Columbus Somali leader on attack: ‘The timing is not good’

Is there ever a good time to go on a murderous rampage trying to slaughter students and university employees? If you are an invading jihadi probably yes. From Cincinnatti.com

COLUMBUS – Fifteen miles northeast of Ohio State University, where a Somali immigrant attemped a gruesome attack Monday, Omar Hassan grieved. And worried.

“The timing is not good,” Hassan, 54, said in reference to the country’s increasingly intensified anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim fears. “We are black. We are Muslim. We are Somali. We are all the negative stigmas.”

Hassan sat in the lobby of the Somali Community Association offices upstairs and around the back of a 1970s-era strip mall on Cleveland Avenue. In the past few years, the large Somali refugee community in central Ohio has come under increased scrutiny over concerns that ISIS sympathizers could be hiding there. Not so, said Hassan,

With more than 50,000 residents, the Somali refugee community of Columbus is the second largest in the United States, behind only that of Minneapolis.

Yet despite the expanse of the mid-Ohio immigrant community, word spread fast Monday morning and didn’t take long to reach the ears of Hassan, leader of the Columbus-based Somali Community Association of Ohio and known as the community’s unofficial mayor.

Police say a Somali immigrant, Abdul Razak Ali Artan, drove his car onto the sidewalk during a mid-morning attack, hitting several pedestrians, then getting out of his car and wielding a butcher’s knife.

Artan, who was a student at Ohio State, was born in Somalia and living in the United States as a legal permanent resident, according to multiple news outlets, citing unidentified law enforcement officials. It was unclear when Artan came to the U.S.

Hassan knows members of the suspect’s family. He spoke with them at 3 p.m. Monday. “They said the U.S. officials came this morning and got his mother and siblings,” Hassan said.

Hassan said his community and many of its members live under a cloud of suspicion and scrutiny. “America is not my enemy. America is my friend,” he said “We do not have a spike in crime,” Hassan said. “But we are human beings. We might have a couple of bad actors, like any community does. Crime is everywhere. Criminals are everywhere. Punish the individual, not the entire community. We do not want to get a bad label because of an individual.”

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