It sickens me to write this, to report on the latest manifestation of the hate that has enveloped my country and spread out across the world like a giant oil spill, but the death of Shaima Alawadi, a 32-year-old Iraqi woman and mother of five, is a moral obscenity – a crime for which the War Party must take responsibility.
On Wednesday, in the quiet San Diego suburb of El Cajon, California, the teenage daughter of Shaima Alawadi returned home to find her mother drowning in a pool of blood. There were signs of forced entry at the back of the house. Someone had broken in and beaten her mother nearly to death with a tire iron.
Next to her body was a note: “Go back to your own country, you terrorist.”
A similar note had been found tacked to the family’s door a few weeks earlier, but Shaima had dismissed it as a kid’s prank.
This kind of hate is nothing new for San Diego. In 2010, a plan to build a mosque in nearby Temecula resulted in a series of protest demonstrations by local nut-jobs. A woman in a hijab was hauled off a Southwest Airlines flight in at San Diego airport in 2011 by TSA agents, and told the captain didn’t “feel comfortable” with her on the flight: this was around the same time braying demagogue Peter King (R-New York) was holding hearings on the “Muslim fifth column in America.” Last year, a similar “go back to where you came from” message was delivered by someone who repeatedly punched a Muslim cab driver, who had been observed praying.
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The President recently remarked that “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon [Martin],” the young African American recently killed by an overzealous member of a “neighborhood patrol.” One wonders what it takes to get the President to notice a victim of a vicious racist murder that doesn’t involve someone who looks like a member of his own family. Al Sharpton and MSNBC may not be whipping the public up into a frenzy over the murder of Shaima Alawadi, but then again, that’s a good reason to notice it, and come out with a strong statement against this kind of hate. President George W. Bush, for all the evil he wrought, had the moral sense to condemn the sentiments that motivated Shaima’s killer (or killers) the moment they reared their ugly heads. Will Obama have the basic decency to do the same? Or is he so afraid of the zombies who believe he’s a secret Muslim that he doesn’t dare speak up?
Wes Messamore,
Editor in Chief, THL
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