Sometimes, there’s just too much stupid to keep it neatly boxed up. This week seems to be one of those times. Usually, we choose one glaring example of the stupid (or awful, or both) per week and present it to you as our “Bonehead of the Week.” But this week, the news feeds are overflowing with stupid, and we have to give you two Bonehead posts. Yesterday, we wrote about Eduardo and Paula Montanez, a Connecticut couple who are accused of torturing a nine-year-old girl with a shock collar. Today, we have the story of Cosovic Ahmmed, who decided it wasn’t enough to be a vicious racist by himself, but enlisted his dog to aid his bigotry.
According to the Chicago Tribune, police believe that an African-American postal worker was trying to deliver to a laundromat when Ahmmed came out of the building, shoved the carrier’s cart, insulted him using a racial epithet, and told the dog to attack him. It’s unclear from the news reports whether the dog actually obeyed, but Chicago police threw the book at him. Ahmmed was arrested and charged with felony hate crime, felony stalking, misdemeanor aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, and not having a license for his dog. (Just in case any of the other things don’t stick, apparently.)
The stupid doesn’t end with Ahmmed, though; some of the creepier corners of the Internet are using the story of his arrest to take their own racism out of the closet and parade it around like a prize-winning Poodle. One site, which will go unlinked here, blogged the story and described Ahmmed in the headline as a “Muslim illegal,” although there’s been no information published about his religion, his place of birth, or his immigration status. Other than the fact that he’s 27, lives in Chicago, and hates African Americans, we don’t know much about him.
It’s a shame when someone turns a dog into an instrument of their bigotry, but the truth is, there’s a long tradition of it in America and elsewhere. In antebellum America, escaped slaves were hunted down with hounds, and during the Civil Rights movement, police dogs attacking protesters became one of the most prominent representations of racism. Ahmmed didn’t invent this kind of boneheadedness, and I’m sure he won’t be the last to use it.
Via: Chicago Tribune
