From Bloomberg News
Austin’s Bar and Grill on 151st Street in Olathe, Kansas, would look familiar to many suburbanites. The walls are cluttered with television sets featuring basketball, baseball, tennis — even football out of season. The two-dimensional athletes loom over the weekend-warrior variety — an almost entirely white, mostly male crowd congregating after work.
I met Moussa Elbayoumy there for dinner recently because I thought the place might be haunted. It’s the bar where a bigot with a gun last year murdered Srinivas Kuchibhotla, a 32-year-old Hindu immigrant from India who had worked as an engineer at Garmin International, which is located little more than a mile down the road.
The killing featured the cultural cluelessness typical of racial and religious avengers, such as the self-styled patriot who responded to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by randomly murdering a Sikh in Arizona. Kuchibhotla’s killer, who wounded two other men, including a white Kansan who bravely tried to intervene, apparently concluded that his Indian targets were Iranian, more or less, and thus deserving of death.
Elbayoumy, a cardiologist who works as a hospital administrator, leads the Kansas chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. A native of Egypt, he has lived in nearby Lawrence for a quarter century.
Elbayoumy said he doesn’t frequent bars, but he expressed little unease about returning to the scene of the crime. It wasn’t until he started speaking, however, that I realized I had expected an angry man. Instead, when I asked about the attack, and about the stream of bigotry and scapegoating that flows from the White House, he responded with his own outpouring — of optimism and gratitude.
“Generally speaking, over the last several years, the instances of hate and anti-immigration were a lot less in Kansas than we have seen in many other states,” he said. “We have seen people from all walks of life, from all races and faiths, coming to support the family and coming to the support of the Muslim community.”
