the Red Cross has said that such attacks have made everyday life “untenable” for the more than 3 million Palestinians living in the West Bank.

The Israeli settlements are also clearly illegal, as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp explained in September — but that hasn’t stopped them from expanding. 

Ahead of Israel’s elections later this month, settlers have accelerated a campaign of ethnic cleansing with the explicit backing of some Israeli cabinet ministers, led by young militant Jewish settlers that are part of a loose network known as the Hilltop Youth. 

The Wall Street Journal’s Feliz Solomon reported on the Jalud attack and has written about the role of Hilltop Youth in worsening settler violence. She spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about the reality on the ground in the West Bank, the settler groups behind it, and how Israeli officials are responding.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Tell me about the last three years in the West Bank. What’s been happening?

The October 7 attack really hardened a lot of people’s views in Israel, and that’s played out in the West Bank in a number of ways. 

One is that the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, which has some powerful members who are settlers themselves, became much more overtly supportive of expanding the Jewish settlements. 

The second thing that changed was basically a total breakdown of trust, both between Jews and Arabs, and also between Jews and the state, because a lot of people felt that they were really on their own in terms of security. 

All of this created a really combustible environment. There are more settlers there now. They’re behaving more brazenly, and there’s what a lot of people would describe as a permissive environment of almost total impunity.

What does that total impunity look like? We often hear the term “settler violence.” What does that mean?

There’s really a whole spectrum of violent actions. It’s mostly by younger male settlers. There are some acts of daily harassment, like trespassing on Palestinian property, vandalism, stalking people, blocking roads, and preventing access to resources like water wells. And then on the other end of the spectrum, there are also acts of extreme violence. 

There have been some very serious physical assaults. Settlers throwing rocks with slingshots. Last year, there was a viral video of an elderly woman who was beaten with a stick. She was hospitalized for days. And lately, we’ve been seeing more mob violence where a large group of settlers will raid a Palestinian village. They’ve set mosques and other property on fire. 

Just to be clear, there’s violence by Palestinians too, but we’re really seeing an alarming surge of violence by settlers that’s often unpunished, and increasingly it’s happening when settlers go into Palestinian areas where they’re not supposed to be.

You reported on an attack that happened last week in the West Bank near the Palestinian village of Jalud. Tell me what happened.

Over the summer, some young settlers who are associated with a group called the Hilltop Youth set up an encampment around three houses on the outskirts of the Palestinian village, Jalud, and essentially besieged the houses. They blocked their access to essential goods and harassed the residents until, in late July, they felt so unsafe that they fled.

Two of those houses belonged to the Tubasi family. In early September, Israel’s high court ordered the state to ensure their safe return, and in late September, they tried to go back. We spoke with Wael, who’s one member of the family, and also with their lawyer about what happened when they tried to go back. 

A few dozen [Israeli] security forces were deployed to escort them home in the middle of the night, and when they got there, they found that the house was totally ransacked. They showed us before and after pictures, and the windows were smashed, the doors were broken, electrical wires were cut, and there was just debris all over the place.

When they came inside for the first time in about two months, they were walking through the property looking at the damage with flashlights, and they’d only been there for a few minutes when suddenly they were surrounded by a mob of settlers. They said at first that there were about 50 settlers around the house, and the military later said that there were more than a hundred people that took part in what they called a riot. 

The authorities told the family to take cover deeper inside the house, and they hid inside a stairwell as the soldiers tried to force these settlers to retreat, but they were shouting and throwing rocks at the house, and then, according to Wael, they even started climbing in through the windows. At that point, the authorities told the family to go upstairs, all the way up to the roof and to hide in a corner of the rooftop. 

Wael explained what he saw up there. He was looking down and he saw the soldiers battling it out with this large group of settlers and this thick cloud of tear gas and loud bangs from stun grenades.

“There are more settlers there now. They’re behaving more brazenly, and there’s what a lot of people would describe as a permissive environment of almost total impunity.”

Eventually, the security forces realized that they weren’t getting the situation under control. They had to get this family out of there. They took them back downstairs and outside and put them in a military vehicle, but then the settlers surrounded the vehicle and they were rocking the car. They slashed the tires so that [the family] couldn’t leave. Then the soldiers had to move them into an armored military vehicle and eventually they got them out. 

A short while later, not long after they had escaped, they started receiving video messages from some of their neighbors that showed what happened after they left, which was that their car and their house had been set on fire.

All right, so the Israeli authorities in the form of soldiers were trying to help this Palestinian family legally return and settlers violently blocked them. This is settlers versus the authorities. What do we know about who these settlers are and what is motivating them?

This was a very large group. We know of three people who were detained in this incident. All of them were teenagers. The youngest one I believe was 15 years old. 

A lot of the harassment in this area comes out of a nearby settlement called Esh Kodesh and smaller, more informal settlements around it that are called outposts. And these outposts are usually pretty crude encampments. They often start with just tents or a camper van or a trailer with no electricity and no water. And the people who choose to live in these places tend to be very young, very extreme ideological settlers.

You mentioned something called the Hilltop Youth. Who are they?

The Hilltop Youth is a loose network of settlers that live outside the mainstream, and they often have much more extremist views than the mainstream settler movement. It’s an offshoot of religious Zionism, which is one of the main ideologies of the settler movement, and it sort of fuses the ideas of Orthodox Judaism with ultranationalism. 

The Hilltop Youth take these ideas to the extreme, and I’ve spoken with a bunch of them myself. They believe that they’re on a divine mission to reclaim the Holy Land for Jews, and they’ll cite parts of the Torah and other religious texts that they interpret as empowering them to take the land back and even to use violence. They see it as a preventive type of self-defense, and they see themselves as protecting all other Jews.

These are young people, some of them teenagers. Where are they coming from? Why are their parents not grounding them? How has this been allowed to unfold the way it has?

It’s a good question, and I should say also that not all Hilltop Youth are violent, but a lot of the violence that’s committed by Jews in the West Bank does come from this group, and they come from all over the place. Some of them grew up in the settlements, and then as teenagers, they kind of wandered and they struck out on their own. And then there are others who come from all over Israel. 

A lot of the Hilltop Youth, we’re finding, are kind of troubled kids. Sometimes they’re dropouts from strict religious schools, sometimes they have behavioral issues or ADHD, and they just didn’t really fit in. We heard from some kids who said that they found out about the outposts by word of mouth, like someone at their school had invited them to come for the weekend and they’d come and they’d stay a few days and eventually they’d start spending more and more time there until at some point they’re just living there. 

There are a number of NGOs that recruit young kids to come work as farm hands on agricultural outposts in the West Bank, and some of those are in these areas that are more prone to radicalization. These organizations present themselves as very innocent in that they’re identifying kids that need help and are bringing them to a place where they will learn some discipline and they will have a purpose and they’ll have something to do. But that often puts them into a more extreme environment.

In the case of the family you profiled in Jalud, it’s clear that the Israeli authorities, in the form of soldiers, attempted to help the family get back to their home. How does this typically play out, though? How do Israeli soldiers typically respond when settlers attack Palestinians?

There have been a number of high-profile examples of video footage circulating that appears to show Israeli soldiers either standing idly by or even, some would argue, siding with the settlers. 

In one recent example, there was a video that showed some soldiers praying alongside settlers who had besieged the home of a Palestinian American man, and that was actually not very far from where the Tubasi house is. The military said that it was looking into it to determine whether disciplinary action needed to be taken. 

In general, military officials acknowledge that this violence by settlers is a big problem, and the security establishment definitely does not support what’s happening here. They see it as getting in the way of counter-terrorism efforts and overall efforts to bring stability to this very volatile area. 

I’ve heard this directly from military officers, but on the ground there does seem to be a breakdown of discipline in some cases and a lack of clear instruction in other cases. Some soldiers simply don’t know how to deal with threats from other Israelis, especially really young ones, as you pointed out. It’s just not what they’re trained to do.

Do you think the government could put a stop to these attacks by settlers if it wanted to, or has the government lost control?

This problem has gotten so big that it’s going to be very difficult to solve without significant backlash, but I have spoken with a number of former Israeli security officials who say yes, much more could be done — starting with a more frank acknowledgement of what’s happening, clearer law enforcement procedures, and more disciplinary actions.

Maddie Kowalski is a student at the University of Florida. Last November, someone found nonconsensual intimate images and videos of her, stitched them together, and uploaded them to X, where they were viewed millions of times.

“Can you imagine?” asked Ej Dickson, a senior culture writer at Wired who reported on Kowalski’s story earlier this month. “You’re 19 years old and a video that you don’t even remember shooting, let alone consenting to, goes viral nationally along with your name and your sorority, and your parents, your grandparents, everybody in your life sees it. It’s a humiliation and a privacy violation that is kind of incomprehensible.”

The video was followed by a campaign of intimidation and harassment. Kowalski and her parents received threatening phone calls and texts. People on the internet posted old photos of her, her father’s LinkedIn, and even his golf handicap. Kowalski sought help from the police, from the university, and from X. But the video was being shared faster than the posts could be removed, and her name became a trending topic on X.

What made the video go viral, Dickson explains, is something called the “burnerverse”: a loosely connected network of anonymous “burner” accounts on X. The community mainly exists to discuss college sports, but sometimes it disseminates videos and rumors aimed at shaming young women and ruining their lives. The burnerverse has harassed Kowalski and her family for nearly a year, sometimes encouraging her to kill herself.

Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Dickson about the online network that targeted Kowalski, and why it’s been so difficult to do anything to stop it. 

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Your story describes how Maddie has, without even realizing it, entered into something called the burnerverse. This is something I think a lot of us, prior to your piece, had not heard of. What is the burnerverse?

I hadn’t heard of it either. The burnerverse is an online community of anonymous accounts, and ostensibly these are college sports fan accounts. They talk about the coaches, the players, new recruits, they share memes after their team loses, but there’s a corner of the community that has emerged that is pretty violently racist and misogynistic and antisemitic. And one of the things that they’ve started doing in recent years is doxxing young college-age women like Maddie.

Why is it called the burnerverse?

Because it consists of burner accounts, anonymous accounts.

Okay. So the reason that whoever is spreading these videos of Maddie and others feels comfortable doing that is because they’re anonymous. Nobody knows who’s behind them?

Yes, exactly. And I also want to be clear: This is a small segment of the college sports burner community. 

There are a lot of these accounts that are pretty innocuous and would never dream of doing something like this to a young woman. I would say probably the vast majority of these accounts are not like that, but it is a sizable enough segment that they’re able to make these types of narratives go viral.

What do we know about who is part of the burnerverse? Who is likely to be a part of this?

That was one of the most shocking things that I learned from my reporting, actually. I had assumed that these were largely frat kids. I assumed that they were largely SEC frat kids because a lot of these young girls who have been doxed were students at SEC schools. But when I actually started looking into these accounts and who was behind them and who was sharing these images and making these jokes about Maddie, I learned it was way more wide-ranging than that. 

There are a lot of college students who are involved in the burnerverse, but it’s also men who are 10, 20, 30 years out of college. Sometimes they have wives. Sometimes they have children. Sometimes they have grandchildren. They’re from all over the country. It’s not limited to one race or economic demographic. It’s really very wide-ranging, which is kind of what makes it so terrifying.

And it is not just Maddie Kowalski. What did you learn about other young women who are targeted by this?

No, it’s not. So perhaps the most well-known case is this girl named Mary Kate Cornett, who was a student at Ole Miss in February 2025 when this salacious campus rumor about her sex life started going viral. And the rumor was false and it was clearly defamatory, but it went so viral that it kind of escaped containment from Ole Miss and went viral among SEC schools and then went viral nationally, to the point where her name was trending nationally on X. 

This very famous ESPN personality, Pat McAfee, talked about her without using her name, but talked about her and the details of this rumor on his podcast. And a lot of these athletes and college sports personalities tweeted about it as well. What started as an unverifiable and false rumor about a college girl’s sex life was just blown up and amplified to the degree that it was a national news story within a couple of hours. 

The speed with which this happens — [Cornett]she was telling me that basically a few hours after she learned that she was going viral, her parents’ house was swatted. The speed with which this community works toward making these women’s lives a living hell is really, really rapid.

Did you come away with an understanding of how an online community that is meant to be talking about college sports descends into this?

Part of it is just a consequence of how internet subcultures work. Even fairly innocuous, large internet subcultures and communities, there’s always going to be a small part of any online subculture that splinters off and forms its own community that is going to skew a little bit more extremist. 

That’s not surprising in itself, but I do think that there is something about the discourse surrounding college sports, particularly the media ecosystem that’s represented by Barstool, that does create a space for this type of rampant misogyny to foment. 

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that some of the accounts that I have seen posting really horrible defamatory content about Maddie are smaller Barstool accounts that are associated with individual colleges. I do think that has definitely played a role.

Why did Maddie become the target of these people in the burnerverse?

Because she’s young and she’s attractive. Basically, the criteria is these women are young, attractive, they’re usually white for some reason, and they are perceived to have departed from a sexual norm in some way. 

They’re either subject to some sort of rumor about their sex life or their sexual behavior or maybe a text message leaks about them or a photo. Then these guys take it and they blow it up and it goes viral nationally. 

They’re very purposeful about it too. I can’t tell you how many tweets I’ve seen that are just tweets of a girl’s name and they’re like, “Make her famous, make her go viral.”

In an ideal world, this kind of thing would be stopped before it even happened. So, knowing that there is not much that victims can do, what are the methods of preventing this?

That’s a very complicated question. I know that there are platforms developing various AI tools in order to prevent nonconsensual intimate images from spreading. But I imagine that would be pretty difficult to regulate, especially with the rise of deepfakes and with the rise of-AI manipulated nonconsensual images, so I don’t have a lot of faith in that. 

Honestly, I think that the biggest path toward prevention is — can I say this? Parents raising their sons to not be pieces of shit.

You can say that. You can absolutely say that.

I think that the biggest course of prevention is parents raising their sons to not be pieces of shit, honestly. To just set a clear line and say, “It’s not okay to view women as commodities. It’s not okay to talk about women like this. It’s not okay to view social media engagement as the ultimate goal without thinking about the lives that you’re impacting by spreading this content.” I think that parents need to have conversations with their kids about that. 

I think that there needs to be education within fraternities and sororities and universities because it’s not like what happened to Maddie Kowalski is an isolated incident. I was able to identify almost a dozen other young women who have been targeted by the burnerverse in this way. 

I think that there needs to be more discussion of this in general because it’s not just the burnerverse. It’s this larger ecosystem that is socially ordained at this point of men saying horrible things and doing horrible things to women with impunity. That’s the real problem.

Anti-Muslim messaging has been on the rise among Republican elected officials for a while, and last week it took center stage at the GOP’s midterm convention in Dallas, where speakers warned that leftists and “Islamists” were joining forces.

“We are witnessing a new and dangerous red-green alliance. Communists and Islamists coming together and sweeping over the Democrat Party,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) told attendees. “They are united because they share the same enemies. They hate Christians. They hate Jews. They hate capitalism. They hate the Constitution. And they hate America.”

Former Rep. Mike Rogers, the Republican Senate candidate in Michigan, attempted to link his opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, to the 9/11 attacks: “I never imagined that 25 years after 9/11, I would be running against somebody that campaigns with Hasan Piker, who thinks America deserved it,” he said. “Together, they attack America. They excuse extremism. They treat our country like it’s the villain.”

The convention’s rampant Islamophobia isn’t a one-off: It fits a trend of Republican lawmakers attacking Islam and Muslims in the runup to the midterms. 

Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) said on X that “Muslims don’t belong in American society.” Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) said “we need more Islamophobia, not less.” Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) said, “No more Muslims.” Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith said that “I hate Islam; it’s a demonic death cult.” 

The attacks have gotten specific: High-profile Muslim figures like El-Sayed, Piker, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar have all been targets of anti-Muslim rhetoric, and the GOP is also pushing anti-Muslim legislation.

A new “Sharia Free America Caucus” in the US House now includes dozens of members, all Republicans. Texas Republicans made banning and investigating cases of sharia law an official plank in their party platform. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has called for a federal probe of Muslim washing facilities at Texas airports.

To break down the disturbing uptick in Islamophobia this midterm season, what’s driving it, and where it could be headed, Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with journalist Rozina Ali, author of the new book Seasons of Fury. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Do you think that we are partly seeing a rise in Islamophobic rhetoric because this year we have high-profile Muslims like Abdul El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani, and Hasan Piker criticizing US foreign policy?

We have had really prominent Muslim politicians in the last several years. The same year that President Trump was elected, we also elected Ilhan Omar to the Minnesota House of Representatives. And then we had the [2018] election of Rashida Tlaib. These are remarkable because not only were they Muslim politicians, but they were also critical of US foreign policy and the government. 

What’s actually been a turning point has been the post-October 7 period because, one, we had a lot of politicians, especially from the Republican Party, starting to label this entire war as a religious war. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) immediately said, “We’re in a religious war,” which is astonishing, quite frankly, because that’s not even the rhetoric the Bush administration used after 9/11. 

What also happened is that a lot of Muslims — Muslim experts, Muslim scholars, Muslim journalists, and Muslim politicians — started being very vocal about US foreign policy. And that wasn’t necessarily the case after 9/11. A lot of Muslims who did criticize US foreign policy back then were sidelined or monitored or seen as suspicious, but they are so vocal now. The younger generation that has come up — Abdul El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani, and others — they’re so vocal. 

And it’s not just foreign policy. What they say is that the way we conduct US foreign policy actually has direct ties to what’s happening at home. They’re very critical of the inequality they’re seeing at home, the rising costs, inflation — there’s so much to criticize about what’s happening at home. And I think this is one of the reasons we see so much backlash against them — because they’re unapologetic in their criticism.

The US has always had these fights over who gets to criticize the United States of America. I wonder why you think, at this moment, they feel safer launching those criticisms. 

Do they feel more free because the wars were such disasters? What opened the door to allow younger Muslims running for office to run in part on, “The United States is a really imperfect country and we’re not going to stop talking about what we’ve done overseas and at home”?

I think they’re able to do that because so many Americans do that. A lot of politicians and policymakers are openly critiquing what has happened abroad and what is happening here. One of the marked differences between the post-9/11 period and now is that there was widespread support for the Bush administration’s “war on terror” from policymakers on both sides of the aisle, from media, from the public at large. The few scholars and Muslim community members who did critique what the Bush administration was doing were often shunned. 

In later years, it became very clear that we were not winning the wars in Iraq, in Afghanistan, or even the war on terror. There was a lot to be critical of, not just with the Abu Ghraib scandal and Guantanamo, but also what was happening at home. There was mass surveillance, [and] then we had the rise of the NSA. 

I think, ultimately, we have reached a point in this country that we actually have a society that has deep, profound distrust of its institutions. That larger landscape allows politicians like Zohran Mamdani, like Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, but also any other politician to critique the government and feel comfortable doing so. 

I would say this is the Democrats’ side. I think what’s so interesting about the Republican Party now is that so much of their rhetoric and their vision is about who loves America. I was listening to clips of JD Vance at the convention and he kept talking about “America belongs to those who love it, not those who hate it.” And I think this is just a fascinating declaration to make when there is such a disconnect between what the public is feeling right now and what the Republican Party is saying.

I’m glad you brought up JD Vance, because one thing that is true of the vice president is that he too is a critic of America. It doesn’t always come out, but it has come out in the past. There are parts of America, including the wars overseas, that JD Vance has been fiercely critical of. 

Mamdani and El-Sayed are also Americans. It seems to me like some of the pushback they’re getting is rooted in the idea that “you don’t have the right to do this, you’re lucky to be in America.”

Do you think there is something going on here where you can criticize America if you look like JD Vance, but you cannot if you look like Zohran Mamdani?

Unfortunately, yes. And I will say, it’s unfortunate, but it’s not just the Republican Party who perpetuated that narrative. Some of the Democrats in earlier years did the same thing. I very clearly remember Bill Clinton on the DNC stage in 2016, saying, “If you’re a Muslim and you love America and freedom and you hate terror, stay here and help us win and make the future together.”

“I really think that there needs to be a concerted effort to challenge anti-Muslim rhetoric coming from policymakers and from the top that we’re not really seeing yet.”

It placed a conditionality on the way that Muslims would be accepted in the United States. But that was an absurd statement to make because there was a lot to be critical of with the way that the US was fighting its war on terror. 

And that conditionality — we have continued to see it over and over again, except it has morphed and mutated to the extent that someone like JD Vance can say that “we were tired of being called racist for noticing that our country was becoming dirtier and poorer and less safe and less prosperous.” He blames that squarely on immigrants or foreigners or what he considers un-American values. He can say that, but not anyone else who is, perhaps, brown or Muslim. 

I don’t think it’s just targeted towards Muslims. I actually think the problem and fascinating thing about what the Republican Party is doing is combining all of these labels into one. And there’s this narrative that they’re creating that anyone who is against us will be Muslims, will be leftists, will be immigrants, will be people who don’t look like us. 

It’s really creating this cultural, religious, racial divide, which is quite frightening. 

I wonder if you think this fearmongering is about winning the midterms and then it’ll die down in the same way that a lot of political rhetoric gets very heated in the run-up to contested elections and then dies down, or whether you worry that this talk keeps escalating?

I have been wondering about that because I think there are two things happening. 

One is that anti-Muslim sentiment has become a feature of American politics and seems to come out during election season. And I think what the GOP is doing is actually seeing if this anti-Muslim rhetoric is going to be effective in helping them win. This is what they were trying during the Mamdani campaign and it didn’t work. And I think they’re trying this in Michigan and, let’s see if it works. They’re trying this elsewhere too. 

But the other thing that’s happening, which is a bit more lasting, is the effort to change the very structures and laws regarding Muslim expression and the freedom to practice Islam in the United States. For example, in Texas, we are seeing efforts to frame the entire religion of Islam as a political ideology rather than a religion itself. 

There are efforts to, for example, ban sharia, which still makes very little sense because I don’t know if anyone can quite explain that. There is a very concerted effort to try to block signs of visible Islam at a local level. And if they’re successful, we’re going to see that at a national level.

I was in Michigan last month and I interviewed Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. There are a lot of things that make him interesting, but one of them is how easy it is to look at a politician like that and call him “all-American,” right? He’s high-achieving, he’s married, he’s handsome, he’s a jock. He’s got two kids. He is all-American. 

Can you conceive of a world where Abdul El-Sayed being Muslim is not the first line of attack when he makes a point about what the US has done wrong? In short, can you see him occupying, at some point in the future, a place like JD Vance occupies: You get to criticize the country because you are American enough?

There was a time when being Catholic was considered a really big deal. John F. Kennedy was the first Catholic president and it just kept coming up over and over again. Now, no one even remembers. I bet you half the country doesn’t realize he was Catholic. 

I think that could happen to Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, but I don’t think it’s going to be in the near future. I think it’s going to take a generational change for that and it’s not going to come organically. I really think that there needs to be a concerted effort to challenge anti-Muslim rhetoric coming from policymakers and from the top that we’re not really seeing yet.

But you think we might?

I think we might, in decades’ time.