By Tracy Record
West Seattle Blog editor
If you are going to the Womxn’s March on Seattle tomorrow, get to the starting point at Judkins Park in time for the pre-march speakers.
One is a West Seattle neighbor – Aneelah Afzali.
Afzali is executive director of MAPS-AMEN, the recently launched American Muslim Empowerment Network, launched through the Muslim Association of Puget Sound, which is based in Redmond.
She will be one of five speakers at the rally before the march, and her speech will be about combating Islamophobia. “Essentially,” she told us during a phone conversation, “getting people to understand that Muslims were part of America even before it was a country, despite the demonization we are seeing in the media.” She’ll be talking about what people can do to help combat Islamophobia.
What CAN you do? “Each circumstance will vary,” Afzali says. The important thing is to not just stand by in silence – use your voice, use your body if you have to, or tell the story – if you see or hear something, posting about it on social media can be an important way of fighting back. “Standing up for the victim, letting them know they have an ally … there are a variety of things that people can do.”
In the bigger picture, her work “has four areas of focus – coalition building … with other minority groups as well as our friends and allies of any kind of background. That’s important during troubling times. (Also) education about Islam and Muslims – unfortunately, most people in our country don’t know Muslims, and something is easy to demonize when you don’t know much about it.” Another area of focus: “Leveraging media properly – Islam is the most mentioned religion (in media),” but most of the mentions are negative, Afzali says. The final focus: “Youth empowerment – helping build the future leaders of our country.” Last weekend, MAPS-AMEN had a youth-advocacy workshop with more than 100 young participants learning about Islamophobia and using the “power of the pen” to combat it.
MAPS-AMEN plans to have more than 100 American Muslims marching tomorrow; an announcement of that is how we found Afzali – we received a news release about the group’s participation, and asked if there were any West Seattleites with whom we could speak.
ABOUT THE MARCH: Marchers are gathering at 10 am at Judkins Park, with the speakers (including Aneelah Afzali) scheduled at 10:30 am, marching instructions at 11. Full details, including maps, are here.
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