Hate crimes against Muslims don't seem to be vanishing anytime soon, and worse - the hate has extended to children.
This month, a 10-year-old Muslim girl in Massachusetts found two vile handwritten notes in her classroom cubby. In one of the notes - received on Friday - the phrase "you're a terrorist" can be seen written across the paper.
Another note had the words "I will kill you" scribbled across.
"She was visibly upset, she was crying," said her uncle Jamaal Siddiqui.
"That's not what Islam teaches, and that's not what Muslims are," he added.
Since the notes were discovered, police have launched an investigation into the incident, referring to the case as a hate crime. The school is also conducting an internal investigation into the hateful incident.
The girl's identity has not been shared with the public, as her family wishes to preserve her privacy.
The fifth-grader handed the note over to her teacher immediately upon discovery. However, the school did not report it to the police right away in hopes that a "student would come forward," according to CNN.
The police got involved after receipt of the second note on Tuesday.
"When you think about a child who's in fifth grade ... that kind of hate, you know, where does that come from?" said Robert Tremblay, Framingham School District Superintendent, according to CNN.
"It's not an innate feeling that a child would have. And the concern that we have is, how is this a teachable opportunity for our classrooms?" he added.
The 10-year-old student has not been pulled out of school following the incident.
"If we take her out of school it's just going to show that we can't stand up to the situation," her uncle explained.
Anti-Muslim hate crimes have spiked after Trump's Islamophobic tweets
U.S. President Donald Trump's viral Islamophobic tweets seem to have a disturbing real-world effect on anti-Muslim hate crimes.
A study, published earlier this year by researchers at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, revealed that Trump's anti-Muslim tweets were a reliable predictor of the level of attacks against Muslims during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, and onward into the first few months following his election.
When you look at a chart of the president's Islamophobic social media posts, the correlation with spikes in anti-Muslim hate crime is very clear.
Carlo Schwarz, a doctoral student who worked on the study, told The Daily Beast that the research isn't necessarily saying Trump caused the hate crimes.
"But what we think is interesting is that Trump’s tweets and hate crime only appear to be correlated after the start of his presidential run. It is also interesting that this correlation seems to be driven by areas with many Twitter users," he said.
FBI statistics also reveal that anti-Muslim hate crimes rose by 67 percent in 2015 (prior to the U.S. election).
Also, the number of anti-Muslim hate groups actually tripled in the U.S. from 2015 to 2016 – a surge of 197 percent – according to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).