President-elect Donald Trump believes that the Somali immigrant who plowed a car into a crowd of pedestrians on the campus of Ohio State Uni...
President-elect Donald Trump believes that the Somali immigrant who plowed a car into a crowd of pedestrians on the campus of Ohio State University on Monday and then used a butcher knife to attack them should never have been allowed to enter the United States.
Abdul Razak Ali Artan, a 20-year-old Muslim who was a lawful permanent resident and student at the school, was shot and killed by police moments after the attack began. Eleven people were wounded, but all of the victims survived. ISIS claimed responsibility for the assault on Tuesday, calling Artan one of its “soldiers.”
“ISIS is taking credit for the terrible stabbing attack at Ohio State University by a Somali refugee who should not have been in our country,” Trump tweeted early Wednesday.
But U.S. officials say there is no evidence Artan — a refugee who came to the United States with his family in 2014 after fleeing Somalia for Pakistan in 2007 — communicated directly with the terrorist organization. Rep. Adam Schiff, ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said Artan appeared to have been influenced by extremist material on the Internet.
“It appears that the attacker was radicalized online by jihadist propaganda,” Schiff said in a statement.
Trump’s statement echoes his controversial immigration plan, which first called for a temporary ban on all Muslims entering the United States. Trump announced that plan after terror attacks in San Bernardino and Paris. He later muddled his position, saying he wanted to suspend immigration from countries or regions that are “harboring and training terrorists.”
Trump told Yahoo News last year that he was open to the possibility of a database for Muslim Americans. The proposal was met with swift backlash, and Trump distanced himself from the idea. But earlier this month, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a Trump policy adviser and potential Homeland Security secretary, said the president-elect was mulling a registry for immigrants from Muslim countries.
In an interview published in August, Artan told the Ohio State student newspaper that he was “kind of scared” to be seen reciting his Muslim prayers in public.
“I wanted to pray in the open, but I was scared with everything going on in the media,” Artan told the Lantern in a profile for a series called “Humans of Ohio State.”
“If people look at me, a Muslim praying, I don’t know what they’re going to think, what’s going to happen,” he continued. “But, I don’t blame them. It’s the media that put that picture in their heads so they’re just going to have it and it, it’s going to make them feel uncomfortable.”
Source: yahoo.com
