Third grade used to be about learning to write in cursive and mastering multiplication tables. In the America that the left has given us, it’s a different story, as we can see from a ghastly incident that just took place in Savage, Minn.
If you haven’t heard of Savage, Minn., that’s only because it isn’t. Savage is a suburban town of 33,000 that is fifteen miles from downtown Minneapolis and, since its founding in 1852, has been worlds away from any actual savagery. Now, however, it has started to live up to its name, thanks to the “diversity” that has been pushed on Americans as a wonderful way to make our nation more “vibrant.”
You want vibrant? Savage is plenty vibrant now. Shawna Larson’s daughter is in third grade at Hidden Valley Elementary School in Savage. On Monday, Minnesota’s Alpha News reported that Larson is “demanding answers after she says her nine-year-old daughter was jumped on the school playground by a group of girls who she was told targeted her daughter because ‘she wasn’t Muslim.’”
Larson said that Hidden Valley’s principal and her daughter’s third-grade teacher broke the news to her when she went to pick up her daughter from school: “They came up to my vehicle and informed me that there was an incident at school that day. They wanted to make it very apparent that my daughter didn’t do anything to cause this, and they told me this was a calculated incident and that she had been attacked on the playground by four other students in her grade. I ended up learning… this was due to her race and her religion because she wasn’t Muslim. So that was pretty jarring to hear.”
Indeed. But it wasn’t until the following day that Larson realized how badly her daughter had been hurt: “That’s when we noticed that she had a black eye, and we immediately took a picture of it. When she came home that day, I just kind of looked her over and she had bruises on her arms and a bruise on her back, bruises all over her legs.” This isn’t Mary Tyler Moore’s Minnesota, not anymore.
Not only did the Muslim girls beat Larson’s daughter; they also threatened her that they would claim victimhood if she complained: “She told me she tried to get up and when she tried to get up and go for help the first time, and I believe it was the first time that they had gotten her on the ground, that she was trying to fight back and they had told her that if she hit them or she touched them, that they would hurt themselves and tell the teacher that she had hurt them. So, she just told me, ‘You know, so all I could do there is lay there, Mom.’”
Larson noted that school officials did nothing to punish the attackers: “My daughter hadn’t done anything to initiate this or create what had happened. This was just because of her race and her religion. So that was a big thing. Just the lack of action the school was taking, which I do understand to a point that the school has their own rules and their own laws that they have to follow. But the fact that because this was race and religion-fueled, the fact that they were never suspended or expelled from school or redirected to distance learning instead of continuing to stay in the classroom, which two of them were in the same classroom as my daughter, is alarming, regardless of their age.”
Related: Maine Kid Who Tried to Kill Cops With Machete Is Sentenced, Elephant in Room Still Ignored
Now, this is just kids being kids, right? This sort of thing is just going to happen from time to time on whatever pretext, right? Well, there will always be bullies, but the attack on Larson’s daughter was different. Attacking non-Muslims is unfortunately not just something that “extremists” do but is a Qur’anic imperative: “Muhammad is the apostle of Allah. Those who follow him are ruthless to unbelievers, merciful to one another” (48:29). There are numerous incidents of Muslims targeting non-Muslims worldwide in jihad terror attacks as well as in simple acts of petty harassment.
This incident in Savage was a harbinger of many more such incidents to come. All one need do is look at any place in the world where non-Muslims and non-Muslims, both in significant numbers, live close to one another. There is not a single such place where the Muslims don’t carry out regular acts of violence against the non-Muslims. Why did our leftist moral superiors assume that America would be different? Or did they assume that at all?