Let’s cut to it here. When people are specifically targeted for racial, religious, national origin or ideological reasons that is sometimes considered a hate crime, but what it really is — is terrorism. The people that do this, are terrorists. Even when they have white skin and their victims have brown skin as happened this week in Kansas where two legal immigrants from India and a bystander where shot by a gunman who asked about their Visas status, told them to “Get out of our Country” and bragged that he’s “Shot some middle-eastern guys” after the fact.
Sunayana Dumala the widow of the one man who died as a result of the encounter asked “What [will the government] do to stop this hate crime?”
The widow of Srinivas Kuchibhotla, a victim of a triple shooting in Kansas that some witnesses described as racially motivated, said on Friday that she needs "an answer from the government" about how it plans to stop such violence.
“I have a question in my mind: Do we belong?” Sunayana Dumala said at a news conference on Friday, as quoted by the Kansas City Star.
She said that she often asked Kuchibhotla if they were doing "the right thing" by staying in the United States.
"But he always assured me that only good things happen to good people," Dumala said.
“I need an answer from the government," she said. "What are they going to do to stop this hate crime?”
It seems as though our government has no answer for her and are more interested in deflecting blame away from the policies of immigrant hated and fear fomented by Trump.
During the press gaggle that specifically excluded several major news outlets in retaliation for their reporting White House spokes-shill Sean Spicer, just as his boss did twice last week with his petulant responses to questions about anti-Semetic violence, decided that simply bringing up the subject was an accusation against the White House according to a recording released by the WaPo. After being asked how the President reacted to the shooting and whether any of his rhetoric contributed to it Spicer in a fairly terse comment said this.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer said on Friday that it was "absurd" to suggest any connection between President Donald Trump's rhetoric and the shooting.
"Any loss of life is tragic but I'm not going to get into that kind of — to suggest that there's any correlation I think is a bit absurd," he told reporters during a press gaggle. "I'm not going to get any further than that."
So he didn’t answer the first part of the question at all and simply blew off the second part, just for contrast he’d just spent 29 minutes straight arguing about what Reince Preibus did or didn’t say or do in response to the Deputy FBI Directors criticism of a New York Times story, when the reporters from the Times who could defend their story weren’t allowed in the gaggle. I mean his boss went on and on for months saying that “Obama was the Founder of ISIS”, but the suggestion his own anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim words and policies just might cause some deadly anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim events is just “a bit absurd?” Yeah, ok, Dude. Whatever.
Spicey also doesn’t answer the question put forth by Mrs. Dumala — “What will this government do about hate crimes?”
The “contributing” part of the question wasn’t just random speculation by the reporter, it had been specifically brought up by members of the victims family.
“This certainly shows that Trump is surely the primary reason as of now. Most of my relatives are in the U.S. from the past 20 years and they have never encountered this thing. This is first such incident in our family,” Srinivas’s brother told an Indian news agency.
And the reason why is because the first thing the shooter did was challenge whether they were in they were in the country legally.
In an interview with the New York Times, Madasani said that Purinton confronted them while they were watching a basketball game on the bid screen TV’s and and asked them , “What visa are we currently were on and whether we are staying here illegally.”
“We didn’t react. People do stupid things all the time. This guy took it to the next level,” Madasani said, explaining Purinton was escorted out only to return and begin shooting.
And when he came back he also did some shouting, then bragging.
At least one witness reportedly heard the man yell “get out of my country” shortly before shooting Kuchibhotla and Madasani. The man fled on foot. A manhunt ensued. Five hours later, Purinton reportedly told a bartender at a bar in an Applebee’s in Clinton, Mo., that he needed a place to hide out because he had just killed two Middle Eastern men, The Star has learned.
He asked them if they were in the country legally, they didn’t answer him allowing him to continue to believe his wrongful impression, he came back shouting "Get out of my country" along with several racial slurs, according to most reports, and then bragged later that he'd killed “two Middle Eastern Men” - and nobody at White House thinks that might have anything to do with Donald Trump saying we are in a fight with “Radical Islam” and “Illegal Immigration?” That it’s not related to the massive rise in violent hate crimes and racial harassment that began right after the election? That’s it's nothing like one Trump supporter’s deadly attack on a mosque in Quebec this month? That it's not enabled and similar to ICE yanking 680 suspected undocumented immigrants off the street last week including one kid who had been a registered dreamer supposedly protected under DACA, forcibly dragging an undocumented woman who needs surgery for a brain tumor out of the Hospital and back into detention in preparation for deportation, or the hours long detention of Muhammad Ali Jr., simply because he has an Arab name and happens to be Muslim?
As it turns out neither of them were illegal, or Arab or Muslim, they were — and are — legal immigrants from India, two of them were engineers who work for GPS company Garmin which is located just a mile from the shooting location, and also that various members of the family had already wondered if America was still safe for them in the wake of Trumpism.
At a press conference, Kuchibhotla’s wife, Sunayana Dumala, said her husband’s death raised questions about whether immigrants are valued in the US. She wanted an answer to just one question, she said: “Do we belong here?”
“He did not deserve a death like this,” Dumala said at the press conference, which was organized by her husband’s employer, the GPS device-maker Garmin. Kuchibhotla and Madasani, both engineers, worked at the company’s main campus a mile from the scene of the shooting. Garmin is one of the region’s best-known employers.
“I don’t know what to say,” Damala added. “We’ve read many times in newspapers of some kind of shooting happening somewhere. I was always concerned, ‘Are we doing the right thing staying in the US or America?’ But he always assured me good things happen in America.”
No, he didn’t deserve this death, and a lot of us are wondering if America is still safe — from Trumpism?
Yes, there have been other attacks similar to this prior to Trump, such as the attack on the Sikh Temple in Wisconsin which killed 6 people in 2012 who were wrongly thought to be Muslims by a White Supremacist, or the attack by Anders Breivik in Norway that killed 77 people in 2011 but the point is the rhetoric from those shooters and people like Trump who falsely claimed there’s a Muslim Crime Wave in Sweden or Kellyanne Conway and her false “Bowling Green Massacre” — are in fact fueling the same false anti-immigrant narrative as those terrorists. It was deadly hate speech then, it’s even more deadly now that it’s coming from the President and his staff.