The Somali-born student who went on a car-and-knife rampage at Ohio State University railed on Facebook against U.S. interference in Muslim lands and warned, “If you want us Muslims to stop carrying lone wolf attacks, then make peace” with the Islamic State group, a law enforcement official said today.
The posts from Abdul Razak Ali Artan’s account came to light after Monday’s violence, which left 11 people injured. Investigators are looking into whether it was a terrorist attack.
“America! Stop interfering with other countries, especially the Muslim Ummah. We are not weak. We are not weak, remember that,” he wrote, using the Arabic term for the world’s Muslim community.
This man clearly isn't representative of all Moslems. He has taken sides. And despite the welcome he received here (he was a student at OSU) he sides not with tolerance, freedom, and not plowing into and stabbing fellow students, but with the ISIL monsters who hope to define Islam as a monstrous religion that celebrates intolerance, control, and plowing into and stabbing people who disagree with that view of Islam.
Funny enough given his outrage at the treatment of Moslems, only a minority of Moslems who think like the Somali-born Abdul Razak Ali Artan try to kill us. The rest manage to drive minivans and live and work and otherwise live the way jihadis like Artan get worked up into a killing rage over.
What Artan wanted is for America to stop helping non-jihadi Moslems fight and defeat the jihadis like ISIL, al Qaeda, Boko Haram, al Shabab, and other disgusting people like himself.
I want the Moslem enemies of Artan to win their civil war. I think we need to help these Moslems.
And no, I don't assume that just because Artan used the term "Muslim," that all who spell "Moslem" with that alternate transliteration are hateful jihadis and their supporters.
UPDATE: Sometimes I amaze even myself:
[In one of his classes, Artan] had a group project on "microaggressions" due later this week. The assignment, worth 15 percent of his grade, required students to find a dozen examples of microaggressions on social media and explain which identity groups were the victims, according to the syllabus.You can't say that Artan wasn't actively engaged about a global issue.
The purpose of the class is to promote "intercultural leadership" and transform students into "actively engaged, socially just global citizen/leaders." [emphasis added]
Which is a problem:
Historically outbreaks of Islamic terrorism fail and do so relatively quickly. The problem is that because such violence is encouraged by Islamic scripture, it keeps recurring and will continue to do so until there is a fundamental cultural shift in the Moslem world. Efforts to make that happen in the last thousand years have been few and futile so far. On the plus side there have been some serious efforts, since the 1990s, to achieve such reforms. So far it’s been mostly talk, often sponsored by the Saudis. It’s not much but it is progress.
And this is why I haven't dumped on the Arab Spring of 2011. Yes, it mostly failed in one sense because only Tunisia--where it started--showed good results.
But the fact is that the Arab Spring protesters finally showed that they wanted an alternative to the traditional choices given Moslems in the Arab world--autocracy or Islamism--for government models.
However little the protesters understood the full concept of democracy, which in addition to democratic free voting encompasses rule of law that protects minority rights in order to prevent democracy from merely being the tyranny of the majority, they knew that democracy worked in other societies and that they wanted to try it.
Few Moslems in America are willing to kill. They want to live in our democracy and prosper under rule of law. These American Moslems are a potential resource for reforming the Islamic world.
And sadly, we have to help by killing the jihadis who think like Artan and who contribute to the innocent body count around the world.
Remember this image from the Iraq War?
That Iraqi boy knew that the American soldier facing the threat would protect him.
UPDATE: Will the young people who want something other than autocracy or Islamism be a source of more strife or a source of hope in the Arab Moslem world?
I'm hoping for the latter, but that issue is out of my lane. Past experience would argue for the former, but the status quo always continues--until it doesn't.
And I tend to be an optimist, at heart. Really.
