Muslim Woman Turns Hate Tweets Into Donations To UNICEF

Jan Dizon, Tech Times 12 November 2015, 07:11 am

Tired of all the online Islamophobia, one Muslim woman decided to pledge a dollar for each hate tweet against her.

Susan Carland is an Australian academic and the wife of Aussie writer, lawyer, and talk show host Waleed Aly. She also happens to be Muslim who wears variations of the hijab to cover her hair.

According to reports, she and her husband are often called by the media as “Australia's Muslim Power Couple.” Unfortunately, their popularity also comes with its share of haters and trolls who call them “terrorist sympathizers." One user called Susan Carland an "ignorant, maggot-brained, raghead defending idiot,"

But instead of keeping quiet about such slanderous hate speech directed towards them, Carland announced on her Twitter account last October that she would start donating one dollar to UNICEF Australia for every hateful tweet she received.

In the two weeks since she posted her original tweet, she has donated $1000 to the charity.

I donate $1 to @UNICEF for each hate-filled tweet I get from trolls. Nearly at $1000 in donations. The needy children thank you, haters!

— Susan Carland (@SusanCarland) October 21, 2015

When asked what inspired her to turn around the hate she, her husband, and many other Islam practitioners face, Carland said that she was guided by the teachings of the Quran.

She said that the holy book teaches that “'Good and evil are not equal. Repel evil with what is better.' I'd tried blocking, muting, engaging and ignoring, but none of them felt like I was embodying the Quranic injunction of driving off darkness with light. I felt I should be actively generating good in the world for every ugly verbal bullet sent my way.”

Carland then came up with the idea to donate to UNICEF because they are an organization that helps children in need due to war, sickness, poverty, and hunger – the direct outcome of hate, she says. Always one able to turn otherwise negative situations into something good, Carlson also tweeted a hilarious comeback at anti-Muslim Twitter trolls who called her an “Islamic clown.”