This past Wednesday, 23-year-old Mohamedtaha Omar, 20-year-old Adam Kamel Mekki and 17-year-old Muhannad Adam Tairab were found dead in an abandoned home in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The three young Muslim Americans were reportedly shot “execution style” by more than one person.

Public Safety Director Rusty York has emphasized that there is “no reason to believe this is any type of hate crime…because of their religion or nationality,” also noting that they do not believe the murders were connected to any gang violence. The unclear motive presents the murders to be somewhat of what of a mystery, raising many questions around gun violence and the surge in Islamophobic hate crimes across the country.

Although many are questioning the feasibility of ruling out Islamophobia as a motive, many are also failing to acknowledge that two of the victims (Omar and Tairab) were both Muslim and black. Their intersectional identities only further the likelihood of being dismissed by the media, but also illustrate the lack of urgency in the Muslim community to rally around their deaths.

As Muna Mira eloquently states in Towards a Black Muslim Ontology of Resistance, “The hypervisibility of Blackness makes one’s identity as a Muslim impossible precisely because Blackness precludes Muslimness in the cultural imaginary. So to occupy both subject positions is to experience the downward thrust of cognitive dissonance: you will always be too Black to be a true Muslim, but you must live with all of the pain that America inflicts on both Black people and Muslims.”

Many have used Twitter has a way of expressing outrage and pain about the dismissal of Omar, Mekki, and Tairab’s deaths via the hashtag #ourthreeboys. The hashtag is being used to garner support around signing a petition which calls for the Fort Wayne Police Department to conduct a full investigation of the murders.
The hashtag is also in reference to #ourthreewinners, which arose from the deaths of three Arab Muslim Americans, Deah, Yusor and Razan, whose deaths in Chapel Hill arguably gained widespread support from the Muslim community.

 

 

 

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*A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that all three victims were Muslim*

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