On August 25, 2016, the Lantern, the student newspaper for Ohio State University, published an interview with a young Somali Muslim refugee, Abdul Razak Ali Artan. “I just transferred from Columbus State,” he told the Lantern. “I wanted to pray in the open, but I was scared with everything going on in the media. I’m a Muslim, it’s not what the media portrays me to be. If people look at me, a Muslim praying, I don’t know what they’re going to think, what’s going to happen. But, I don’t blame them. It’s the media that put that picture in their heads.” Artan had only immigrated permanently to the United States in 2014, after living seven years in Pakistan.
On November 28, Artan allegedly rammed his car into a group of innocents, then leaped out of the car and began hacking at them with a butcher’s knife, injuring eleven people, including one critically, before being shot by an Ohio State University police officer. In the moments immediately before that, Artan wrote on his Facebook page that he had hit a “boiling point,” referred to “lone wolf attacks,” and cited Anwar al-Awlaki, the terror cleric killed by the Obama administration in a drone strike. More specifically, he wrote, “I am sick and tired of seeing [Muslims] killed & tortured EVERYWHERE. . . .I can’t take it anymore . . . America! Stop interfering with other countries . . . [if] you want us Muslims to stop carrying [out] lone wolf attacks. . . . Let me ask you this question if the Muhammed peace and blessings upon him and his Sanaba were here today wouldn’t the western media call them terrorists? To conclude by Allah, I am willing to use a billion infidels in retribution.” Just last week, ISIS called on terrorists everywhere to participate in lone-wolf attacks.
This means that one of two things is true: Either Artan was radicalized between his complaints about Islamophobia in August and November, a span of three months or so; or he was a radical when he gave that statement to the Lantern, and merely took the final steps over the last three months.
The latter story is certainly more plausible. If it’s correct, that means that Artan, like other terrorists, used the cover of Islamophobia as a form of projection — Artan actually hated the West and that hatred drove him to murder. In order to justify violence against others, people generally have to consider themselves victims.