Is anyone surprised by this?
NY1 is reporting a scary story:
Apparently a New York City cabbie was stabbed Monday night by his passenger -- after confirming that the cabbie was Muslim:
Investigators with the New York City Police Department say it all began Monday night when a 21-year-old man hailed a cab at 24th Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan.
Police say the passenger asked the driver, "Are you Muslim?" When the driver said yes the passenger pulled a knife and slashed him in the throat, arm and lip.
According to NY1, the cabbie managed to lock the passenger in the back seat while he called 911. Then both cabbie and crazy deranged passenger were taken to Bellevue Hospital, a few blocks away. According to NY1 -- and sort of incredibly -- as of late last night, the crazy deranged passenger had not yet been charged. No word on the condition of the cabbie at this point, either. Right now, NY1 appears to be the only source for this story (and their source seems to just be the police).
Damn it all. Listen, lizard brain people: "Muslim" does not mean "terrorist" or "America hater". There have been American Muslims here for a century. Muslims died on 9/11 too. Muslims reached out and helped their community after that tragedy as well, as NYPD, FDNY and volunteers. It was their tragedy too. What you are doing makes you no better than the blind and dogmatic hatred of al Qaeda. Peter Daou:
Maybe if I put it in terms as simple as a Geico commercial, I can emphasize the point: hate breeds violence.[..]
For context, read this:
An abortion provider who had been a frequent target of Fox News’ bloviator Bill O’Reilly was gunned down during a church service in Kansas; a mentally disturbed man who believed the “tea-bagging” movement’s contention that the Obama administration is destroying the American economy — and who reportedly owned a number of firearms — withdrew $85,000 from his bank account, said he was part of a plot to assassinate the president and disappeared (he was later captured in Las Vegas); and this week, a white supremacist who was deeply steeped in far-right conspiracism entered the U.S. Holocaust Museum and opened fire, killing a guard before being shot and wounded by security personnel.
The three incidents share a common feature: All of these men thought they were serving a higher moral purpose, that is, defending their country from an insidious “enemy within” as defined by the far right — a “baby-killer,” the Jews who secretly control the world and a president who’s been accused of being a Manchurian Candidate-style foreign agent bent on nothing less than the destruction of the American Way.
Thankfully, the cabbie has survived this attack so far. But as David Neiwert points out again and again in his documenting of eliminationist acts, it's only a matter of time before there's a fatal assault.
And Gingrich, Palin, Fox News will have blood on their hands for continually feeding the fear of Muslims.
