Hindus for Human Rights Responds to Anti-Afghan Rhetoric Following Washington, D.C. Shooting

Warns Against Politicizing D.C. Shooting to Target Afghan Americans

Hindus for Human Rights (HfHR) condemns the Trump administration’s attacks on Afghan Americans in the wake of the shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington, DC. While we utterly reject the actions of the shooter, we are horrified that this administration has used this tragedy to attack our Afghan and Afghan American friends, families, and neighbors. The administration’s efforts to expel Afghans from the United States will end in disaster as people are forced to return to a country where they face certain death. Instead of meeting a moment of grief with clarity and compassion, federal leaders have chosen to label an entire community as terrorists and punish those who have already survived war, displacement, and betrayal.

These attacks did not begin last week, though. The US government has, for the last few weeks, sought to roll back policies to grant Afghans safe refuge in the United States, including re-evaluating refugee status for Afghans and ending the Special Immigration Visa process for those Afghans who worked with the US government. These attacks on Afghan immigrants do not make this country safer. Instead, South Asian Americans are once again vulnerable to the violent impulses of white supremacists and Christian nationalists. 

We reject narratives that dehumanize entire peoples,” said Ria Chakrabarty, Senior Policy Director at HfHR. “We owe it to our fellow South Asian Americans to unite steadfastly against this anti-Afghan hatred, especially in the face of an explicitly white nationalist administration.” ”

Afghans and Afghan Americans repeatedly pay the price for the others’ misdeeds in Afghanistan. The individual responsible for the shooting was recruited at 14 years old by the CIA - effectively making him a child soldier. He was one of several individuals who had become entangled in the US’s military-industrial complex in Afghanistan, which devastated the Afghan people. The United States must reckon honestly with the violence it exported to Afghanistan, the communities it destroyed, and the promises it made to Afghans seeking refuge. 

We unequivocally condemn the shooting in Washington, DC. Still, we call on American leaders to take an honest look at the US’s decades of broken promises to the Afghan people. At a moment when compassion is needed most, we urge our leaders to honor their commitments to Afghan refugees, uphold human dignity, and resist the politics of fear.