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Muslim children have been kicked out of a public swimming pool in Wilmington, Delaware for wearing «cotton-based» religious clothes, reported the Washington post on Thursday.
On June 25th, Muslim kids at a summer camp were swimming in the Foster Brown public pool when they were told to leave. The pool’s manager told the facilitator of the summer Arabic enrichment program, Tahsiyn A. Ismaa’eel, that the kids couldn’t wear «cotton», while swimming as «it could strain on the pool’s filtration system».
Ismaa’eel, has been taking her elementary school kids to this same pool for four years now, and they have never been kicked out. «There’s nothing posted that says you can’t swim in cotton», she told the Washington post. «At the same time, there are other kids with cotton on. … I asked, why are my kids being treated differently ?» she added.
Tahsiyn, who owns and runs the Darul-Amaanah Academy and directs summer programs, says what happened to her and her program participants is pure discrimination. «If there is a policy, it should be posted and applied to everybody» she said.
The office of Wilmington Mayor Mike Purzycki initially cited a city rule that states that all swimmers must be in «proper swimming attire», siding with the pool employees, though this rule does not specifically prohibit wearing cotton.
He then issued an apology on July 14th, saying «we should be held accountable for what happened and how poorly we assessed this incident, I apologize to the children who were directed to leave a city pool because of the religious-required clothing they were wearing. We also referred to vaguely-worded pool policies to assess and then justify our poor judgment, and that was also wrong».
In its most recent report, the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) revealed that a 17 per cent rise in bias-motivated incidents against American Muslims increase has been recorded between 2016 and 2017.
