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On Monday, a jury convicted Jason Eaton of attempted murder for shooting three Palestinian college students in November 2023, concluding a case that highlights an increase in anti-Palestinian racism since October 7.

On November 25, 2023, Eaton shot Kinnan Abdalhamid, Tahseen Ali Ahmad, and Hisham Awartani in Burlington, Vermont, after seeing them walk by his apartment. The three students, who were 20 years old at the time, were wearing keffiyehs and speaking in both English and Arabic as they visited the town during the weekend of Thanksgiving.

Eaton walked towards the students and shot them at close range, injuring the three young men and leaving Awartani paralyzed from the waist down.

During the trial, which began on September 14 – nearly three years after the shooting – Eaton’s defense argued that he was legally insane, and that he was suffering from delusions and believed he was instructed to shoot the three students.

But the students and their families have insisted that anti-Palestinian racism was the reason for Eaton’s attack.

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In the two months after October 7, 2023, civil rights organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) documented a “staggering” spike in violence, hate speech, and discrimination against Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians across the U.S. In one incident, a landlord in Illinois stabbed and killed 6-year-old Palestinian American Wadea Al Fayoume on October 14, one week after October 7.

The prosecution in Eaton’s trial also quoted the shooter using racial slurs, such as that the students had been “dressed up like terrorists” and that they should have been told not to “wear the thing on their........

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