Days go by but history repeats itself

College student stabs 11 and pledges allegiance to ISIS
​On the 28th of November 2016, an American college student with Somali heritage attacked  Ohio State University, injuring 11 people by intentionally hitting them with his car on a pavement and then attacking them with a butcher’s knife. The aggressor was then killed by a police officer within a minute of his attempted killing spree having begun. Despite Abdal Razak Ali Artan having openly declared his support of Islamic State on Facebook, the minister of Interior security Jeh Johnson has declared that no communication between the two had taken place prior to the attack and no link whatsoever between the two parties existed. The Islamic State has declared their responsibility for the act anyway.

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Abdal reportedly felt that Muslims were being more and more persecuted within American society, especially since Mr. Trump’s presidency success, an FBI spokesperson has said. His fears were evident since last summer when he declared on the school newspaper that he was afraid to pray in public. Since then he felt that people’s perception of the religion had grown increasingly injurious. He had told the newspaper “I was kind of scared with everything going on in the media. I’m a Muslim, it’s not what media portrays me to be. People look at me, a Muslim praying, I don’t know what they’re going to think, what’s going to happen. But I don’t blame them. It’s the media that put that picture in their heads.”

At 9:50, “This car suddenly appeared on the sidewalk,” according to Angshuman Kapil, a fellow student and eyewitness, who also added “It was in high speed, and it just hit whoever came in front of him.”. Six people were hit. The car was luckily stopped when it hit a concrete block. This was when the driver came out of his vehicle and started attacking passengers with a knife. Five people were stabbed or lacerated.

The sequence of events involving the car is reminiscent of the recent terrorist attack in Nice, leading observers to conclude that the attack was, at least in part, inspired by Islamic State activity; this is far from saying that they played a role in its enactment however. Soon more preventive measures will be put in place, especially in schools and universities (which seem to be common targets of attacks), to help prevent such heinous and deplorable acts from recurring. Trump’s anti-muslim rhetoric, already propagating throughout the country, could further allow extremists to justify crimes against the country, with Americans as “the bad guys”.

Katharina Wiesner S7Fra (EEB1)

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