Harassed Portland girl cries for her murdered rescuers

This video from the USA says about itself:

Portland Teen Thanks Those Who Saved Her Life

29 May 2017

As tears streamed down her cheeks, 16-year-old Destinee Mangum thanked the three strangers who intervened on a Portland light rail after a man hurled anti-Muslim slurs at her and her friend who was wearing a hijab. Mangum told CNN affiliate KPTV, “I just want to say thank you to the people who put their life on the line for me”. “Because they didn’t even know me and they lost their lives because of me and my friend and the way we look.” According to police, two of the men were killed. One is in the hospital after the suspect, identified as 35-year-old Jeremy Joseph Christian stabbed the three victims.

Translated from Dutch NOS TV:

Harassed Portland girl in tears for her rescuers: “They did not even know me”

Today, 15:18

In tears, 16-year-old Destinee Mangum has thanked the three men who saved her last Friday from an attacker in a train in the US city of Portland. The man did an anti-Muslim rant against her and a girlfriend. One of the girls wore a headscarf.

When the three men intervened, the perpetrator began to knife them. Two of the men did not survive. The third one is in hospital.

“I just want to say thank you to the people who put their life on the line for me,” said an emotional Mangum to CNN. “Because they didn’t even know me and they lost their lives because of me and my friend and the way we look.”

According to Mangum, the perpetrator demanded they should return to Saudi Arabia.

This Islamophobic murderer is a neonazi Donald Trump supporter. I wonder what murdering Mr Jeremy Christian thinks about Donald Trump’s weapons and wars deals with the Saudi monarchy.

“He said we did not belong here, that we must leave his country, that we had to kill ourselves.”

The two girls ran away from the screaming man when the three other men tried to bring him to heel. The men said, according to Mangum, that the perpetrator did not have to behave so respectlessly towards the girls. Thereupon, a discussion came and then a fight.

The perpetrator was arrested shortly after the incident. He turned out to be a person well-known to police, the 35-year-old sentenced criminal Jeremy Christian. It has not been announced by the police for what the man had been convicted before, but local media reports that it has to do with the possession of weapons, theft and kidnaping.

According to American media, the man’s Facebook page contains racist and extremist texts.

This morning, it became also known that Christian was involved one day before the stabbing crime with two other incidents in two tram stations in Portland. Even then he is said to have screamed racist and anti-Islamic language to women.

Vigil

The death of the two men in the train has caused a lot of emotion. Not only in Portland, but across the US. Last night, a vigil was held for the ‘American heroes’ Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche (23) and Ricky John Best (53). There, a thousand people were present.

Also online there is much praise for the men and in the meantime some 600,000 dollars have been collected for the survivors.

The well-known former CBS news reader Dan Rather has called in a message on Facebook upon president Trump to express himself against Islamophobia and racism. Rather wrote “They were brave Americans who died at the hands of someone who, when all the facts are collected, we may have every right to call a terrorist.”

Police so far does not call Mr Christian a terrorist. Maybe they would have done so, if the perpetrator’s name would have been not Christian, but Mohamed Islam; and if the crime would have been about clothes, not of ‘Islamic looking’ girls, but of ‘white Christian looking’ girls.

He added that the two men were not killed by a radical Islamic terrorist or an undocumented immigrant, terms that Trump often uses for criminals. The message has been shared more than 140,000 times.

So far, Trump has not said anything about it. …

Meanwhile, in Portland not everything is relaxed, despite the mayor’s call to keep calm. For Sunday a meeting is scheduled of the [neo-nazi] so-called alt-right movement, for freedom of expression. Organizer Joey Gibson said to the British newspaper The Guardian that he did not intend to cancel the manifestation.

In earlier demonstrations of the alt-right movement in Portland, perpetrator Jeremy Christian had also joined. He would then have made fascist and racist statements. …

For Sunday, anti-fascist groups have announced counter demonstrations.

This video from the USA says about itself:

Portland deaths: Son who died trying to stop Muslim abuse ‘a hero’

29 May 2017

The mother of a US man who died protecting two young women from anti-Muslim harassment has called him “a hero” who “will remain a hero” after his death.

Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche was one of two men who were stabbed to death on a train on Friday in Portland, Oregon.

Police named the other man who died as Ricky John Best, 53, a father of four and an Army veteran.

Another passenger was wounded before the attacker was arrested.

Police have identified the suspect as Jeremy Joseph Christian, 35, a convicted felon.

He is due to appear in court on Tuesday, charged with two counts of aggravated murder, attempted murder, intimidation and being a felon in possession of a restricted weapon.

However, Loren Cannon, special agent in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Oregon, said on Saturday it was too early to tell whether the “violence was an act of domestic terrorism or a federal hate crime”.

What happened?

On Friday afternoon, two teenage girls, one of them Muslim and wearing a headscarf, boarded a train in Portland.

According to witnesses, they attracted the attention of Mr Christian.

Dyjuana Hudson – mother to one of the girls – said he began “saying all Muslims should die“.

Sergeant Pete Simpson confirmed the “suspect was on the train and he was yelling and ranting and raving a lot of different things, including what would be characterised as hate speech or biased language”.

America’s ‘invisible’ Muslims

Islamophobia ‘has long history in US’

Three men then stepped in to help the girls. Ms Hudson told the Oregonian that one of them said: “You can’t get at them like that — they’re little girls.” But the suspect then allegedly turned on the girls’ defenders. Sgt Simpson said: “Some of the people that he was yelling at, they were attacked viciously by the suspect, resulting in the two deaths and one injury.”

Apparently unaware of how badly injured their defenders were, the two terrified girls fled, calling Ms Hudson for help.

Mr Christian was arrested shortly after he got off the train.

Who were the victims?

Mr Best was on his way home when he was attacked.

He had spent 23 years serving in the US Army, retiring in 2012, according to the Oregon website Willamette Week. Since 2015, he had worked for the City of Portland.

His colleague Kareen Perkins told Oregon Live he was “the first person you would go to for help”.

Mr Namkai-Meche was on the phone to his aunt when the suspect confronted the girls. Mr Namkai-Meche’s aunt urged the economics graduate to get off the phone and film what was happening, KATU News reported.

“I didn’t mean for him to try to be a hero and get himself killed but he was trying to protect those two teenage girls,” she told the television station.

Mr Namkai-Meche’s mother paid tribute to her “dear baby boy” on Facebook.

“He was a hero and will remain a hero on the other side of the veil,” she wrote. “Shining bright star I love you forever.”

Ms Hudson, the mother of one of the girls, wrote on Facebook: “Thank you thank you thank you… You will always be our hero.”

The injured victim, Micah David-Cole Fletcher, remains in hospital.

Portland mayor Ted Wheeler said the “brave and selfless actions” of the three men “should serve as an example and inspiration to us all”.

However, speaking at a press conference, he warned “the current political climate allows far too much room for those who spread bigotry“.

Who is the alleged attacker?

A senior researcher with the Southern Poverty Law Center, a hate-attack monitoring group, said Mr Christian’s Facebook page said he held “some racist and other extremist beliefs”.

…

An article in a Portland local alternative publication reported that he was a “known white supremacist” who had previously given a Nazi salute at a right-wing march.

The police have declined to share details of his criminal history.

By Toby Reese in the USA:

Two men stabbed to death in Portland, Oregon anti-Muslim incident

29 May 2017

Ricky John Best and Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche died on Friday after being stabbed in the neck by 35-year-old Jeremy Joseph Christian in Portland, Oregon.

Christian was reportedly yelling ethnic, racial, and religious-based obscenities at passengers on the city’s Metropolitan Area Express (MAX), including two young women–one wearing a hijab.

The men were attacked by Christian when they intervened to try and calm down the situation and were stabbed before Christian exited the train. A third victim, 21-year-old Micah David-Cole Fletcher, was also attacked and is currently being treated for wounds that are not expected to be life-threatening.

According to witnesses, Christian entered the train on Friday afternoon and soon after began hurling epithets at passengers that police said could best be described as “hate speech toward a variety of ethnicities and religions”. The police and medical personnel arrived at Hollywood Station responding to a report of a disturbance on the eastbound MAX train to find the three victims of the stabbing. Christian was arrested a short while later nearby–repeatedly telling the police to “shoot me then” prior to being subdued and taken into custody.

Local police stated that an investigation was being conducted into Christian’s “extremist ideology” but the FBI stated that it was too early to say if the killings qualified as a federal hate crime. Christian is expected to appear in court on Tuesday and is currently being held without bail on several charges including aggravated murder, intimidation, attempted murder, and as a felon in possession of a weapon.

Best, 53, a father of three teenage sons and a 12-year-old daughter, was an Army veteran and had been working for the City of Portland in the Bureau of Development Services. He had worked as a technician for the city after retiring from the Army and, according to his supervisor Kareen Perkins, was well-liked.

Perkins told the local press that Best “was always the first person you would go to for help. I’ve talked to most of his coworkers today, and several of them said it’s just like Rick to step in and help somebody out.” He was pronounced dead at the scene when authorities arrived.

Namkai-Meche, 23, of Portland, had recently graduated with a degree in economics from Reed College. He died shortly after he was taken to the hospital. In a statement posted on the school’s homepage one of his former professors recalled, “I still remember where he sat in conference and the types of probing, intelligent questions I could anticipate him asking. He was thoughtful, humble, smart, inquisitive, and compassionate. He was a wonderful human being. As good as they come.”

Christian had been known to police and political groups in Portland for his outspoken political views on social media and at protests. Almost one month prior to the stabbing, Christian had shown up at a “March for Free Speech” event in the Montavilla neighborhood brandishing a baseball bat and wrapped in an American flag.

In videos that are now circulating on the Internet, Christian can be heard espousing racist comments and obscenities to counter demonstrators … At the time, police officers told local press that he had a head injury and was mentally ill but did not pose a threat.

… He had previously created posts calling for the creation of a “White homeland” in the Pacific Northwest, claimed support for the Nazis, and praised Timothy McVeigh on April 19, the anniversary of the 1995 bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

…

In 2002, Christian was convicted of first-degree robbery, second degree kidnapping, and conviction for carrying and using a dangerous weapon. In 2011, he was indicted for being a felon in possession of a firearm.

The Portland attack happened on the same night as the commencement of the Muslim holy month, Ramadan. Muslim organizations, imams, and mosques in Portland and around the country have issued alerts and called for extra patrols during the month in anticipation of hate crimes and persecution that have intensified since the inauguration of President Donald Trump.

After the stabbing on Friday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations demanded that “Trump speak out personally against rising bigotry and acts of racial violence in America targeting Muslims and other minority groups”. The organization cited a 50 percent increase in anti-Muslim incidents in 2017 and noted that in 8 percent of all incidents, a “Muslim woman’s headscarf has been a trigger”.

Trump has repeatedly stated that his actions, including an attempted travel ban targeting seven predominantly Muslim countries, bears no connection to the increased number of reported anti-Muslim crimes since the start of his presidential campaign. As of this writing, Trump has not tweeted about the incident nor has the White House issued a statement.