Terror in Anaheim

Originally posted at CultureStrike, a project on immigration, art and activism

Last weekend, news cameras zoomed in on a theater in Aurora, where many moviegoers were shot down, apparently by a gunman trying to act out a crazed fantasy. While the mass killing reignited a nationwide debate on gun control, a different, but similar, tragedy unfolded not too far away in Anaheim, California. The difference was that this time, the cops did the shooting. And while the victims of the violent outbreak were also ordinary community members, unlike the Aurora residents, they had placed themselves in the line of fire by confronting a police force that works above the law.

It started when police shot an unarmed man while chasing him down an alley. The circumstances surrounding the incident remain unclear, but we know the young man’s name: Manuel Angel Diaz, 25, pronounced dead that night at a local hospital.

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Isolated Incidents: A Hijab, a Hoodie, and an Iraqi American’s Death

4:42 pm in Uncategorized by Michelle Chen

Shaima Alawadi, Agnés Torres Hernández, and Trayvon Martin (by Julio Salgado)

Cross-posted from CultureStrike.

As reporters clamored for breaking news about the vicious attack on Shaima Alawadi, an Iraqi American mother of five in El Cajon, California, her teenage daughter Fatima turned to the interviewer with a question of her own:

“‘Why did you take my mother away from me? You took my best friend away from me,’ she said, choking with tears, in an interview with CNN affiliate KUSI. ‘Why? Why did you do it? I want to know. Answer me that.’”

So far, neither the grieving family’s pleas, nor CNN, nor the police have been able to provide any answers. Issuing the standard platitude about the ongoing investigation, the authorities described it as evidently “an isolated incident.” The grim circumstances of Alawadi’s death, however, point to a pattern of hate crime that’s devastatingly familiar to many Muslim and Arab communities.

The 32 year-old Alawadi died of wounds inflicted in a brutal beating in her home, which had, according to her daughter, been preceded by a racial threat. “A week ago they left a letter saying, ‘This is our country, not yours, you terrorists,” she recalled when speaking to the media. “So my mom ignored that, thinking (it was) kids playing around, pranking. And so the day they hurt her, they left it again and it said the same thing.” Read the rest of this entry →

Tags: Arab, California, iraq, Muslim, Shaima Alawadi, Trayvon Martin
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