You remember Kitty Genovese. She was the young woman stabbed to death in Queens in the 1960s as 38 bystanders witnessed the attack but did nothing to help. Kitty Genovese Syndrome entered the national lexicon. The papers quoted one cowardly witness who explained the unwillingness to even pick up the phone to call the police: “I didn’t want to get involved.” For every Good Samaritan willing to intervene, there’s an ostrich who sticks his head in the hand while a victim cries out for help. In St. Paul, citizens and law enforcement officials are horrified by another example of Kitty Genovese Syndrome…this one caught on videotape:
As many as 10 people witnessed a man raping and beating a woman early Tuesday in the hallway of a St. Paul apartment building, police said Wednesday. No one stopped it. At one point, the 26-year-old victim knocked on a door, yelling for the occupants to call police. A man inside told police he didn’t open the door or look out, though he said he called police. Police found no record of the call, according to an affidavit for a search warrant filed in Ramsey County District Court. St. Paul police arrested Rage Ibrahim, 25, on suspicion of criminal sexual conduct Tuesday. He hasn’t been charged.
Yes, his name is “Rage.”
“It was horrifying. I can’t describe how it sent chills up my back, watching this woman getting assaulted and people turning their backs and doing nothing,” said St. Paul police Cmdr. Shari Gray, who oversees the department’s sex crimes unit. She saw surveillance video that recorded the attack in the Highwood neighborhood. As the woman screamed, five to 10 people - men and women - peeked out their apartment doors to see what was happening or started walking down the hallway and retreated after witnessing the assault, Gray said.
They did nothing.
When police arrived, they found Ibrahim and a woman on the floor in a hallway, both naked from the waist down. The woman appeared to have blood on her legs and injuries to her face. Ibrahim told the officers they were just drunk, but the crying woman told them Ibrahim had drugged and raped her. Paramedics took the woman to Regions Hospital in St. Paul for a sexual assault examination and to be treated for her injuries. The surveillance video shows Ibrahim and the woman leaving an apartment, and Ibrahim standing over the woman and removing his pants. A man approached Ibrahim and the woman at one point, the video shows. Ibrahim got up, confronted the man and, with no pants on, chased him down the hallway. Ibrahim then returned to the woman. The video also shows Ibrahim striking the woman five times.
An activist from something called the “Somali Justice Advocacy Center” is speaking out. No, not on behalf of the female victim. He’s defending the male assailant caught on tape assaulting the victim:
Charged with two counts of rape, Rage Ibrahim turned himself in to Ramsey County authorities Thursday afternoon. “Ibrahim is innocent of rape he said,” says Omar Jamal with the Somali Justice Center, speaking on behalf of Ibrahim.
This Omar Jamal character is quite active on the domestic violence scene, playing both sides, and he’s been dubbed the Al Sharpton of the Twin Cities’ Somali community. (Despite being convicted of lying to immigration officials, he has yet to be deported.) Here’s an article from the Star-Tribune from August 17 on domestic violence in the Somali Muslim community and the code of silence that pervades the culture:
The victim wasn’t in the St. Paul courtroom Friday when Afif Abdiaziz Ahmed was sentenced to 17½ years in prison.
Ahmed beat his wife so badly last summer in her St. Paul apartment that she is in a prison of her own: She has permanent brain damage and scars. She will never be able to care for her 17-month-old son because she will never be able to care for herself. Advocates and law enforcement authorities say domestic violence often is a taboo topic in the male-dominated Somali community. Women are strongly discouraged from reporting it, said Omar Jamal of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center. There is a “deep mistrust in the system,” he said. “This case created bad disagreement in the community. Most of the men didn’t like that the women [took the case] this far.”
Liberal naivete and cluelessness rule:
No one appeared in the courtroom gallery on behalf of the victim or the defendant. Jamal said that he’d encouraged the victim’s relatives to come to court but that they fear a backlash from the community. “If we talk about it, maybe there’s hope,” he said. “But nobody even wants to talk about it.” Elders try to discourage women from reporting domestic violence and pressure them to drop cases or not show up in court, he said.
Lucky Farah, a legal advocate with the Domestic Abuse Project in Minneapolis, painted a less grim picture. If a woman is being abused, the elders and family members “stick together to try to solve the problem,” she said. “That’s how it’s always been in Somalia. “They don’t have bad intentions,” she said, but they need more education on the dynamics of domestic violence. Too often, the community thinks of domestic violence “as a normal marriage issue,” she said. “If they were more educated to think of it as a problem, then the whole thing might be different.”
“They don’t have bad intentions?”
Tell that to the 7-year-old Afghan girl raped by two men in Kabul, Afghanistan whose case is spotlighted here. These monstrous attacks are tolerated daily, justified daily, and covered up daily by see-no-evil, hear-no-evil conspirators under sharia law:
Two brothers — identified only as 18-year-old Ismat and 24-year-old Mohammad — allegedly asked their teenage sister to lure the girl to their home in the Jaghuri district of Ghazni province and raped her until she lost consciousness, according to human rights officials and advocates handling the case. The suspects were briefly held by police and then freed. Rights officials suspect they used personal contacts or bribes to secure their release. The girl’s family fled north to the capital, leaving home under cover of darkness. “The district chief went to the uncle and said if they complain any further or go to Kabul, he’s going to personally come and kill them,” said Manizha Naderi, director of the advocacy organization Women for Afghan Women, which is helping the girl’s family. Jaghuri district chief Khada Dad Erfani denied any threat, and claimed tribal elders and relatives of the girl and the brothers intervened, preferring to handle the case through tribal law instead of potentially embarrassing legal proceedings.
…The two suspects’ 15-year-old sister knew the 7-year-old because they grazed sheep together. The sister invited the girl to eat cheese and then left her with Ismat and Mohammad, said Jamila Zafar, a social worker who is counseling the girl and her family. After attacking the child, the brothers left her unconscious near the family home. When she came to, she went home and complained of stomach pains for a few days, Zafar said. The family then took her to the hospital, where doctors examined the girl and determined she had been raped.
The attackers and their apologists don’t need “education.” They need to be damned to hell. This is the little girl rendered mute and still suffering pain from the vicious attack that bystanders wanted to whitewash:
How can you look the other way?
