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Horrific Crimes Demand Action – Action the Left Forbids
Every
time I look at Mohammad Anwar's photo, I cry. I've not read his bio on the web.
I can't find his bio on the web. The Wikipedia page devoted to Anwar is all of
258 words long. Everything I know about him, I see in his photo. Mohammad Anwar looks his age – 66. He
is bald on top with black hair at the sides of his head. He wears heavy,
black-framed glasses. He has a prominent nose and a bushy mustache.
He
is wearing a dignified gray suit, gray shirt, and gray tie. There's just one
restrained accent of color: a scarf around his neck sports one red stripe. He's
probably overdressing for his job – Uber Eats driver. This is a gentleman who
respects himself, and I respect him. This is the kind of guy who doesn't just
hold up a family; he holds up a community.
It's
his eyes that wreck me. In them, I see every immigrant dream. The pride. The
self sacrifice. The dignity. This is a guy who would work long hours at a
miserable job, who would silently swallow every slight, who would bounce up
after every putdown, and do it all so that his kids and grandkids can enjoy a
better life. When I look at a photo of Mohammad Anwar, I see my father. I see
my mother's immigrant dreams. And I cry.
Anwar
was a Muslim immigrant from Pakistan. I'm a critic of jihad and gender
apartheid. I'm also a resident of a county with a high Muslim population. I
have written as many stellar letters of recommendation for Muslim students as I
have written articles critical of jihad and gender apartheid. In letter after
letter, I have written, "You can rely on her." "He stands out
from the rest of the class." "She was never late or absent." "He
asked for extra work."
In
my city, I have witnessed, over the course of a lifetime, Muslim immigrants make
every sacrifice, work every job, put their kids into low-status, sometimes even
dangerous schools, schools that were the only ones they could access, given
their address and income. These parents make sure that their youngsters steer
clear of any ugliness or danger around them and keep their eyes on the prize.
Their children graduate with degrees that earn them solid employment. I've
watched people come to the US with nothing and parent children who become
pharmacists, computer technicians, real estate entrepreneurs, who can buy nice
houses in good neighborhoods and send their own kids to Ivy League schools.
I've
watched South Paterson transform. Less garbage on the street. Astounding,
multi-story, shiny structures arise amidst Paterson's decay. Former Passaic
County Sheriff Jerry Speziale told a reporter, "South
Paterson's low crime rate is directly connected with the business acumen of its
restaurant owners and grocers. For as long as I've been in law enforcement in
this area, it's always been a group that's been very willing to work with us.
They care about the businesses and have always worked hard to make sure the
area thrives."
Capitalism
does that to people. Business demands a safe neighborhood. People will not shop
where they might be shot. Paterson's Mayor Andre Sayegh, himself a Christian
Arab, said, "We're proud of our multiculturalism in Paterson. We're trying
to monetize it. We want to leverage the culinary culture that exists here and
become even more of a destination for foodies." Sayegh, a reporter noted,
greets diners with the words, "God bless you, and America."
A
recent arrival from Egypt told a reporter, "Here, with any goal, with any
dream, I feel I have a chance, and I can pursue my ambitions."
South
Paterson's revival is all the more remarkable given how different South
Paterson is from many neighborhoods in the rest of the city. Along Broadway,
aka Martin Luther King Way, I have seen few new businesses succeed, and I've
watched many fail. The city plants trees – lindens and sycamores – and these plantings
are rapidly vandalized and must be chopped down. One wonders: what would
inspire residents to vandalize trees on their own streets? Healthy young men hang
out, smoking marijuana, on sidewalks littered with discarded televisions,
bedding, and hypodermic needles. Older men, intoxicated in the middle of the
day, recline in their own bodily waste. Rosa Parks Boulevard, where 42-year-old
James Timmons, 15-year-old Armoni Sexton, 12-year-old Genesis Rincon, and 16-year-old Ragee Clark were all shot dead in separate
incidents, is just two miles from South Paterson. That South Paterson is safer
than the rest of Paterson is a remarkable phenomenon, worthy of study by anyone
concerned with the high death-by-shooting rate among African Americans.
That's
why I cry over Mohammad Anwar. Though Anwar lived in Virginia, not New Jersey,
in him I see a wide-eyed immigrant, like my parents; in him I see a hardworking
Muslim immigrant, like my students and my neighbors.
And
there's another reason I cry. I watched Mohammad Anwar die. I can't link the
Twitter video; Twitter removed it. As I write this, the
video is viewable here. In the closing
moments of the video, a cloud of white fog cloaks an object on the far left of
the image. That obscured object is Mohammad Anwar's dying body. After killing
him, his killer screeches "My phone is in that car." The car is Anwar's
car. On March 23, 2021, Two girls, 13 and 15 years old, wielding a stun gun,
stole Anwar's car and drove it a short distance before crashing it. The killer
screeching, "My phone! My phone is in there! My phone!" is walking
two feet from the body of the man she just killed.
Should
you watch this video? You should. And you should cry.
Anwar
was sacrificed in broad daylight, in an inhabited area, in the capital of your
country and mine – Washington DC. His killing was not isolated. Shortly
afterward, a 13-year-old and a 14-year-old, wielding a knife,
committed another carjacking. Two 13-year-olds, using a gun,
committed two more.
DC
Mayor Muriel Bowser tweeted that "auto theft is a crime of
opportunity." After Twitter users protested, she later deleted her
tone-deaf, victim-blaming tweet. Anwar was killed three miles from the White
House. Joe Biden has been celebrated as a deeply compassionate president. Jen
Psaki, his press secretary, when invited to address Anwar's death and the wider
threat of increasing violent crime in Washington, offered a robotic
banality.
"The president has asked senior levels of his team to be engaged in a
broad swath of leaders from the AAPI [Asian American and Pacific Islander]
community across the country." Much less eloquent than the eulogy Biden provided at George Floyd's
funeral.
Reports
are that Anwar's girl killers received a deal guaranteeing that they will never serve a day
behind bars, and they will be freed of any legal obligations when they reach
21. Compare this to the fate of two white 12-year-old girls who attempted, but
failed, to stab another girl to death in 2014. They received sentences of 25
and 65 years.
Here's
one last reason I cry. I wouldn't have heard about Mohammad Anwar's death if I
didn't listen to right-wing talk radio.
On
March 29, six days after Anwar died, I turned on the radio. A talk show host made
a brief reference to a horrific carjacking in Washington, DC. My first thought
was, "Huh?" I skim headlines at the New York Times, the Washington
Post, and Google News several times a day. I tune to National Public Radio
at least ten times a day. I had heard nothing about a "horrific
carjacking." I felt disoriented. If there was a horrific carjacking,
surely I would have heard of it.
Instantaneously,
this flashed through my mind: "I have not heard of this carjacking because
the identity of the perpetrators is taboo knowledge." That thought chilled
me, and I realized that I had taken one step toward living in the society
described by George Orwell. I once lived in the Soviet Empire and I remember
trying to decode what was really going on from the state news sources. I now
had to apply that skill to a country where the First Amendment guarantees
freedom of the press.
I
performed a Google search and found no mention of
Anwar in the Times. Another search turned up no coverage
at National Public Radio, even though its headquarters are in Washington, DC.
The Washington Post did run a couple of articles.
Contrast
this with the wall-to-wall coverage that National Public Radio offers crimes committed
by white assailants against non-white victims. The death of George Floyd and
the trial of Derek Chauvin has been the most frequent lead story on NPR for
months now. NPR has devoted thousands of stories to Chauvin, as has the
New York Times and the Washington Post. "Yes,"
leftists will say. "Since Chauvin was a police officer, this saturation
coverage is warranted." That assertion is simply not true. Compare the
minimal coverage when a black police officer, for example, Mohammed Noor, shoots an innocent white woman,
Justine Ruszczyk, or the minimal coverage of a 2020 shooting of a white man by a black officer in Chicago,
"But,
wait," you may be thinking. "The left likes Muslims. They will mourn
Mohammad Anwar." You're wrong. The left doesn't like Muslims. The left
doesn't like anybody. In place of God, the left worships its narrative; in
place of humanity, the left sacralizes hate honed to destroy. Human beings and objective
facts are equally immaterial. Anything that can be twisted to serve the
narrative is favored. Anything that violates the narrative is sacrificed. The
left once favored working class whites; the left once favored Jews. Both have
been abandoned because their utility to the revolution is past. Leftists
favored African Americans, but when Juan Williams said the presence of Muslims
on airplanes makes him nervous, the left dropped Williams. The left more
recently shafted African American Teen Vogue editor Alexi McCammond. Leftists
abandon Muslims as easily as any other identity group they temporarily
champion. Always, always, it is service to the narrative that matters, not
compassion, not justice, not human life.
The
narrative? America is a white supremacist wasteland that destroys "black bodies" as Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it. All
white Americans are racists forever and ever amen, argues Robin DiAngelo. Americans
are all white supremacists who merely "pretend" to mourn Anwar in
order to hurt black people, insists New York Times columnist Wajahat Ali. We need a Marxist revolution to bring
on Utopia. Any death that does not serve that narrative must be tossed down the
memory hole. In place of whatever it is in a human being that transcends, that
feels for a stranger, that is capable of compassion, leftists have only reptilian
strategizing. Every tear they shed for George Floyd is a bullet in their
arsenal. They will cry over fake hate crime victims like Jussie Smollett, Althea Bernstein, and Nathan Phillips. An honorable man like
Mohammad Anwar is a pebble in the shoe that must be shaken out and discarded. Black
suffering that does not serve the leftist narrative must also be ignored and
erased. Witness the minimal coverage offered the killing of heroic black Officer David Dorn. This is true even for
Wajahat Ali, hired as a Muslim voice on the New York Times' editorial
page. Ali would rather smear America and Americans than mourn a tragically
killed Muslim immigrant.
I
donated to the Anwar family's GoFundMe. I thought that that donation would help me to
forget, but his eyes haunted me. I wanted to know if anyone else was feeling
the grief I was. I went to Twitter. And, there, I discovered something
horrific. Twitter users drew a parallel between Anwar's death and the death of
another immigrant in my home state of New Jersey.
Mehmood
Ansari, just like Anwar, was a 66-year-old immigrant from Pakistan. "The
66-year-old father worked hard, morning and night, and was 'always smiling,'
says his son Asif Ansari." "He worked every single day, open and
close," reported the son. Ansari viewed America as "the land of opportunity."
On April 1, 2021, reports NJ.com, "Mehmood collapsed and died shortly
after being robbed by a knife-wielding 12-year-old boy during a confrontation
with multiple juveniles who were rampaging through the store … his son said he
believes Ansari died from the shock of the incident." A 14-year-old girl was also involved in
the crime. "He was killed by hatred, by the lack of the protection from
the local city," said Habib Rehman.
The
few news sources that covered Ansari's death do not identify the suspects by
race, but a YouTube video shows African American
children screaming obscenities and attempting to resist arrest. Comments
further suggest that Atlantic City merchants have been plagued by shoplifting,
harassment, and other crimes for some time, with no response from local
government. "All Lives Matters," (sic) reads one sign at a small protest Pakistani merchants staged
after Ansari's death.
A
Google search reveals that Ansari's shocking death
has received scant news coverage. The only reason I know of this death in my
own state is that I'd gone to Twitter to check on tweets about Mohammad Anwar.
And
then I was horrified again. On April 6, I was absent-mindedly scrolling through
Facebook when I read that on March 31, 2021, a Hasidic family, visiting from
Belgium, were slashed, in broad daylight, on camera, in Manhattan's Battery
Park. A man stabbed the husband, wife, and their 13-month-old baby. The victims
were treated for their wounds and released. I listen to National Public Radio
affiliate WNYC every day, throughout the day. I heard nothing of this attack,
and Google shows no WNYC coverage. Google searches found
no coverage in the New York Times. A Facebook friend who lives in Israel
had heard of the attack before I did.
Facebook
friends informed me of other crimes. In January, 19-year-old Antoine Watson, on
camera,
killed 84-year-old Thai grandfather Vicha Ratanapakdee. In March, 38-year-old
Brandon Elliot violently assaulted 65-year-old Filipina immigrant Vilma
Kari,
as she walked to church in Manhattan. Doormen observed the assault but rather
than attempting to intervene, they closed the door on her. They did, later,
summon police. Kari's GoFundMe is here.
Also
in March, an Asian man was beaten and choked until he was unconscious on New
York's J-train. Those few American news sources that reported this story cut
off the video because of its disturbing content. China's People's Daily has no
such compunctions. They posted the video on Twitter, here.
American
media and academia insist that white people are uniquely violent and dangerous.
White people's speech, alone, does harm. After news broke that BLM co-founder
Patrisse Cullors had purchased several homes worth millions of dollars, BLM tweeted that any criticism of these purchases
constitutes white supremacist terrorism against black people. Teachers and government
and corporate employees are required to sign on to this set of beliefs or are
threatened with loss of their jobs. See Jodi Shaw, Aaron
Kindsvatter,
Paul Rossi, Bari Weiss, Coca-Cola
telling workers to "be less white," and the Smithsonian
Institution's lessons on whiteness.
That
all whites are responsible for any crime a white person commits against a
non-white person was expressed clearly on National Public Radio on April 13.
"I don't have anything to prove, but you do as white people" said activist Demetria Hester. "You failed
because he [a black person] is dead."
When
whites commit violent crimes against non-whites, the story becomes
international news for years at a time, and assailant and victim names become part
of daily vocabulary: witness 57 million Google results for "George Floyd."
Some
crimes are unquestionably inspired by white supremacy. The Neo-Nazi ideology
that inspired the killer who carried out the June 17, 2015 Charleston
church shooting certainly deserved and received attention, and anything in
American culture that fed into similar killers' twisted minds must be rooted
out and rejected.
When
African Americans, including children, commit shocking, violent crimes against
the elderly, against women, against Jews, against harmless working class
immigrants, these stories are not given the same coverage. In something so
simple as vocabulary choice, these stories are suppressed.
Michelle Malkin, herself a person of
color, cites statistics suggesting that Anwar's death was no outlier. "Federal
Bureau of Justice statistics data show that of nearly 600,000 violent
interracial victimizations involving Blacks and Whites, Black suspects
committed 537,204 interracial felonies (not including homicides), or 90%, and
Whites committed 56,394 of them, or less than 10% … Black perpetrators are also
overrepresented among all perpetrators of hate crimes — by 50% — according to
the most recent Justice Department data from 2017. Whites are underrepresented
by 24%." Malkin further argues that rather than take on the issue of hate
crimes committed by African Americans, district attorneys go soft on African
American assailants.
We
all know that if any of the above-described assaults had been committed by
whites, the media would report the story, not just more widely and deeply, but
choosing entirely different words. "A man assaulted a woman in
Manhattan" would become "A white man assaulted an Asian woman in
Manhattan." The assailant's identity as white would be emphasized.
Here's
another thing we are not saying about these crimes, but that we must regain the
ability to say. These crimes are not normal. It is not normal for a 12-year-old
boy to cause the death of a community elder. It is not normal for a 13-year-old
girl to pull a weapon on a man, kill him, and then care only about retrieval of
her cell phone. It is not normal for a big, beefy, adult man to kick a much
older woman to the ground and continue to assault her. It is not normal for
anyone to stab a baby. We must be shocked by these crimes. There is something very
wrong here. We must fix it.
After
the Charleston church shooting, media probed the killer's ideology and
upbringing. This is as it should be. After the above-listed crimes, there is no
comparable analysis. In fact, comparable analysis is demonized. One must not
talk about any aspect of contemporary African American culture that might
contribute to criminality. In this, the media betrays African Americans
themselves. As hard as it is for us to comprehend, the assailants in the
above-described crimes are themselves victims. Mentioning their status as
victims in no way diminishes their culpability, or the gravity of the wrongs
they have committed. Yes, the assailants are victimizers. But they are also
victims. It is impossible to watch the videos linked above and not see
assailants who have been failed by everyone around them.
You,
me, and everyone else is like these assailants in this: we all have violent
impulses. Normal people have been socialized to resist our inner demons. What
of these assailants? Where are their parents? Where are their churches? Where
are their schools? Where are their teachers? One possible reply: they have all
been so cowed by the fear of being called "racist" that they declined
to say to these assailants at key points in their lives, "What you are
doing is wrong. You are hurting others. You can't do that. You must choose
another path. I will show you the right way. If you do not follow, you will continue
to go wrong, and you will be rejected by society."
Another
possible answer: at every step in the assailants' lives, someone decided that
they would be held to a lesser standard. You punched the kid next to you in
class? Okay, no punishment. You shoplifted? Not a big deal. We won't address
that. You vandalized public property? It's just a property crime. We'll let it
slide. "It takes a village to raise a child." It takes a nation to
fail children because holding them to standards might be deemed
"racist."
Why
aren't the New York Times or NPR or The Washington Post asking these
questions? Media are not just failing America at large. They are failing
African Americans specifically. African Americans are disproportionately represented as both the
perpetrators and the victims of violent crimes. African Americans
must fear being mugged, assaulted, raped, and killed in a way that white people
don't have to fear being victimized.
White
children commit horrific crimes, too: The Slenderman Stabbers, the Sandy Hook
and Columbine Shooters. When white kids do bad things, we put them under a
magnifying glass. Media is flooded with front page stories of analysis by
psychologists, sociologists, and clergy. We ask if the root cause of the kid's
crime was violent video games or Asperger's syndrome, bullying or
pharmaceuticals, social media or Satan himself. I read so much about the Sandy
Hook shooter that I know that he habitually removed clothing tags because he
couldn't handle their touch. That shooter's father, Peter Lanza, actually met
with parents of Sandy Hook victims. He also said he wished his son had never been born.
Susan Klebold, mother of a Columbine shooter, wrote a gut-wrenching memoir
putting herself under analysis. What did she do wrong to raise such a son? She said, "There is a piece of me that I will
never forgive not being the mother that Dylan needed me to be." She
donated all proceeds from her book to mental health and suicide prevention.
We
need to ask similar questions about violent crimes committed by African
Americans. One possible focus: the impact of father absence. We know that
African Americans have high single-parent family rates and high poverty rates.
See a recent chart from The American
Enterprise Institute's Mark J. Perry. Thomas Sowell argues that poverty among married
African Americans is much lower than the poverty rate of African Americans in
single-parent households. "The poverty rate among black married couples
has been in single digits in every year since 1994." Statistics suggest
that single parenthood hurts blacks economically and marriage helps. Does
single parenthood affect crime?
Walter
Mischel's Stanford Marshmallow Experiment suggests that children who grow up
without the presence of their biological father in the home are less able to
delay gratification. Research
suggests
that an inability to delay gratification is correlated with criminal activity. Other
research suggests that children growing up in father-absent homes are less likely to master impulse control. A lack of impulse
control is widely associated with criminality. Father absence in general is
associated with criminality. "The more opportunities a child has to
interact with his or her biological father, the less likely he or she is to
commit a crime or have contact with the juvenile justice system," reported
one study.
Another
possible focus for inquiry: societal attitudes towards anti-social behavior. Black
conservatives like Shelby Steele, Jason Riley, Jason D. Hill, Larry Elder,
Candace Owens, Thomas Sowell, Walter E. Williams, John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, and
many others have said clearly that holding blacks to a lesser standard has
hurt, not helped, blacks.
Rather
than providing media coverage of black conservatives, rather than assigning
them on syllabi and in "race training" professional workshops, leftists
demonize black conservatives. University of Vermont Professor Aaron
Kindsvatter
resisted leftist race training on his campus. As was required by his school, he
did teach his students the work of leftist Ibram X Kendi. He also taught his students the work
of black conservatives Shelby Steele, Coleman Hughes, and John McWhorter. His
university's response was a turning point for Kindsvatter. Teaching Steele,
Hughes, and McWhorter, he
learned,
was "inconsistent with the program, department, and university
values." Even discussing these black conservatives' work was a
"harmful practice … inconsistent with university policy of diversity,
equity, and inclusion." "I was slowly being boxed into a corner. I
came out and said, 'I'm not going to pretend any more.'"
Similarly,
Paul Rossi, a teacher at Grace Church High School
in Manhattan, in the face of an onslaught of aggressive Critical Race Theory
indoctrination, attempted to assign the work of black conservative Glenn Loury. Rossi writes, "Juniors and seniors in my Art of
Persuasion class … sought to engage with a wider range of political viewpoints
… I thought of assigning Glenn Loury … my administration put the kibosh on my
proposal." The school's administration is majority
white.
Leftist
silencing of non-conforming blacks is as pervasive on social media as it is in
institutions. Terence K. Williams, an African American "actor, comedian,
and commentator," had the audacity to express outrage at the killing of
Mohammad Anwar. Williams has, of course, been denounced as the ultimate Uncle Tom. One tweet calls
Williams a "boy" and a dancing coon.
Jason
Whitlock, an African American sportscaster, was blocked from using Twitter after he posted a
factual, restrained tweet mentioning that BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors, a
self-described "trained
Marxist,"
had purchased several homes worth millions of dollars, one in a neighborhood
that is one percent black.
In
2020, Candace Owens tweeted a video addressing the
response to George Floyd's death. Owens made clear that she condemned Floyd's
death and that she believed that Derek Chauvin should be in jail. She also
said, though, that black people do not benefit by turning criminals into
heroes. She asked how Aracely Henriquez, who alleged that Floyd assaulted her,
would feel knowing that Joe Biden would attend Floyd's funeral. Owens was criticized by celebrities like
Meghan Markle, Piers Morgan, and Dave Chappelle.
In
2020 Shelby Steele and his son Eli Steele released "What Killed Michael Brown." This
documentary that interrogates the narrative that Michael Brown was killed by
white supremacy. Amazon rejected the documentary from its streaming services,
but relented under pressure.
An
African American woman who calls herself "Honestly Speaking" released
a
brief, searing YouTube video on December 2, 2014. She criticized the
response to the August, 2014, shooting of Michael Brown by police officer
Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. "Mike Brown started the trail that
lead to his death. Just because he's black does not change that he committed a
crime and the cops were called … We know d--- well that if Mike Brown were in
our hood Mike Brown would have f---ed one of y'all N------ up. And y'all woulda
went and shot him. So spare me your f---ing bleeding heart bulls---!" For
this, she was denounced as an "Uncle Tom."
Yes,
there are many African Americans who are not parroting leftist narratives.
These African Americans are attacked, insulted, denounced. They are not on
primetime news shows. They are not on school syllabi. Much of the time, those
silencing and erasing them are leftist whites.
I
donated to Mohammad Anwar's GoFundMe at least partly for selfish reasons. I
wanted to exorcise grief. I'm writing this essay for his killers. I see my
immigrant people in Anwar's eyes. I see myself in his killers. I was a
13-year-old girl once. I went to Catholic school and all the stories you've
heard are true. When we stepped out of line, the nuns did beat us with rulers.
I had immigrant, Slavic parents who never hugged me, never complimented me, and
were free with the belt and the fist. They told me that the world owed me
nothing. They taught me to work for what I wanted, to respect my elders, to say
"excuse me," "please," and "thank you." My mother
cleaned houses for the rich and my father carried their bags. They communicated
to me no envy for what the rich have that was unattainable to us. My mother
drilled into me that we made our lives matter with our dignity, decency, and
hard work. It never entered my mind that because we were poor we couldn't be
good people. I am grateful I had those hard parents and not the parents of the
two girls who killed Mohammad Anwar.
My
religion teaches me that all human lives are redeemable but redemption requires
confession, repentance, and reparation. There is no force in powerful media,
academia, the courts or most churches to call for Mohammad Anwar's killers to
repent. It wasn't conservative America who betrayed those girls. It wasn't
conservative America who fashioned those children into killers. It was the
left. The left, that "puts the kibosh" on inconvenient truth. The
left, that divides us, exploits us, and pits us against each other for its own
gain. The left, that has no natural feeling and is incapable of grief at the
horrific waste of human life inscribed in the above-listed crimes. The left,
that has rejected a God that loves both Anwar and those two girls, but hates sin. The left, that dehumanizes African
Americans by applying to blacks, and only to blacks, a lesser standard, in the
assumption that black people can't manage to be quite as human as other races. The
voices, the truths, the lessons, and the tough love that can save the children
growing up now in neighborhoods where trees are vandalized and youth abdicate
their manhood in exchange for drugs and hanging out – those salvific
truths are not coming from the left. Those truths are coming from black
conservatives.
Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
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