OHIO – Leading members of the American Muslim and Somali communities condemned the attacks at Ohio State University on Monday which injured at least 9 people, and they asked the public to avoid rushing to judgment about the suspect’s motives.
“Like all of our fellow Columbus citizens we are saddened and heartbroken by this senseless act of violence and we want to condemn in the strongest possible terms this and any other kind senseless violent act,” Jennifer Nimer, Legal Director for the Ohio Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said at a news conference late Monday, November 28.
Somali-born Abdul Razak Ali Artan, who was a legal permanent US resident, was shot dead by a police officer outside an engineering building at Ohio State University in Columbus on Monday.
Eleven people were injured, one critically, after he allegedly drove his small Honda onto the university’s campus in Columbus and then began stabbing people.
Members of the Muslim and Somali community at the conference also urged the public not to jump to conclusions about the attack as investigators were still uncovering details about the suspect
“We as yet know nothing about the motivation of the attack but we do know of his Somali heritage and that will be enough for some people to falsely link this tragic incident to the faith of Islam and the Somali and Muslim communities,” said Roula Allouch, national board chair of CAIR, said.
The attack follows reports of threatening letters allegedly mailed to mosques nationwide, which referred to Muslims as “Children of Satan” and “vile and filthy people.”
Muslim leaders warned that Monday’s attack at Ohio State University might prompt similar threats against the Somali and Muslim community.
“We are living in times where there’s been increased violence against members of the American Muslim community and we want to ensure that as Americans we stand drawn together, united and we don’t allow the act of one individual to cause a backlash against others,” Allouch said.
Fear
As police investigate the reasons behind the attack, many report cited an earlier interview made by the attacker in which he spoke of his religion and fear of Islamophobia.
“I wanted to pray in the open, but I was kinda scared with everything going on in the media,” he told the university magazine The Lantern last August.
“I’m a Muslim, it’s not what the media portrays me to be. If people look at me, a Muslim praying, I don’t know what they’re going to think, what’s going to happen. But, I don’t blame them. It’s the media that put that picture in their heads,” Artan told reporter Kevin Stankiewicz.
Over 45,000 Somalis live in Ohio, according to the Somali Community Association of Ohio, 99.9 percent of which are Muslim.
In 2015, the New York Times reported, officially reported hate crimes against Muslims surged to 257, a 67% increase from 2014.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit that tracks extremist movements across the country, recorded over 700 “reports of hateful incidents of harassment around the country” in the week following Republican Donald Trump’s victory in the general election.