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US man making anti-Islam rants, fatally stabs 2 trying to restrain him

Jeremy Joseph Christian, 35, was booked into a Multnomah County jail after stabbing to death two men that tried to intervene when he targeted two Muslim women with anti-Muslim hate speech.

A man shouting anti-Muslim hate rhetoric at two young Muslim women on a train in the US state of Oregon has stabbed to death two passengers who tried to intervene, police say.

Police authorities in the city of Portland cited witnesses as saying that a white male passenger riding a light-rail train early Friday afternoon began yelling what “would best be characterized as hate speech toward a variety of ethnicities and religions,” adding that “some of the slurs” targeted two female passengers, one of whom was wearing a hijab.

“This suspect was on the train and he was yelling and ranting and raving a lot of different things, including what we characterized at hate speech or biased language,” Portland police spokesman Pete Simpson said during a news conference Friday evening.

He added that the victims had tried to calm down the abusive passenger, but “they were attacked viciously by the suspect."

“It appears preliminarily that the victims — at least a couple of them — were trying to intervene in his behavior, deescalate him and protect some other people on the train when [the suspect] viciously attacked them,” Simpson further stated.

The attacks came just as Islam’s holy month of Ramadan was about to commence. According to Simpson, Portland police had already reached out to Muslim organizations, mosques and imams in the community to talk about continuation of extra patrols during Ramadan.

Portland police officers investigate the deadly stabbings on a Metropolitan Area Express train in northeast Portland, Oregon.

“Our thoughts are with the Muslim community,” Simpson underlined. “As something like this happens, this only instills fear in that community.”

“It’s horrific. There’s no other word to describe what happened today,” he noted. “It is simply horrible.”

According to police, officers responded to calls of a disturbance at the Hollywood Transit Station in east Portland at about 4:30 pm local time on Friday, when they found three stabbing victims, all adult men.

One of the victims died at the scene despite lifesaving measures by medics, and another was pronounced dead at a hospital, while the third was being treated for non-life-threatening injuries and expected to survive.

Meanwhile later on Friday, police officers were able to locate and arrest the suspect, who had fled the train on foot.

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Police on Saturday identified the suspect as 35-year-old Jeremy Joseph Christian, of north Portland. He was being held without bail on two counts of aggravated murder, one count of attempted murder, two counts of intimidation in the second degree and one count of possession of a restricted weapon as a felon.

According to the anti-racist US rights group,  Southern Poverty Law Center,  a Facebook page they said belonged to Christian showed he held racist, white supremacist and extremist beliefs. On that profile, the Facebook user said he supported creating a “White homeland” in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.

The US-based Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) called on President Donald Trump in a tweet to denounce bigotry following the Oregon attack, blaming him for putting a focus on militant Muslim groups and strong anti-immigrant rhetoric, which they say contributed to a 50-percent spike in hate crimes against Muslims last year.

Trump has spoken of establishing a registry of all Muslims in the United States, claimed that “Islam hates us,” and sought to impose a travel ban on citizens of some Muslim-majority nations that the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals said “drips with religious intolerance, animus, and discrimination.”

Although Trump did manage to release a statement wishing all Muslims a “joyful Ramadan,” following what has become commonplace among recent American presidents, the statement focuses more on terrorism than Islam, as widely noted in press reports in the US and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Portland City Commissioner Chloe Eudaly also released a statement on behalf of Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler and the City Council, describing the train attack in Portland “especially sad and disturbing.”

“People lost their lives or were injured because they stood up to hate,” said the statement. “We need to offer our heartfelt support to the women and others who were targeted. The courage of the people who stood up for them is a reminder that we as a city need to stand together to denounce the hate.”


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