Mohamed Noor is a Somali Muslim, the first Somali Muslim on the Minneapolis police force. In 2016, Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges expressed her excitement about that fact: “I want to take a moment to recognize Officer Mohamed Noor, the newest Somali officer in the Minneapolis Police Department. Officer Noor has been assigned to the 5th Precinct, where his arrival has been highly celebrated, particularly by the Somali community in and around Karmel Mall.”
Hodges wasn’t excited because Mohamed Noor had the skills necessary to become a fine police officer. She was only excited because he represented a religious and ethnic group that she was anxious to court. And it became increasingly clear — as we learned about Mohamed Noor’s nervousness and jumpiness and lack of respect for women, and from his own account of events that he relayed to friends (that he was “startled” and reacted by opening fire) — that Mohamed Noor was not cut out to be a policeman. He did not have the temperament for it, and if he hadn’t killed Justine Ruszczyk Damond, he would likely have done something similar at some point.
Mohamed Noor was not competent to be a police officer. If he had not been a Somali and a Muslim, he never would have been on the force at all. Identity politics kills. If there was any lesson to be drawn from the killing of Justine Ruszczyk Damond, that was it. The city of Minneapolis was so eager to have a Somali Muslim police officer on the force that it hired a man who had been found incompetent to hold the job. Even worse, Minneapolis officials did not fire him even when he proved that he was indeed unfit to be a cop.
Now the rioters who are burning down Minneapolis want Noor freed. This is one small indication that these riots are the ugly result of decades of miseducation in which people have been relentlessly hammered with the idea that race and gender and ethnicity are paramount, nothing else matters, and America is intrinsically and systematically racist. So if Mohamed Noor is in prison, it doesn’t matter what he did. He is there solely because he is black, Somali, and Muslim, and must be freed. As the burning of Minneapolis shows, identity politics kills even those who assiduously courted the groups it anoints as victims, and hence sinless and to be preferred over all others.
Minneapolis: Somali rioters shout “Free Mohamed Noor” on CNN.
Mohamed Noor was MPD’s first Somali cop who shot and killed a white woman who called police for help. pic.twitter.com/I2VxGOi56h
— Chris Menahan ?? (@infolibnews) May 30, 2020
“WATCH: Rioters Call for Somali Cop Who Killed White Woman to Be Freed on CNN,” District Herald, May 30, 2020:
A pair of rioters called for the Somali cop who killed a white woman who had called for help to be freed from prison during an interview with CNN.
The rioters, who claim to be against police brutality, were shouting “Free Mohamed Noor.”
Noor was setenced [sic] to 12 and a half years in prison for the 3rd degree murder of Justine Damond, who had moved to the US from Australia to live with her fiance. She called police on July 15, 2017, because she believed that someone might be being sexually assaulted behind their house….
During the riot, a CNN reporter asked the two masked men what “justice” would look like in the case of George Floyd.
The rioters declared, “the same thing which happened to Mohamed Noor.”
“We want a prosecution, that’s what we want,” they said.
“Free Mohamed Noor!” one of them shouted.
“Free that man right now!” the other declared.
“Thank you guys, please be safe out there,” the CNN reporter said….
Noor was a diversity hire who claimed that he had been startled by the 40-year-old yoga teacher. He was the first Somali-American police officer in the city’s Fifth Precinct. He was also the first police officer in Minnesota to be convicted of murder.
Information Liberation noted that “whereas Derek Michael Chauvin was fired and charged immediately, Noor was placed on paid leave for eight months before being charged.”…