Sunday 06 Mar 2016 - 14:22 Makkah mean time-26-5-1437
Muslim Americans hold a vigil in Washington following the murders. Image from Middle East Eye
Fort Wayne City, Indiana, (IINA) - The mysterious killing of three young men of Sudanese origin in Fort Wayne, Indiana last week shook the Midwestern town of 250,000, Middle East Eye reported.
But the murders, which police have said were carried out “execution-style," have also created shock waves across the country, particularly in Muslim communities.
Already reeling from a surge in Islamophobic rhetoric by politicians over the past six months and a spike in hate crimes, many Muslims fear that the official uncertainty regarding how and why the three youths were killed may be hiding hate-based motives.
Activists held vigils for the three victims - Muhannad Tairab, 17 year-old, Mohammed Taha Omar, 23, and Adam Mekki, 20 - across the country this week, and many on social media have changed their profile pictures in memory of the youths and spread the hashtag #OurThreeBrothers.
“Everyone is on edge, and then an incident like this happens and everyone is left wondering what they’re going to do now,” said Gohar Salam, a local doctor who is also the president of Fort Wayne’s largest Islamic centre and school.
Although police and the families of the youths, two of whom were closely related have cautioned the public not to jump to conclusions, the speed at which the case has become a rallying cry for young Muslims hints at the community’s deep unease amid the rise of controversial figures like Donald Trump who have helped fuel Islamophobic sentiment.
Whether or not Islamophobic or anti-black motives are found in the killings, the reaction underscores the sense of an existential threat that has gripped some Muslim Americans in recent months.
All three of the young men were children of Sudanese immigrants; two of them came from a Muslim background while the third was Christian.
In a press conference on Tuesday, family members said they had escaped war and ethnic cleansing in the Darfur and Nuba regions of Sudan by emigrating to the US, and managed to settle in this mostly white Midwestern metropolis, which is dotted by large immigrant and refugee enclaves.
The bodies of the three men were found east of downtown Fort Wayne on 24 February in an abandoned house that was sometimes the site of parties held by young people.
The family has focused their response on the need to end gun violence broadly, asking the public to “stop the senseless killings of young beautiful souls”.
But some worry that this is not just another case of America’s unhealthy obsession with guns.
Salam told Middle East Eye that “when the news first broke, the biggest concern was that the crime was Islamophobic”.
“But luckily we live in a town where we have strong relations with the police, the authorities and the FBI,” he continued. “After their initial assessment that there was no evidence of hate involved,” the families accepted that premise, he said.
There was a strong possibility that the men “were just at the wrong place at the wrong time,” he added, noting that the place where they were found was “not considered very safe”.
But as news of the killings spread across the country over the last week, many noticed parallels with the murders of three young Muslims almost exactly a year before. In that incident, three students, including two women wearing the hijab, or headscarf, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill were shot dead by a neighbour.
Police said the killings were caused by a “parking dispute” that escalated out of control. But one of the victims’ fathers noted that his daughter told him beforehand that the neighbour “hates us for who we are and how we look”.
Many across the country argued that last year’s incident seemed to have strong Islamophobic undertones. In the year since then, hate crimes against Muslim Americans have risen amid the increasing visibility of conflicts in the Middle East, the Islamic State attacks in Paris and a mass shooting committed by a Muslim couple in San Bernardino, California last November.
The domestic political climate, meanwhile, has worsened the situation for Muslims, many of whom feel the community is under siege. Presidential hopefuls like Trump and Senator Ted Cruz have seized upon Islamophobic and xenophobic rhetoric for political gain.
Only a few days before the bodies were found in Fort Wayne, Trump told a large crowd of supporters a fictitious story that he believed to be real about dipping bullets in pig’s blood in order to murder large numbers of Muslims, suggesting approvingly that the strategy worked. In the same speech, he also hailed torture as an effective practice, only a few weeks after calling Cruz a “pussy” for not fully endorsing it.
This was the context in which many Muslim Americans interpreted the killings this February.
SM/IINA
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