Cab Driver: 'I Feel Very Sad,Hopeless, Insecure-All 4 Of My Kids Were Born Here'

[kpete]

Update 3: (H/T to "the OTHER rasmussen") NY Daily News reports the victim's name is Ahmed Sharif who has released a statement through the Taxi Workers Alliance:

***** "I feel very sad," Sharif said, according to a statement released by the Taxi Workers Alliance. "I have been here more than 25 years. I have been driving a taxi more than 15 years. All four of my kids were born here."

Sharif, who was slashed in the throat, upper lip, arm and hand, said he believes the battle over the Ground Zero mosque has inflamed anti-Muslim sentiment in America.

"I never feel this hopeless and insecure before," the Queens man said in the statement. "Right now, the public sentiment is very serious (because of the Ground Zero mosque debate). All taxi drivers should be more careful."
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/8/25/896043/-Updated:-NYC-Cab-Driver-Stabbed-By-Passenger-Who-Asked-Are-You-Muslim
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/08/cabbie_stabbed_for_being_muslim_i_feel_very_sad_1.php
.....................

Interesting background considering the crime. Although, from the NY Post, seems he's got a longstanding drinking problem:

Enright has had run-ins with the law in the past.
He was charged with criminal trespassing and disorderly conduct last year and sentenced to a day in jail.
In 2008, he received two summonses for underage drinking.
http://www.lohud.com/...
http://www.lohud.com/article/20108250362
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/08/what_we_know_about_michael_enright.php#more


Man accused of stabbing Muslim cabbie ‘works for pro-Islam group’
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/0825/man-accused-stabbing-muslim-cabbie-works-proislam-group/

[malaise]

1. What We Know About Michael Enright, The Alleged Slasher Of The Muslim Cabbie

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/08/what_we_know_about_michael_enright.php
<snip>
The man accused of stabbing a Muslim NYC cab driver hardly has the background one might expect from someone charged with a hate crime committed in a drunken rage.

Michael Enright is a film student at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and has been working at Intersection International, a multifaith and multicultural effort which seeks to promote justice and peace. The project's website is strongly supportive of the Codoba House project in lower Manhattan and videos of its leader, Imam Faisel Rauf, are posted on their website.

The 21-year-old aspiring filmmaker had been to Afghanistan recently, working on a documentary on a Marine unit his high school buddy served with. His efforts to embed with his friend were the subject of a profile in the local paper.

The documentary he was working on was "completely nonpolitical," Enright told the newspaper. "It's just showing the young people who are spearheading our foreign policy. They're doing what I don't have to do."
------
Throw away the key

[truedelphi]

2. That is so weird.

A film student at the School of Visual Arts and a participant at intersection International...

Two lives destroyed by the forces of irrational hatred.

[Hannah Bell]

3. the weirdness should cause us to ask questions.

"Enright told police he works for an Internet media company who had recently spent time with a combat unit in Afghanistan filming military exercises until this past May."

[truedelphi]

5. I know. I am sitting here considering that.

But I get assigned the "tinfoil" so often, I didn't feel like mentioning that factor.

[pitohui]

6. well it sure sets off my spidey sense, shades of mk ultra!

i suppose they'll find a brain tumor or some other cause of sudden mental illness, i had a friend myself who went suddenly, terribly mad (schizophrenia) in his 20s but talk about things that make you go "hmmm!"

[gratuitous]

4. If this is true about Enright

You can bet that rather than being some lone wolf actor, as any conservative whacko would be portrayed, Enright will be depicted as a vital cog in a huge network of liberal and progressive groups and organizations, all of whom will be pinned down and have an apology extracted from them. If an apology isn't immediately forthcoming, they will all be fair game for the darkest and most sinister innuendos the combined minds of the Mighty Republican Wurlitzer can devise.

If it turns out that he's actually some right wing nutjob, he will be given the usual short shrift, a loner whose irrational act did not spring from Fox or any other conservative outlet, so stop saying that.