“Already, hateful posts criticizing Islam and sharia law are filling social media in response to the police shooting.”
That there needs to be a public discussion about Islam and Sharia law doesn’t enter into the Post’s mind. As I said yesterday, “We don’t have any indication at this point of why Mohamed Noor killed Justine Damond. There is no evidence now that he is a jihadi or that this was a jihad attack. But with three complaints against him in two years, he seems at very least to be dangerously reckless and/or incompetent. His presence on the force appears to be a manifestation of the general anxiety to avoid charges of ‘Islamophobia’: Minneapolis officials were so anxious to have a Somali Muslim police officer that they put Mohamed Noor on the force and kept him there when his obvious shortcomings would have had a non-Muslim officer fired or not hired in the first place.”
Now the Post is reinforcing the idea that Muslims are victims who must be accorded special solicitude by publishing yet another story about how Muslims, after an atrocity committed by a Muslim, are fearing “backlash” from non-Muslims that seldom, if ever, actually materializes. Articles like this one only reinforce the fiction that Muslims in the U.S. are facing widespread persecution. That perception leads to phenomena such as the hiring of Mohamed Noor by the police, and his remaining on the force despite his manifest incompetence. And so now Justine Damond is dead, but instead of realizing what it is perpetrating and changing course, the Post just starts the cycle all over again.
“After Minneapolis officer in police shooting is named, Somali community braces for backlash,” by Katie Mettler, Washington Post, July 18, 2017 (thanks to Lookmann):
When Mohamed Noor joined the Minneapolis police force and was assigned to patrol the city’s southwest corner, the Somali community there — the nation’s largest — threw a party for him to celebrate.
He was the first Somali American officer to serve in Minneapolis’s fifth precinct and one of fewer than a dozen Somali American officers in the department. His presence on the squad brought Somali activists some pride and reassurance at a time of Islamophobia in America and nationwide racial tension stoked in part by shootings of black people by white police officers.
Now that same Somali community is bracing for a backlash against Noor that has already begun.
On Monday, multiple media outlets named Noor as the officer who fatally shot an unarmed Australian woman in the city’s popular Fulton neighborhood over the weekend, an incident that has grabbed global attention and thrust Minneapolis into yet another uproar over police violence….
The report stoked fear among Somalis in the Twin Cities, who have worked for decades to become part of the city’s fabric. There are now Somalis on the police force, the city council and in the Minnesota House of Representatives. But the largely Muslim population of Somali Americans in the region still face Islamophobia and innuendo about terrorism.
“They fear this will be just another event used to create animosity toward the Somali community,” Mohamud Noor, executive director at the Confederation of Somali Community in Minnesota, told The Post.
Already, hateful posts criticizing Islam and sharia law are filling social media in response to the police shooting. Several far-right blogs featured sensational headlines that blamed the officer’s ethnicity for the deadly use of force.
Other Somali officers in the police department are “nervous,” Jamal said.
“They’re not talking at all,” he said. “You can feel the pressure, because you know, the difference now is ‘one of you guys did it.’ ”
“The fact that the police involved in the shooting is Somali makes it a different matter,” he said.
Mohamud Noor, who is not related to the officer, is also a city council candidate. He and others in the Somali community have protested other police shootings in the region along with Black Lives Matter, but this one “changes the narrative,” he said. Usually, they are protesting the death of black men at the hands of police, he said. Now it is a white woman reportedly shot by a black officer.
He hopes the conversation will focus on police reform, not racial stereotypes.
“This is the time to bring people together,” he said. “We have so many questions. What happened? Why were the body cameras off?”…
After Noor’s welcome party to the fifth precinct last year, Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges posted a note on Facebook saying his arrival had been “highly celebrated, particularly by the Somali community” and was “a wonderful sign of building trust and community policing at work.”