On Monday, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Taleb Jawher “pleaded guilty to being an illegal alien in possession of a firearm.”
Jawher admitted striking Christopher Simmons, 34, with the butt of a handgun several times during an altercation outside a Phillips 66 gas station in September. Reportedly, the gun went off when Jawher was hitting Simmons, and the bullet struck the victim.
Jawher came to the United States from Jordan in 2007. He overstayed his visa and obviously managed to find employment. He apparently did not absorb enough of the local culture which frowns on clubbing customers over a disputed candy bar.
The possession charge is federal. Jawher faces deportation as well as prison. He also faces first degree murder charges in St. Louis Circuit Court, the court presided over by St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner who has been accused, among other things, of mismanaging her caseload.
As it happens, it was another dispute at another shop on Florissant Avenue that triggered the shooting of another African American, Ferguson’s Michael Brown, in 2014. Unlike the Brown case, the shooting of Simmons has gotten almost no national attention.
The failure of the major media to pick up a story of a presumably innocent black man killed at the hands of a caucasian was predictable from the beginning. Jawher’s illegal alien status made him an unattractive villain. The media much prefer that foreign nationals, even those here illegally, play the victim role in the morality plays that pass for news.
A Google search of “Taleb Jawher” gets 435 hits. A Google search of “Adam Purinton,” the man who killed an Indian national in Olathe earlier in 2017, nets 122,000 results. Purinton was white. The media eagerly ascribed the killing to the “Trump effect.”
The media could not, however, pull any useful political meaning out of a murder committed by an illegal alien even if he did kill an innocent black man in a highly combustible neighborhood.
