{"id":11384,"date":"2023-10-16T23:57:28","date_gmt":"2023-10-17T03:57:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=11384"},"modified":"2023-10-21T14:43:29","modified_gmt":"2023-10-21T18:43:29","slug":"remember-wadea-al-fayoume","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2023\/10\/remember-wadea-al-fayoume\/","title":{"rendered":"Remember Wadea Al-Fayoume"},"content":{"rendered":"

O<\/span>n the morning of Saturday, October 14, a landlord in Plainfield Township, just outside the city of Chicago, knocked on the door of Hanaan Shahin. When she answered, he first tried to choke her, and then began to stab her with a knife that had a seven-inch blade, shouting, \u201cYou Muslims must die!\u201d She escaped and ran to another room to call 911, and when she came back out seconds later, she discovered that her son Wadea Al-Fayoume, who had just celebrated his 6th birthday a week before on October 6, had suffered dozens of stab wounds. Hanaan Shahin is currently in serious condition at a nearby hospital, but her child, Wadea, was pronounced dead soon after being transported to an emergency room.<\/p>\n

The parents are originally from Beitunia, in the West Bank of Palestine, and the family are victims of racist hate following a weeklong US backed war by Israel on the people of the Gaza Strip. As of the writing of this article, 2,670 people in the Gaza Strip have been killed, and 724 of those dead are children. It\u2019s a morbid mirror to the situation in the Gaza Strip, where half of the population are under 18, that a 6-year-old Palestinian child – six thousand miles away in the US – cannot escape the same racism and death that Israel has wrought upon Gazans.<\/p>\n

In addition to funding the apartheid state of Israel with billions of our tax dollars every year, politicians at every level have created an environment of racism and Islamophobia. From President Joe Biden, to US Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, to Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, all the way down to Chicago City Councilwoman Debra Silverstein – politicians are rushing to repeatedly shout their solidarity with Israel – as that same government simultaneously bombs and starves the people who live in the Gaza Strip.<\/p>\n

Politicians unequivocally condemn and characterize Hamas as \u201cpure evil,\u201d while providing zero context for what took place October 7. It\u2019s little wonder that when politicians and an unquestioning corporate media fill people\u2019s heads with nonsense and hate – portraying Muslims, Arabs, or Palestinains as a group of senseless murderers – that some individuals, such as this landlord in Plainfield, will take matters into their own violent hands. This tragedy is the direct result of both Israeli and American racist dehumanization of the \u201cenemy\u201d which serves as justification for mass murder, as well as the funding for it.<\/p>\n

Following the attack on Hanaan Shahin and the murder of Wadea, Ahmed Rehab, Executive Director of Chicago Office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), led a press conference<\/a> on October 15, with Odey Al-Fayoume, Wadea\u2019s father, standing next to him. When asked about the racist atmosphere created by politicians, Mr. Rehab responded, \u201cIt does go all the way to the president of the United States; this whole frenzy of rushing to dehumanize Palestinians either by expression or by omission.\u201d Regarding Palestine, Rehab expressed that there are \u201cseventy-five years of repression and occupation, displacement and dispossession, and not a word on that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rehab is correct; the attack by Hamas on October 7 did not occur out of thin air. And when it is characterized as the product of some inherent or internal malady, attributable to Palestinians\u2019 ethnic or religious background, rather than a product of decades of violent oppression and senseless murder by the most well funded military in the Middle East – it has a distorting effect and confuses people here in the United States. This confusion is by design; otherwise, how would people in the US consent to billions in tax dollars funding an illegal occupation and apartheid regime?<\/p>\n