Muslim schoolgirl called ‘terrorist’ in racist abuse on Sydney bus

SYDNEY, Australia (MNTV) — A 13-year-old Muslim girl was subjected to a torrent of racist abuse on a Sydney bus, in an incident police are investigating and that advocates say reflects a sharp rise in anti-Muslim hostility in Australia, SBS News reported.

The girl, Janna, an eighth-grader born in Australia, was traveling toward Greenacre in the city’s southwest when, according to her mother, Roula, she noticed an older man appearing to photograph another schoolgirl and told the girl what she had seen. 

The man then turned on Janna, her mother said. 

Footage circulating on social media shows him calling the uniformed teenager a “terrorist” and an “immigrant” who “didn’t deserve to be here,” alongside further slurs, including sexualized and dehumanizing language. New South Wales Police confirmed they were investigating.

Roula said a woman in a hijab was the only passenger to intervene, and expressed dismay that other adults — including men seated nearby and the bus driver — did not step in. “She’s a minor. She was in full school uniform, and the bus driver should have helped,” she said.

Advocates said the case was far from isolated. Aishah Ali, executive director of the Islamophobia Register Australia, called the harassment of “a young, visibly Muslim thirteen-year-old girl…a microcosm of the state of Islamophobia nationwide,” and said the group had recorded a more than sixfold increase in reports since October 2023. 

An Islamophobia in Australia report published this year documented 309 in-person incidents in 2023 and 2024, more than double the previous annual average; Muslim women and girls made up 79 percent of victims of verbal abuse and 95 percent of those targeted on public transport. 

The register, Ali said, is “chronically under-resourced to cope with the sheer volume of anti-Muslim hate occurring nationally.”