Sikh-American physician tells lawmakers of brutal attack

Dr. Prabhjot Singh will likely never forget Sept. 21, 2013. He had just said goodbye to his wife and their toddler son and was walking up to a well-lit intersection near Columbia University when his nightmare began: Shouting “terrorist” and “Osama,” two dozen or so men on bicycles swept over him.  He felt his beard being pulled with great force -- and then the assault began in earnest.

“The group surrounded me and began punching my face and body,” he said. “As a physician, I immediately knew that my jaw was fractured because I could feel my teeth moving back and forth.”

Bystanders intervened and aided him, he said, and the next morning he underwent surgery to repair his damaged jaw.

“A few days after being attacked, I wrote an op-ed that shared how deeply grateful I was, and still am, that my wife and son were not with me. Today, they are here with me, and Hukam is now four years old,” he said.

Singh’s emotional account of that day’s hate crime left his listeners riveted and visibly shaken. Singh, chairman of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Health System, recreated that brutal incident in graphic testimony earlier this month delivered to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was holding a hearing on hate crimes based on religious background.

Singh was among several civil rights leaders who appeared before the committee on May 2, including Vanita Gupta, incoming president and CEO, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and former head of the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice and Jonathan A. Greenblatt, CEO and national director, Anti-Defamation League.

But it was the Singh’s experience and its sheer brutality – as well as the scars left on his very being as a Sikh-American – that visibly stirred the lawmakers, including Capitol Hill veterans such as Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), the 84-year-old chairman of the committee.

“It’s probably not enough for us to say that we’re sorry for the crime you had to endure and the suffering that came from it,” Grassley told him. “But, I don’t think we’d be very human if we didn’t recognize that’s what you faced.”

The manner in which the attack was staged was also not lost on Grassley. “One of the parts of the crime committed against you that struck me was how the mob humiliated you before the assault,” he said. “Apart from your physical injuries, can you tell us about any lasting emotional and psychological trauma faced by religious hate crimes victims? And if that describes you, tell us.”

Singh characterized himself as an “optimist by nature” but acknowledged the last few months “have felt particularly cruel as tragedy has rippled through the Sikh-American community: In April, a cabbie had his turban ripped off in New York City by passengers he had driven to the Bronx. In March, a Sikh man was shot in his driveway outside Seattle by a gunman who shouted “go back to your own country.”

Singh said, “Apart from sharing a common humanity and Sikh identity with these people, we share something else.”

He still thinks about that evening, he told lawmakers. “My experience received national media attention and Americans opened their hearts to me.  I still have a box overflowing with prayer cards from churches nationwide. I cherish the letters from Jewish leaders who shared their experiences with anti-Semitism and I still remember letters from Muslims who shared fears about their children’s safety,” he said.

He felt supported by the Hate Crime Unit of the NYPD and wondered whether his experience would become part of their statistics.

“We cannot address what we do not know. None of the headlines during that time mentioned that a recent Somali immigrant, a Muslim who wore a hijab, was also attacked by the same group of young men that evening. They threw a bottle of urine at her face, cutting her nose. I knew this because she was in the stretcher next to me in the emergency room,” he said.

“When I asked reporters why they didn’t mention it, they said it would complicate the story, which was about a professor and doctor who was ‘mistakenly’ attacked in his own neighborhood,” he said. “We cannot accept this premise.  There is no such thing as a ‘mistaken’ hate crime.  No one should ever be targeted.  The only mistake is thinking otherwise.”

He recalled being attacked physically after 9/11 – incidents, he said, that did not make the news. “In fact, I did not feel comfortable reporting them to anyone but friends and family,” he said. “In their aftermath, while finishing my PhD, I struggled with depression, but also found solace in practicing my Sikh faith. Then on Aug. 5, 2012 a neo-Nazi gunman walked into a gurdwara [Sikh house of worship] in Oak Creek, Wisconsin and murdered six worshippers. Harpreet Singh Saini, who lost his mom at the Gurdwara that day, delivered powerful testimony before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee shortly thereafter, and I urge all of you to watch it again.”

Singh placed some of the blame for the increase in such acts on the rhetoric of President Donald Trump. “I was horrified to hear our president last weekend telling thousands of people at a rally that immigrants are snakes waiting to bite America. Words matter, and when political leaders divide and dehumanize us, this lays the groundwork for hate to infect our society,” he said.

Singh asked lawmakers to consider making hate-crime reporting mandatory. And, he said, politicians should hold one another accountable for putting their constituents in danger. “Words matter…My personal experience with hate violence is a case in point. Please hold each other accountable and make it stop,” he said.

Singh said his young son loves soccer, trains and Dora the Explorer and when he starts kindergarten in the fall he will wear – like most Sikh boys -- a patka, a small piece of cloth on his head to cover his long hair. “No one on our block treats him differently for it, and they watch over him like he was theirs,” he said. But, he said, according to the Sikh Coalition, “a majority of kids like him will be bullied and harassed in school, and as someone who was in his shoes 30 years ago, I know firsthand that I didn’t want to talk about verbal or physical assaults with my parents.”

He said that one day he hoped to tell his son about this testimony he was giving. He said wants to “tell him that on this day, a group of senators looked me in the eye and said that hate is a problem in America and that they thought about you as they committed to addressing it openly and honestly.”

Delivering her testimony, Gupta called hate violence “the country’s original form of domestic terrorism.” She said the hearing was being held at a crucial time as “an alarming number of gut-wrenching, hate-motivated [violent acts] have shaken the public, including the tragic shooting of two South Asian men in Kansas City, Missouri, told to ‘get out of my country,’ and mosque arsons, and synagogue vandalism around the country.”

Gupta said, “There is no question that many South Asians, Sikhs, and people of other faiths are targeted because people believe they are Muslim. However, we cannot lose sight of the fact that many people are also targeted because of their actual identity.”

Eric Treene, special counsel for religious discrimination in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, told the committee that “Attorney General [Jeff Sessions] has made fighting violent crime one of his top priorities” and has established a task force with a hate crimes subcommittee.

Grassley noted that “crimes against Jews are the most common religious hate crimes and they have increased,” but the fastest-growing category are religious hate crimes against Muslims. “These crimes increased by 67 percent between 2014 and 2015, the last year for which FBI figures are available,” he said.

“Ultimately eliminating prejudice in the U.S. will require that Americans develop respect for cultural differences and establish dialogue across racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious boundaries,” Gupta said, adding “it’s really incumbent on the Justice Department to continue a very aggressive outreach with particularly vulnerable communities….Nobody in law enforcement or in the Justice Department from my experience can do much about hate crimes if communities don’t feel safe in reporting them.”