The man suspected of fatally stabbing 6-year-old Palestinian American boy Wadea Al-Fayoume and wounding his mother, Hanan Shaheen, on Saturday was a regular listener of conservative talk radio — and hosts’ programming on the Hamas attack on Israelis ultimately led him to carry out the horrific attack, prosecutors have said.
Joseph Czuba, 71, made his initial appearance in court in Will County, Illinois, on Monday after he allegedly stabbed Al-Fayoume 26 times; as he appeared in court, mourners held a funeral for the young Muslim boy at a local mosque. Shaheen was not in attendance because she was hospitalized after the attack.
According to prosecutors, Czuba’s wife said that he regularly listens to conservative talk radio and that, in days before the attack, became irritated over the call for a supposed “national day of jihad” on October 13 — a bunk and perhaps purposeful misinterpretation by right-wing figures of a comment made by a former leader of Hamas to Reuters last Wednesday.
Czuba had been listening to right-wing radio coverage of the Hamas attack in the days before the attack, his wife told detectives, and wanted Shaheen to move out. He evidently believed that he was personally endangered by Shaheen’s presence and that Shaheen “was going to call Palestinian friends to come and harm” him and his wife, said Michael Fitzgerald, a Will County assistant state’s attorney, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
Even though the unsubstantiated threat of “jihad” — a word broadly meaning “struggle” that has been misinterpreted in the U.S. for decades — never came to pass, Czuba still believed something would happen the next day, his wife said. That Saturday morning, he knocked on Shaheen’s door and began arguing with her about the war in Israel.
Shaheen told investigators that she responded, “let’s pray for peace,” after which Czuba began attacking her with a knife. She locked herself in the bathroom and called 911 and told dispatchers that “the landlord is killing her baby with a knife,” Fitzgerald said.
Al-Fayoume was a playful child who loved Legos, swimming, jumping, and playing games, family members and friends said. He had just turned six a few days before he was killed.
Czuba had no prior criminal convictions, public defender Kylie Blatti said in court. A neighbor said that Czuba had helped to build a treehouse for Al-Fayoume only a few years ago, according to The New York Times.
Muslim and Palestinian advocates have strongly condemned the escalation in Islamophobic rhetoric in the days following the Hamas attack and Israel’s subsequent ethnic cleansing of Gaza, in which Israel has killed over 1,000 children so far. Advocates say that anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian rhetoric bears responsibility for Al-Fayoume’s killing.
“We welcome the federal hate crime investigation and hope this tragic case will remind public officials and commentators why they must end dehumanizing anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian bigotry when speaking out about the ongoing violence in the Middle East,” said Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) National Deputy Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell in a statement on Monday.
“Media outlets, political leaders and major corporations have spent more than a week ignoring the suffering of the Palestinian people, justifying war crimes against Palestinians, and spreading inflammatory propaganda and misinformation aimed at Muslims and Palestinians here in America,” Mitchell continued. “This must end. Now.”
The “global day of jihad” rhetoric, for instance, may have played a role in the young boy’s death.
In his Reuters interview, former Hamas leader Khaled Meshal never called for a “global day of jihad,” but the phrase quickly spread across far-right forums and social media networks like X, formerly Twitter. Users referred to Muslim people with racial slurs and told each other to stock up on weapons and ammo.
Prominent conservative figures, including Republican members of Congress, amplified the message. Several Fox News hosts warned about the “day of jihad,” while Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk — who hosts a show that is broadcast on right wing radio stations — said that “we have invited some of the most disgusting people on the planet into the West” and that “we shouldn’t be surprised” if something ad were to happen on the “global day of jihad” on the 13th.
Ultimately, there was no organized global protest or other action that conservatives had spread fear about. But there was at least one incident of violence carried out against a Palestinian-American family, allegedly motivated by the fear mongering.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.