‘My daughter’s death will not be used’
Parents furious over Trump’s false terror claim
WASHINGTON • Her daughter had not yet been buried, nor had the newspapers finished turning up bloody details of her death, before Rosie Ayliffe began to write about her child’s murderer.
“Grief is a funny thing,” she wrote in the Independent last August—five days after a man chased her 21- year- old daughter through a hostel, stabbed her to death and killed another backpacker who tried to protect her. “I haven’t seen Mia for nearly a year, and so in my head she’s still alive, well and living Australia.”
She was careful, even then, to write accurately about the accused killer. Smail Ayad yelled “Allahu akbar” during the attack, the Guardian reported, but he also rambled incoherently, stabbed a dog and “was apparently infatuated with” her daughter.
“Much nonsense is being spoken in the press about her alleged killer,” Ayliffe wrote. He “is not an Islamic fundamentalist, he has never set foot in a mosque.”
Likewise, police ruled out terrorism, and the Ayad murder case was transferred to a mental-health court.
The sensational stories faded. The parents of Mia Ayliffe- Chung and Tom Jackson mourned and tried to move on.
Then, on Tuesday, both families saw their children’s murders in a list of terrorist attacks the White House said hadn’ t got enough attention, and Ayliffe said she needed to set down words again.
“My daughter’s death will not be used to further this insane persecution of innocent people,” she wrote in an open letter to U.S. President Donald Trump.
Her words were joined by the parents of the attack’s second victim, Jackson, who expressed their disbelief in an email to the White House and elsewhere.
“I’m pretty sure he and his advisers know full well — or could very easily verify — that Tom and Mia died not as the result of an act of terror but rather through the actions of a disturbed individual ,” Les Jackson wrote on Facebook. “Of course, that doesn’t suit his agenda.”
Sandra Jackson tweeted: “@realDonaldTrump wake up t his morning to see you’ve used my Son murder to further your campaign of hate, how dare you. You are a disgrace.”
On Monday, Trump accused “the very, very dishonest press” of covering up terrorist attacks around the world. His staff promised to release a list of them.
What the White House came up with was full of typos and questionable examples of “under- reported” terrorism. It did not point to any examples supporting Trump’s contention that terrorist attacks were “not even being reported.” Less than half of the 78 incidents occurred in Europe or North America.