Posted on 10/04/2001 9:31:09 AM PDT by Samir
Merchant's death may be backlash
YEMENIS ANXIOUS IN WAKE OF KILLING
BY KAREN DE SÁ
Mercury News
REEDLEY -- Homicide investigators, FBI agents and a Middle Eastern diplomat converged Monday on a tiny San Joaquin Valley convenience store where a Yemeni shop owner was gunned down in what police are calling a possible backlash killing in the wake of last month's terrorist attacks.
Abdo Ali Ahmed received a death threat last week because of his heritage, and on Saturday he staggered from his store about 4 p.m. into an adjoining tavern with a severe gunshot wound to his midsection. A car full of teenagers sped away moments before Ahmed fell to the bar's wooden floor, just paces from the house where he lived with his wife and six children.
The Fresno County sheriff and the FBI are investigating the case as a possible hate crime, one of more than 100 reported to the FBI since the Sept. 11 terrorists attacks in New York and Washington.
Police say witnesses were outside the East Reedley convenience store at the time, but nobody saw the shooting or could say whether Ahmed's killers uttered racial slurs.
Two youths entered the store and fired more than one shot at the 51-year-old shopkeeper, who was apparently behind the counter. The youths then ran to a car where two others waited. No money was stolen from the store, and nothing was disrupted, Fresno County sheriff's Lt. Greg Burton said. Ahmed's relatives say a safe and a bag of cash were left untouched beneath the cash register.
A note on the windshield
A few days before the shooting, Ahmed and his wife, Fatima, found a death threat on the windshield of their car while they were parked at the local Save Mart grocery store.
The note included anti-Arab statements, sheriff's Sgt. Toby Rien said, and Ahmed threw it away.
Ahmed also had told friends and family that he had received taunts and threats at his store and from customers at the neighboring bar since the terrorist attacks. His advice to family and friends was to brush it off.
``I am an American citizen,'' Ahmed would say, according to family members, when someone taunted him or asked if he were related to Osama bin Laden -- the Saudi exile militant and chief suspect in last month's attacks. Bin Laden also has been linked to last October's bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen that killed 17 U.S. servicemen.
Ahmed told his nephew: ``Whatever they say to you, ignore it,'' said Ali Saleh, the nephew, who flew in Sunday from Louisiana, where he works at a convenience store. ``He didn't take it seriously, because he was a peaceful person. He looked after everybody.''
Saleh was one of dozens of family members from across the country who have gathered among the plum, peach and nectarine orchards about 25 miles southeast of Fresno.
Some are sleeping in their cars outside Ahmed's home.
Relatives from Yemen are expected to arrive for a service Thursday at a mosque in Fresno, where hundreds from the Central Valley's Yemeni community are expected to gather.
``We felt things were getting better,'' said Monsoor Ismael, the Yemeni consul from San Francisco who visited Ahmed's family and met with local authorities Monday. ``But when we heard of this incident last Saturday, it made us afraid again.''
$10,000 reward offered
The Yemeni Consulate is offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to the capture of the suspects -- four men identified as between the ages of 13 and 18.
Police have stepped up patrols to provide safety for 20 local businessmen of Middle Eastern descent, Reedley police Lt. Steve Wright said. After Ahmed's killing, Wright said, police learned that threats against the minority community have been widespread.
``Sad is probably not the right word,'' Wright said. ``It cuts me right to the core. For a couple of people using the flag for patriotism to come up with these criminal intentions, it's just not what America is about.''
Reedley Mayor Joe Rhodes said it's too early to sum up the killing as a hate crime.
``The majority here want to believe it was a robbery,'' said Melissa Barry, who tends bar at Hawg Jaws, which is attached to Ahmed's convenience store. ``You expect this in the big towns, but not here. Not in the sticks.''
Ahmed's family is receiving condolences from near and far. A top Yemeni government official called Monday from the Middle East. Neighbor Cora Alexander wiped back tears after paying her respects.
Ahmed's 11-year-old son, Yasser Ahmed, tried to open the family store for business on Monday while his mother stayed home inconsolable, family members said.
Yasser's 5-year-old brother, Ali, waited by the door, expecting his father to cross the dusty lot to bring him candy.
``You know when you meet someone so good?'' Alexander said. ``He was just a good person.''
Ahmed moved to the United States about 35 years ago and went to central California to work as a farm laborer before buying his shop a decade ago. Family members say he worked 14-hour days, seven days a week.
Making news abroad
Ahmed's killing in this rural crossroads some 2,900 miles from the wreckage of the World Trade Center is finding its way to the front pages of Yemen's newspapers and the newscasts of the Arabic equivalent of CNN.
Bin Laden sympathizers are using such accounts to stir up anti-American sentiments, said Hisham Melhem, a longtime Washington correspondent with the As-Safir newspaper in Beirut, Lebanon.
``In the region many columnists and editorial writers are talking about a `campaign against the Muslim community' . . . as if it were somehow sanctioned by the authorities,'' Melhem said. ``Some of the writings report harassment on a massive scale.''
But Melham said reporting on the backlash has been balanced out somewhat in the Middle East as the Bush administration and other U.S. leaders continue to urge Americans to treat Arab-Americans and Muslims with respect.
The Yemeni Consulate in San Francisco sent out a warning last week about the possibility of threats against the 20,000 to 25,000 people of Yemeni descent who live in California, advising them to call police if they were harassed.
``Yemen is against any terrorists or any group that would do anything like what happened in Washington,'' said Ismael, the Yemeni consul. ``There are bad people all over the world. There are bad people in Yemen. There are bad people in America.''
Abdo Ali Ahmed wasn't one of those bad people, said his brother-in-law Mahmood Al-Shaibi.
``The problem is no one can bring Ahmed back to his family,'' Al-Shaibi said, ``and no one can take care of them like the father could.''
I'm sorry, but this attack is the last straw. I am sickened, SICKENED by this. Yeah, "loose lips sink ships" -- you can say THAT again....
And under the right circumstances, it's a great way to start a "hot" social and civil war too.
That's the whole point.
PC in defining crimes is a such a waste of time, and the unintended consequences are worse than the problem being addressed.
What are you threatening?
I have a problem with this man being made a poster child for the "oppressed" arabs..sorry..
why doesn't someone just ask her?
dep
I don't see how it makes a difference whether it was a robbery or they shot him because he's an Arab.....everyone responsible should be locked up forever or executed either way. Hate crime laws are pointless symbolism. They won't do anything to deter crimes that regular laws do...and our "regular" laws should have the harshest penalties for murdering, attacking, or harassing anyone, regardless of the reason behind it.
I have no animosity towards peaceful muslims, and hope these perpetrators are found and sentenced to death, but the Yemeni Consulate involvement is hypocrisy in its highest form.
And the 6.000+ that died in NYC were just a bunch of pikers? ALL murders are hate crimes, regardless of who the victims are. It's wrong that this man was murdered, but to be more outraged by this one killing than by the killing of many thousand innocent people shows a real lack of proportion on your part. You are either dense, or a liberal.
However, the gist of what you've written in antiwar.com since 9/11 has been that an arrogant imperialistic America got what was coming to her. You have focused like a laser beam with righteous outrage on incidents of harassment of foreigners, identifying so strongly with the Muslim community that you felt you looked Middle Eastern, even describing in detail perceived hostile looks from a blond woman (obviously one of those perfidious WASPs). No putting the incidents of harassment in context (99% of Middle Eastern-looking persons here I dare say have not experienced so much as a sideways glance). No outrage over the murder of 6,000 mostly American citizens by illegal aliens. Just expressions of admiration for the little guys who brought down the giant.
I used to think you had something to say in decrying our tendency to play world policeman, but you've gone way off the anti-American deep end in writing about events related to 9/11.
What about the persecution and ultimate executions of Christians in other countries. Is that not a hate crime? I do not feel we should lower our standards or morals to these countries, but we must be aware that at least we live in a Christian nation where these crimes are not tolerated. "Love thy neighbor as thy ownself" is something all Americans should be remembering right now.
How convenient - now you can focus YOUR hatred.
Wrong. The truth seeps through even CNN from time to time. The large majority of cases involves non-whites attacking arabs and in the case of the Christian Sudanese "perceived" moslims.
The know-nothing PC crowd just assumes that hate crimes are all done by white males.
Sir,
I have no hatred towards anyone.
Are these the ONLY crimes against arabs committed? How many other non-arabic murders were there during this period?
While any violent act against innocents is deplorable, your angry focus on white males is indeed revealing.
You should have simply corrected him and left it at that.
But then you went overboard & claimed the "thousands" of hate crimes committed against arab-americans in the past three weeks were "overwhelmingly" committed by whites. By "overwhelmingly" I assume you mean disproportionally.
There's no way you or I or anyone could know the ethnicities of these offenders.
While I feel awful for this poor hard working man here 35 years, a citizen, just trying to live his life and love his family, I wish the Muslim community would step up to the plate and do some serious PR work to allay the fears surrounding them. We don't need anymore tragedy of any kind right now.
I live in this area, and it has been confirmed that this was no "hate crime" the guy was drunk off his ass and did what many drunk drivers do, had an accident. He didn't even know where he was or what was going on he was so plastered. So how about not trying to use every case that involves a muslim as a declaration of "hate crimes" by "whitey"
I also see you did not mention the shooting of a arab clerk by Micheal Roper a black man. Was this intentional? many muslims here have been decrieng it as a "hate crime" but in fact it was a robbery that got ugly.
No such claim was made by me or anyone else on this thread. I claim that a majority of the incidents turn out on closer anaysis to be not hate crimes by WASPs contrary to what Raimondo claims. My sources include the Detroit area radio and TV and CNN from Atlanta. Black initiated hate crimes have a very short news cycle if they are reported at all. This has been the case for some time.
That aside, I too suspect a good portion, if not most, of the incidents being called "hate crimes" are being committed by non-whites because most large arab communities are located in inner cities.
And I completely agree with you that the media is loudly reporting any crime committed against arabs by whites in keeping with their current crusade against (white) "hate crimes" while totally ignoring others by non-whites.
From an acknowledged expert no less.
Are you Arabic? (I'm Middle Eastern ancestry)
Why should the Yemeni Consulate be concerned with a citizen of the United States?
Exactly!
Like anyone else, I hope the murderers are brought to justice and meet their end - quickly. But the real story here is not the relatively few incidents with Muslims here in the U.S. (over and above normal crime, I might point out). It is the fact that "good Muslims", who uncategorically denounce the WTC atrocity, without a bunch of "well here's why they deserved it's", are extraordinarily conspicuous by their almost total invisibility.
"Good Muslims" appear to be an extremely endangered species. The belligerant ones need to become so.
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