A jury in Illinois has convicted 73-year-old Joseph Czuba of murder and hate crime charges for the fatal stabbing of six-year-old Palestinian American Wadee Alfayoumi in October 2023.
Czuba, who faces life imprisonment at his May sentencing, was found guilty Friday of a crime prosecutors described as motivated by anti-Muslim hatred. The attack, which also left the boy’s mother Hanan Shaheen critically injured, stands as one of the most severe hate crimes in the US following the outbreak of Israel’s war on Gaza.
Court records show that Czuba, who was Shaheen and Alfayoumi’s landlord, used a military-style knife with a 7-inch serrated blade to stab the child 26 times during the attack in Plainfield Township, approximately 40 miles southwest of Chicago.
During this week’s trial, Shaheen testified that Czuba told her, “You, as a Muslim, must die.” Prosecutor Michael Fitzgerald presented a 911 call recording in which Shaheen could be heard saying, “The landlord is killing me and my baby.”
Czuba had previously pleaded not guilty and did not testify during the trial, which began Tuesday.
The case attracted worldwide attention and profoundly affected Chicago’s substantial Palestinian community. Ahmed Rehab of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)-Chicago stated, “All of us who are parents, who are Arab or Palestinian… who are Muslim, we all saw our children die in Wadee Alfayoumi because this could have been any one of our boys, any one of our girls.”
“It just so happened that it was Wadee Alfayoumi. When he was targeted, all of our children were targeted. Every Muslim was targeted when he [Czuba] yelled, ‘All Muslims must die,'” Rehab added, according to The Associated Press.
Abed Ayoub, executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), said the verdict provides some justice for Wadee’s family and “sends a clear message that hate-fuelled violence has no place here.”
“We will never accept nor forget that a six-year-old child lost his life because of dangerous anti-Palestinian rhetoric,” Ayoub said, according to AFP.
Other concerning incidents of potential anti-Arab bias in the US include an attempted drowning of a three-year-old Palestinian American girl in Texas, the stabbing of a Palestinian American man in Texas, the beating of a Muslim man in New York, a violent attack on pro-Palestinian protesters in California, and a Florida shooting of Israeli visitors whom the suspect mistakenly identified as Palestinians.
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