Brother’s slaying spurs S.F. doctor to speak against Islamophobia
Hamed Aleaziz
San Francisco Chronicle
When San Francisco doctor Suzanne Barakat dreams about the night her brother was shot and killed one year ago — gunned down, along with his wife and her sister in their apartment in Chapel Hill, N.C. — the vision ends differently every time.
Some nights, Barakat’s brother, Deah, emerges from the horror.
“I’ve seen him. I’ve been able to hug him because he made it and he’s alive,” said Barakat, a 28-year-old resident physician at San Francisco General Hospital.
But she always wakes up with the same dread, facing the “awful reality that I will never hug him again.” She can’t help constantly reimagining the events of Feb. 10, 2015, when her brother’s neighbor, Craig Stephen Hicks, allegedly committed a shooting that sparked a nationwide conversation about the treatment of Muslim Americans.
“I still haven’t found a way to get by other than feeling numb,” she said, “or trying to do something good about it.”
In the view of Muslim leaders and many others, Barakat has become a powerful and badly needed voice for the community since the slaying of her brother, who was a 23-year-old dental student at the University of North Carolina, as well as his wife, 21-year-old Yusor Abu-Salha, and her sister, 19-year-old Razan Abu-Salha.
She appeared on television, gave speeches, and met with President Obama while speaking with a unique authority about the threat of Islamophobia, which intensified after the terrorist rampages last year in Paris and San Bernardino.
‘Fighting through her tears’
“If she curled into herself because of her grief, nobody could blame her,” U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat who was the first Muslim elected to Congress, said in an interview with The Chronicle.
“The tragedy her family suffered was indescribable,” he said, “but she’s done something pretty rare … fighting through her tears of grief to benefit people who are still living and who might be protected from anti-Muslim hate.”
In some ways, Barakat always intended to become an advocate. She grew up in North Carolina and followed a childhood dream to become a doctor, attending medical school at the University of North Carolina.
During her studies, she spent a year at UCSF researching postpartum mental health outcomes in low-income Latina women, and traveled to the Turkish-Syrian border to care for displaced refugees at a makeshift clinic. When she moved to San Francisco to train in family medicine, her goal was to help the underserved at San Francisco General.
Barakat did not plan to become a public figure. But she felt the need to speak up when police in Chapel Hill initially blamed the triple killing on a parking dispute, when the families saw a clear hate crime. She also felt the story wasn’t getting appropriate media coverage.
All three victims were Muslims — and the sisters both wore the hijab. Reports indicated that none had a car parked in a disputed spot.
Photo: Handout, McClatchy-Tribune News Service Deah Bara kat was killed Feb. 10, 2015. A neighbor was charged with three counts of murder.
All three were shot in the head. The Department of Justice opened an investigation — which is ongoing — to determine whether the slayings were hate crimes or violated other federal laws. Local prosecutors, meanwhile, are pursuing the death penalty against Hicks.
The victims’ families have said Hicks repeatedly told Deah’s wife he did not like how she looked because of her headscarf. They believe the circumstances of the crime clearly suggest they were targeted because of their religion. The New York Times has also reported that online posts showed that Hicks “appeared to have a deep dislike of all religion.”
In the aftermath of the killings, Barakat said on CNN that the slayings needed to be considered terrorism.
“It’s time people call it what it is,” she said.
Since then, Barakat has noticed a rise in anti-Muslim sentiment, and presidential candidate Donald Trump has proposed a ban on Muslims entering the country.
“It’s really disheartening that even after we’ve seen how lethal words can be, that we continue to spew the hate and find political and financial gain from using hate speech against a minority group in this country. I don’t understand it,” Barakat said.
Americans’ perceptions
What shocks her, she said, is that candidates like Trump “have such a massive following. It really confuses me.”
A 2014 Pew Research Center survey of more than 3,000 Americans found that those polled rated Muslims a 40 on a zero-to-100 scale — the lowest among religious groups who were rated.
Muslim Advocates, a legal-affairs organization, has tracked 70 potential anti-Muslim hate crimes across the U.S. in the three months since the attack in Paris.
Despite her place in the national spotlight, Barakat is not immune to everyday bigotry, even at San Francisco General.
In January, as she led a team of 10 in hospital rounds, they came across a patient who used her finger to outline her own face, referencing Barakat’s hijab, and said to Barakat, “San Bernardino.” Barakat felt humiliated and alone.
A few days later, they came across the same patient, who looked at Barakat and said, “Your people are killing people in Los Angeles.” This time, Barakat decided to speak up as an example to others in her group to not stay silent in the face of bigotry. The conversation ended with the patient apologizing profusely.
Photo: Justin Cook, Special To The Chronicle Hundreds attended a vigil on the one-year anniversary of the murder of Deah Barakat, his wife Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha and her sister Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha (ALL NAMES CQ). A vigil was held in their honor at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC on Wednesday, February 10, 2016.
“This is my reality now. Somehow I am being blamed and called a terrorist when I’m providing compassionate care to a patient,” she said. “I’m grieving the loss of three members of my family who were murdered because of this exact kind of Islamophobia — how am I supposed to feel?”
Telling Obama her story
Barakat told Obama the story at a roundtable meeting with a group of Muslim Americans before his speech at a Maryland mosque in early February. She said he responded, “If patients are mean to you, give them good care anyway.” She later heard that Obama rewrote his speech after the conversation with the group.
The message clearly resonated. On Wednesday, the anniversary of the killings, Obama’s senior adviser, Valerie Jarrett, tweeted, “Thank you Suzanne Barakat for sharing your story w/ @POTUS last week — your strength is inspiring. We stand with you.”
People like Barakat can “humanize” Islamophobia, said Farhana Khera, head of Muslim Advocates and former counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. “She speaks from a unique space having experienced the trauma of hate violence.”
Linda Sarsour, the head of the Arab American Association of New York, said Barakat’s rise to prominence has inspired her.
“She’s a directly impacted person whose story and message resonates,” she said. “She has become a symbol of courage and defied a lot of stereotypes in a way many people have been trying to do for 20 years. Suzanne did it overnight — she took a tragedy and created an opportunity for the entire American Muslim community.”
Barakat has received countless messages of support, including from young Muslim Americans.
“Seeing other people speak out … gives them the strength to be confident in who they are, that they should be able to speak up and that they are just as worthy as anyone else to live in this country and to practice a faith they find suitable,” she said.
Talking takes a toll
The interviews, talks and meetings, however, take a toll on Barakat. With each interview, she said, she experiences an emotional setback. While people applaud her composure, “They have no idea what happens behind closed doors — the pain, the suffering.”
In some sense, Barakat finds it cruel and unfair to continue to have to speak out after she sacrificed so much. But she doesn’t plan to stop.
“I don’t need to theorize or bring metaphorical analogies on how this is a real thing,” she said. “I just need to point to that picture: These people lived, I knew them, and I loved them, this is what they were doing, and this is what happened to them because of Islamophobic rhetoric.”
Source: www.sfchronicle.com