The Passport photo of 46-year-old Sunando Sen, pushed to his death because a woman thought he was Muslim (Photo: Christie M. Farriella for New York Daily News)
The Passport photo of 46-year-old Sunando Sen, pushed to his death because a woman thought he was Muslim (Photo: Christie M. Farriella for New York Daily News)A horrific crime if we’ve ever seen one–and a reminder that Islamophobia affects many communities outside Muslim ones.
From the AP:
A woman who told police she shoved a man to his death off a subway platform into the path of a train because she hates Muslims and thought he was one was charged Saturday with murder as a hate crime, prosecutors said.
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“I pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers I’ve been beating them up,” Menendez told police, according to the district attorney’s office.
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Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Friday urged residents to keep Sen’s death in perspective as he touted new historic lows in the city’s annual homicide and shooting totals.
“It’s a very tragic case, but what we want to focus on today is the overall safety in New York,” Bloomberg told reporters following a police academy graduation.
What kind of perspective is Bloomberg referencing? If someone said “I shoved a Jew in front of a train because I hate Jews,” would Bloomberg be touting drops in the city’s annual homicide and shooting totals? Quite an insensitive comment, at the very least.
After this news broke, Twitter was aflutter with people pointing to Pamela Geller as one culprit pushing anti-Muslim sentiment in the city. Geller’s organization, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, recently put up a new crop of ads that features the World Trade Center burning with a Qu’ran verse printed to the right of the towers.
Geller’s role in promoting anti-Muslim sentiment of the sort that leads to Islamophobic hate crimes should not be in dispute. But what should also be highlighted is how New York City’s own police force has promoted anti-Muslim bigotry time and time again, from surveillance of Muslims that places the whole community under suspicion to training officers with an Islamophobic flick.
Friend of Mondoweiss Lizzy Ratner made this point in her excellent piece on Geller in The Nation:
Though Geller and her crew are fringe elements, they are not random or spontaneous, idiopathic lesions on the healthier whole. They are, quite sadly, part of this country, outcroppings of something big and ugly that has been seeping and creeping through the body politic for years. In the decade since September 11, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry has become an entrenched feature of our political and social landscape. It lurks in the hidden corners of everyday life—in classrooms and offices and housing complexes—as well as in the ugly scenes that occasionally explode into public consciousness. In the special registration of Middle Eastern men after 9/11. In the vicious campaign against Debbie Almontaser, the American Muslim school teacher who tried to open the Arabic-language Khalil Gibran International Academy (KGIA) and was tarred as an extremist. In the attack on the Park51 Islamic center, more commonly (if less accurately) known as the Ground Zero mosque. In the New York Police Department’s selective surveillance of Muslim communities. And that’s just New York City. All of these instances should have called on our horror and outrage, and in all too many of them, society hasn’t lived up.
This crime appears to be the latest manifestation of New York City’s Islamophobia. This time, it cost a life.
ar and ak….
do you see one US congressperson going after gellar or spencer …
or any of these people..not chance in ………..
I dont have to be a theatrical physicist to see what the heck has been going on ..regarding the zionists….in the USA for the last 100 years…
I am willing to bet it all that not one US MSM..will make much of this….
let me jump here though
http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/jewish-projection-for-christmas.html
One day before Christmas, the Israeli embassy in Ireland posted a message on its Facebook page that said that if Jesus and Mary were alive today in Bethlehem, they would probably be lynched by local Arabs.
RE: “Though Geller and her crew are fringe elements, they are not random or spontaneous, idiopathic lesions on the healthier whole. They are, quite sadly, part of this country, outcroppings of something big and ugly that has been seeping and creeping through the body politic for years.” ~ the phenomenal Lizzy Ratner
MY COMMENT: And now the Zionists are trying to deify Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the constantly bloviating, über-pompous ass of yore who once advocated a policy of “benign neglect” for America’s (black) urban areas!
SEE: “Hagel Is The Wrong Choice”, by Gil Troy, The Daily Beast, 12/14/12
SOURCE – http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/12/14/hagel-is-the-wrong-choice.html
P.S. Gil Troy – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Troy
Bloomberg’s response to the murder of Sunando Sen reminds me of the responses Israeli police often give to the murder of Palestinian citizens of Israel at the hands of Jews.
When it’s the other way around, the public is told that it was an attack of nationalist nature — another Israeli euphemism for “terrorism”. When a Jew attacks a non-Jew and the motive is clearly hate, then the case is brushed under the rug.
Case in point, during Israel’s latest Pillar of Cloud attack on Gaza, a Jewish man on a Vespa in Jerusalem (If memory serves) was harassing two women in a vehicle traveling in an adjacent lane.
One of the women was wearing a hijab, so the man on the Vespa knew that she was Moslem. At the next red light, he got off the Vespa and assaulted both females.
When they complained at the police station, the police brushed it off and said something along the lines of, ‘Well, that’s most likely in response to the rocket attacks on Sderot’.
But Bloomberg’s response is not surprising given the ongoing, constitutionally illegal and discriminatory spying on Moslems well outside the confines of New York City limits.
Bloomberg’s handling of this case also opens the door as the proverbial slippery-slope to dehumanizing Moslems to the point that vigilante justice against Moslems becomes the norm. And then, US law enforcement agencies will pay lip service to the rule of law, but actually do little to nothing to put the lid back on that Pandora’s box.
In reading the comments to various news articles about this case, I am reminded of what is wrong with the way both the media and the government have been treating Moslems since the early days when the Israel Lobby made it its core objective to vilify Moslems (Say circa 1967).
The victim’s family should sue the MTA for allowing hate mongering ads. Even if it’s dismissed for failure to establish direct relation, the publicity generated will make it worthwhile.
New York’s Sikhs got the connection between the anti-Muslim fervor and the attack by a racist gunman on a Sikh temple near Milwaukee. Our print and broadcast do their anti-Muslim work with the 24/7 portrayal of Palestinians as evil incarnate. That does not exclude the holier-than-thou New York Times.