Finally, White House says it’s disturbing
MUTED RESPONSE Statement comes a week after an Indian engineer was killed in Kansas in an alleged hate crime
WASHINGTON: The White House has said reports on the killing of Indian engineer Srinivas Kuchibhotla were “disturbing”, breaking its silence on the Kansas shootings amid mounting pressure to condemn what many believe is the latest in a series of hate crimes across the US.
“I don’t want to get ahead of the law enforcement, but I was asked the other day about the story in Kansas — the shooting in Kansas,” Trump’s press secretary Sean Spicer said in his opening remarks at the daily briefing on Monday. “While the story is evolving, early reports out of Kansas are equally disturbing,” he said after condemning strongly, on the President’s behalf, continued reports of vandalism at Jewish community centres, synagogues and cemeteries.
The US justice department is investigating the killing of Kuchibhotla, an Indian aviation engineer working with Garmin in Kansas, and the shooting of his friend Alok Madasani and Ian Grillot, an American who tried to help, as a possible hate crime.
His earlier perfunctory comment that “all killings are tragic” was condemned by many in the US and pressure was mounting on the White House to condemn the shootings, which have been attributed to a surge in antipathy towards immigrants, especially those from Muslim-majority Middle-Eastern countries targeted by this administration.
Adam Purinton, a 51-year-old US navy veteran charged with the shootings, had mistaken the Indians for immigrants from Iran, one of the seven Muslimmajority nations whose citizens were temporarily banned from entering the US.
Purinton, who was arraigned in a court with first-degree murder and two counts of attempted first-degree murder on Monday, had told a bartender in Missouri, where he had fled to after the shooting, he had shot two Irani- ans. He had told them to “get out of my country”, before opening fire. His motives were under investigation and the justice department had still not confirmed if the shootings amounted to a hate crime.
“Once upon a time, presidents like (Barack) Obama or (George) Bush would’ve spoken out against this hate crime today,” Jon Favreau, Obama’s speechwriter for his first term, wrote on Twitter, adding, “Trump yelled about the media and FBI.”
“The President could say ‘Don’t shoot innocent brown people. It’s wrong’,” Kumail Nanjiani, a Pakistani-American comic who plays a techie in HBO TV series Silicon Valley, wrote on Twitter. “And he would save lives. But he won’t. & that doesn’t surprise us.” And Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank, suggested that the President tends to take a motivated position on such issues.