Looks Like We've Hit The 'Six-Year-Old Palestinian Kids Getting Stabbed To Death In Rural Illinois' Stage Of This Thing

Who could have predicted this, except for anyone who was alive in 2001?

Wadea Al-Fayoume, on his sixth birthday.

Wadea Al-Fayoume just turned six a couple weeks ago. Sadly, he won’t be turning seven next year — because like so many other Palestinian children this week, he was brutally murdered by someone in control of his home. The difference? He wasn’t killed in Gaza, but in Plainfield, Illinois.

Tragically, on Saturday morning, 71-year-old landlord Joseph M. Czuba stabbed Wadea 26 times with a military-style knife and critically injured his mother. He is being charged with first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder, and two counts of committing a hate crime.

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The Will County Sheriff’s Office reported that “Detectives were able to determine that both victims in this brutal attack were targeted by the suspect due to them being Muslim and the ongoing Middle Eastern conflict involving Hamas and the Israelis.”

Ahmed Rehab, president of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told reporters that he had spoken to Wadea’s father, who said his ex-wife told him, “He knocked on the door and that he attempted to choke her, and said, ‘You Muslims must die,’ and attempted to stab her, and stabbed her. And she went to the bathroom and called 911. And this was all in her own words.”

“What we have is a murdered Palestinian child by someone who is radicalized by the environment in which we live right now, that casts Palestinians as human animals,” said Rehab.

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It’s a little hard not to have flashbacks to the months after 9/11, when hate crimes against Muslims spiked from 28 in 2000 to somewhere between 481 and 600 in 2001, spurred by insistence that it happened “because they hate our freedoms” because that was a more flattering reason than “we did a lot of truly horrible things to people in the Middle East.” While that does not mean that flying planes into a buildings full of people was not a horrible thing to do, it was still worth considering that perhaps such things as the sanctions against Iraq — which exclusively hurt poor people and not the people in charge of anything — created an environment with a strong tendency to produce people who are desperate and hopeless and thus especially vulnerable to radicalization.

By that same token, it’s very hard to look at this picture of Czuba and conclude that he is definitely all there, mentally. Some people might see that as excusing or justifying his crime somehow, but I see it as a warning.

Joseph Czuba mugshot

It’s a warning that all kinds of people are listening to the rhetoric that’s being put out into the universe, people who are not all there, people who don’t have any “Oh gosh, they’re just venting, best not take this literally” filters to speak of, people who do not actually know what’s been going on between the Israelis and Palestinians since even before 1948 (which I’m gonna assume is most Americans, because it’s not polite to discuss such things), people who don’t even know what’s been going on since the Trump administration straight up destroyed any possibility of a two-state solution, people who — if you tell them that people are doing bad things in a vacuum because they are animals, or because they are just inherently, intrinsically evil — will look at an adorable six-year-old kid and think “Well gee, I’d better stop him while I can.”

Those people exist, and while not every one of them is going to turn homicidal, it’s probably a good idea to remember that.

Correction: Ed Gein was from Plainfield, Wisconsin, not Plainfield, Illinois. Should have figured there was more than one Plainfield in the midwest.