At ABC News Sophia Tareen reports that a Muslim boy has been killed in a hate crime in Will County, one of Chicago’s “collar counties”:
CHICAGO — A 71-year-old Illinois man was charged Sunday with a hate crime, accused of fatally stabbing a young boy and seriously wounding a woman because of their Islamic faith and the Israel-Hamas war, authorities said.
Officers found the 32-year-old woman and 6-year-old boy late Saturday morning at a home in an unincorporated area of Plainfield Township, southwest of Chicago, the Will County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement on social media.
The statement added that the boy was pronounced dead at a hospital and the woman had multiple stab wounds and was expected to survive. An autopsy on the child showed he had also been stabbed multiple times.
“Detectives were able to determine that both victims in this brutal attack were targeted by the suspect due to them being Muslim and the on-going Middle Eastern conflict involving Hamas and the Israelis,†the sheriff’s statement said.
That’s awful. I can’t think of any justification for such a crime. ABC 7 Chicago adds:
Will County investigators said on Sunday that Wadea and his mother were attacked by their landlord, Joseph M. Czuba. The 71-year-old is now charged with first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder, and two counts of committing a hate crime.
“What we have is a murdered Palestinian child by someone who is radicalized by the environment in which we live right now, that casts Palestinians as human animals,” said Ahmed Rehab, president of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
In announcing the charges, the Will County Sheriff’s Office called the crime “senseless” and “cowardly,” saying, in part, “Detectives were able to determine that both victims in this brutal attack were targeted by the suspect due to them being Muslim and the on-going Middle Eastern conflict involving Hamas and the Israelis.”
The world is truly going mad.
I’m also hearing that Hamas is kidnapping Bedouins in Israel for ransom. The entire situation is turning into a CF.
Its Chicago. You’re supposed to shoot people.
If he had family or friends that were killed in Israel can see him being pretty angry but dont understand why killing the kid would help other than some vicarious revenge.
Anyway, arent we now supposed to make sweeping generalizations based upon this one guy?
Steve
An example of such a generalization is in the opening sentence of your comment:
Chicago’s reality is that almost 90% of the shootings and almost 90% of the killings are perpetrated by young black men on other young black men. The city has been turning a blind eye to the mayhem because
Agree with most fo what you are saying but I have made some of those points before and been told all of Chicago is a hell hole. Nice link looking at the numbers, which does BTW show that homicides in Chicago are much more likely to be with a gun.
https://www.chicagobusiness.com/crains-forum-safer-chicago/chicago-violence-problem-debate-safety-inequality
Question- In philly and a lot of other cities the increases in shootings looked to be independent of gang activity but was due to personal interactions going sour ie social media disagreements, fights over parking spaces, arguments over sports, etc. Was that also a factor in Chicago? Have not been able to find that level of detail. Seems pretty clear this is related to a lot more people carrying and having access to guns.
Not by me. There’s a lot going into that “Chicago is a hell hole” motif, some purely political. Republicans keep pointing out that Chicago hasn’t elected a Republican mayor in 90 years. I keep pointing out that Republicans aren’t running—how do they expect to win elections? In Illinois the Republican Party is a wreck. The only way people get elected to statewide office as Republicans here is by self-financing and running around the party. I don’t know about elsewhere.
WRT to the article you’ve cited, how quickly things change! On the Northwest Side the crime rate is up by nearly 70% in some categories in the year since that article was written. On the North Side broad daylight armed robberies are becoming a commonplace. There are gangs cruising the streets, hopping out of cars, and robbing people at gunpoint.
I think there’s a connecting thread between Joseph Czuba killing his tenants and the phenomenon you inquire about. People are less inhibited about violence than they should be. That’s probably multi-factorial including abandoning of actual flesh and blood social interactions in favor of visual and/or social media as well as others.
As I was just saying to my wife some people do the right thing because it’s the right thing. Some people do the right thing because other people expect it of them. Some people do the right thing because if they didn’t they would be punished. Some people do the right thing because they believe there’s an all-seeing God who will punish them in this world or the next for misdeeds. When all of those are abandoned, what inhibits bad behavior?
I think it’s worse. I suspect that guy thought he was doing the right thing.
Steve
Have you seen the guy’s picture? He’s a walking insanity plea.
Which leads to an interesting lawyer question. lawyers usually try to get their clients to clean up so they look more respectable in front of a jury. In this case do you try to have him look as much like that picture when you plead insanity? If you can recapture that look how could the jury not vote him insane?
Steve