I swear to god I'd better not see anyone running around here with a towel on their head after this
Just a quote from someone who owned a very lucrative deli on Staten Island when I was a kid.
I wonder if everyone realizes that 40 years ago, Staten Island was largely rural. My family had to pay flood insurance because a few years ago, a creek ran through my backyard.
Staten Island used to be a place where Civil Service workers would make their home to avoid living in "the city". Nowadays it reminds me of Queens.
Because of that the number of Police Officers and Firefighters on SI is HUGE. So it kinda seems predictable (if not quite respectable) that anti-muslim attitudes would be higher here than anywhere else.
That being said, as a kid in SI in NYC, we were never "indoctrinated" against Muslims or anything which is pretty cool considering how easily that could have happened.
I was about 9 when it all went down, and didn't really grasp the whole thing. For me it was a smoke cloud floating over my house, a few days off school, and a couple years of nightvision footage of explosions on CNN. I had immediate family who had close calls, but nobody was killed.
Being young as I was, I don't think the full tragedy of the event really hit me until 2011 when I was in college, and I saw the documentaries about real people, just like me, with the same accent and even working in the industry I wanted to make a name for myself in, jumping out windows.
It was surreal and familiar at the same time.
But I finished elementary and began middle school with Muslim kids and never gave them, or saw them given any uneasiness regarding their religion. Which I think is really something (although I did fucking hate this one Muslim kid, but it had nothing to do with his religion).
Political Correctness was pretty much mandatory where I grew up. It wasn't until I moved out of NYC that I saw nasty comments regarding Muslims, Blacks or Gays. If you said the kind of shit I heard regularly in PA in my Staten Island Middle School you would have been branded an asshole immediately.