Hundreds gathered on the streets of Chicago on Tuesday night to protest the shooting to death of a teenager by a police officer.
The impassioned unrest follows the Chicago Police Department’s release of the dashcam video that shows Officer Jason Van Dyke, 37, shoot 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times during an October 2014 encounter.
Jason Van Dyke has been charged with first-degree murder of McDonald and faces up to life in prison. Van Dyke and other officers were responding to a report of a teen with a knife who had been breaking into cars. The video released on Tuesday shows McDonald jogging down a street and then veering away from Van Dyke and another officer who emerge from a police SUV, drawing their guns. Within seconds, Van Dyke begins firing. McDonald spins around and falls to the pavement as Van Dyke keeps shooting.
Downtown Chicago protests disrupted traffic but did not appear to result in overt violence from either demonstrators or police, at the time of publication, though many observers expected trouble akin to that recently in similar cases in Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri, but no such problems flared up. Instead, on Friday, protesters sought to disrupt the traditionally busy shopping day in the city after the Thanksgiving holiday.
Crowds shouting “16 shots! 16 shots!” and “Stop the cover-up” blocked traffic on Michigan Avenue and picketed luxury stores. Few arrests were made as police maintained a light touch on proceedings. (Source: Daily Dot.com/The Guardian)
Comment:
America is no more than a nation built on the genocide of its indigenous people, inflicted by the so called founding fathers and where the horrors of slavery are still interwoven into an establishment bent on the repression of many minorities.
Whilst the election of the first African American President was seen as the dawn of a post racial America, the political and social climate since Obama’s victory has only seen an increase in racial tensions in the heartlands of the US. This has been optimized by the murder of dozens of young black men like Laquan McDonald for minor offences, if any, whilst their white counterparts with more serious offences, have evaded justice altogether.
Though many will try to equivocate racism with poverty, the clear inequality at the highest levels of business, politics and among minorities in society speaks for itself, pointing to an institutional epidemic of supremacy that infects all sides of the aisle. Since the 2008 economic crash, white Americans have seen their incomes increase from four times higher than that of African Americans to six times as high, and white Americans with a criminal record are more likely to be hired by corporate firms than black Americans.
Even the treatment of President Obama by Congress and parts of the US media, depicts an attitude of white supremacy, forcing commentators to admit the lack of bipartisanship and hostility towards him as being due to the bigotry of senior congressmen and officials.
Naturally the Islamic system, the Khilafah upon the method of the Prophethood is void of such institutional flaws, due to ideas such as nationalism and racism being purged from day one by the revelation of Islam to the Prophet ﷺ, and embodied by the Companions.
إِنَّ أَكْرَمَكُمْ عِندَ اللَّهِ أَتْقَاكُمْ إِنَّ اللَّهَ عَلِيمٌ خَبِيرٌ
“Verily, the most noble of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous of you. Verily, Allah is knowing and aware.”
(Surat Al-Hujurat 49:13)
So much so that the first Muadhin of Islam was an Abyssinian and previously a slave, Bilal (ra), and many prominent Sahaba and Ta’bieen including Muad ibn Jabal (ra) were conscripted with vital tasks of administering wilayaat, dawah, and jihad. Racism has proven to not be an issue in Islam as a result of the Prophet ﷺ implementation of the Shariah, which harmonized society and all its institutions.
The last sermon of our beloved Rasool Allah ﷺ made it abundantly clear that no man is better than another except in faith.
«يَا أَيُّهَا النَّاسُ؛ أَلَا إِنَّ رَبَّكُمْ وَاحِدٌ وَإِنَّ أَبَاكُمْ وَاحِدٌ. أَلَا لَا فَضْلَ لِعَرَبِيٍّ عَلَى أَعْجَمِيٍّ وَلَا لِعَجَمِيٍّ عَلَى عَرَبِيٍّ، وَلَا لِأَحْمَرَ عَلَى أَسْوَدَ وَلَا أَسْوَدَ عَلَى أَحْمَرَ إِلَّا بِالتَّقْوَى، أَبَلَّغْتُ؟»
“O people, your Lord is one and your father Adam is one. There is no favoritism of an Arab over a foreigner, nor a foreigner over an Arab, and neither red skin over black skin, nor black skin over red skin, except through righteousness. Have I not conveyed the message?”
Any racism that does exist in the Muslim world is the result of imported colonial values that have unfortunately become part of un-Islamic culture. InshaAllah we are all able to raise ourselves above such ignorance, but where some may not, the rightly guided Khilafah on the method of the Prophethood will once again purge this diseased ideal from the earth.
Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut-Tahrir
by Maleeha Hasan
