If you witnessed a
violent crime in a progress, would you call the police? Most
of us would like to think that we would, but it's apparently
not always that cut and dry.
Last Thursday night, at the Afton View Apartments in St.
Paul Minnesota, a man allegedly beat and raped a woman right
in a hallway as residents did nothing. Surveillance tapes
show that at least ten witnesses completely ignored the
woman's screams and cries for help for over an hour,
including a man whose door the woman knocked on as she
begged for him to call police.
In what has to be one of the worst excuses of all time, the
suspect -- who claims the whole thing is just a big
misunderstanding -- defended himself by saying that if he
had wanted to assault the woman, he would've done it in the
apartment, not the hallway!
While some people say that no one called the police because
of the "bystander effect," the Real Story is that this is
about cultural assimilation. Let me give you a couple of
other facts that I left out earlier: The suspect is Rage
Ibrahim, a 26 year old Somali man and the apartment building
where it happened is dominated by Somali tenants.
Why does that matter? Because, according to the director of
the Somali Justice Advocacy Center, quote, "The only system
they know is a military, totalitarian government that
tortures and executes...People have no rights. They are used
to keeping quiet and not saying anything."
OK, I get that, but here's the problem: we can't start going
down the road of allowing cultural differences among our
immigrant groups to be an excuse for breaking our laws. I am
completely sympathetic to what many Somalians have gone
through -- after all they're here for freedom and safety --
but where do we draw the line on people blaming their
behavior on the culture they're used to? We don't let
someone who's been molested their whole life go out and
molest others and if the country you came from stones women
to death for adultery we don't just look the other way and
let you do that here.
What I'm really afraid of is that the melting pot has
stopped melting; that instead of an expectation of
assimilation, we've reached a point where people will group
together based on their race or religion or ethnicity and
form their own little enclaves with their own rules and
traditions. Once that happens, we're no longer a country --
we're just a collection of individuals. |
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