The man said he walked off the job and then was forced by his bosses to quit; he filed a case with the Philadelphia Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, which tried unsuccessfully to win his job back.
Today, local Muslim leaders point to incidents like this as a sign that lingering anti-Islam prejudice never vanished after the 2001 attacks. They are alarmed at signs from coast to coast that a renewed wave of so-called "Islamophobia" is suddenly and almost inexplicably taking a turn for the much worse.
While the debate over opening an Islamic community center and mosque roughly two blocks from the former site of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan churns nonstop in the spin cycle of 24/7 cable news, there's also been an alarming national rise in vandalism and violence toward Muslims and their holy places.
Last month's headline-grabbing incident was the bizarre slashing of a cabdriver in Manhattan by a drunken college student after he asked the driver if he was a Muslim, but officials are also probing a recent run of possible hate crimes elsewhere. These include the burning of construction vehicles at a proposed mosque site in Tennessee, which federal authorities ruled an arson this weekend, and a case in which a group of teenagers in a small upstate New York town was arrested for harassing mosque-goers at evening prayers for the Ramadan holiday.
