Muslims Targeted By Anti-Islam Backlash In Days After Paris Attacks

The Village Voice has a story from Christian Alexander Pean, a 28-year-old medical student, who was on his phone texting friends before a screening of "The Martian" in New York City. A man approached him and asked what he was doing in the theater, and told Pean he felt threatened by him.

"'Guys like you texting and standing,'" the man said, according to Pean. "'It’s very suspicious.'"

Pean is a U.S. citizen who grew up in Texas.

Read the whole story here.

On Sunday, a flight from the Washington, D.C., area to Boston was deplaned after the crew reported two passengers engaged in "suspicious activity." No abnormalities were detected on the plane upon investigation, and the flight later departed. The two individuals were taken in for questioning but later released and booked on a later flight.

Conservative pundit Laura Ingraham happened to be on the flight, and live-tweeted the incident.

"Guys--AA Flight #2124 ready for take off to BOS minus the two Middle Eastern passengers!" she wrote.

Former New York City cop Bo Dietl stopped by Fox News Monday expressing support for monitoring mosques in order fend off potential attacks by the Islamic State.

"We broke so many, so many plots by eavesdropping on these radical mosques," Dietl claimed. "We've got to do it again -- and let's stop worrying about people's rights."

CBC reports that a Toronto-area woman was beaten and robbed by two men while picking up her children from school. According to police, the men told her to "go back to her country" and called her a terrorist.

Police are investigating the incident as a hate crime.

A Hindu temple in Ontario, Canada, was vandalized Sunday night while the temple's spirtual leader was attending a nearby vigil for the victims of the Paris attacks. Five stones were thrown into the temple, smashing two windows.

"It's an unfortunate circumstance if people are making a correlation between what happened in France and our area," Staff Srg. Michael Haffner told CBC. "Until we locate anyone who is responsible it would be difficult to speculate."

On Tuesday morning, four passengers were removed from a Spirit Airlines flight at BWI Airport after another passenger alerted a flight attendant to "suspicious activity." According to a reporter on board, the passengers appeared to be "of Middle Eastern descent." All passengers were then moved from the plane to the gate while the aircraft was inspected, and the "suspicious" passengers, three men and one woman, were taken in for questioning. The plane was later cleared for takeoff about three hours behind schedule.

"While the aircraft was taxiing to the runway, a passenger alerted a flight attendant of a passenger engaged in suspicious activity on board," Spirit Airlines said in a statement. "The flight attendant notified the captain, and out of an abundance of caution, the plane returned to the gate."

At least one of the passengers has been released with no charges.

An Uber driver in Charlotte, North Carolina, says a passenger assumed he was Muslim and attacked him early Sunday morning.

He asked me if I was a Muslim. I said I was not a Muslim," Samson Woldemichael told WBTV. "I was driving and he hit me while I was driving."