Prague, Feb 8 (CTK) – The stabbing of Syrian Isaac T. by a masked man in Prague on January 30 has been the first attempt at a racially motivated murder of a Muslim in the Czech Republic since the outbreak of the refugee crisis, weekly Tyden writes in its Monday issue.
In reaction to the attack, the police have started guarding the Prague flat of Isaac and his Czech partner Eva Zahradnickova who have been supporting refugees, Tyden writes.
Ten days ago, 41-year-old Isaac went jogging in the morning as usual. There was nobody in the park, except for two hooded men standing on the sidewalk. Isaac thought they were probably waiting for a bus. When he was running the second round, he saw that the men were walking towards him. When they were several metres from him, they moved aside, each to one side of the park path. “I though they were decent men when they moved aside to let me run,” Isaac told Tyden.
One of the men hit Isaac’s shoulder so that Isaac now faced the other man who held a long knife and was ready to stab Isaac into the stomach. “I lifted my leg in the last moment,” Isaac said. He managed to slightly divert the blow and kick the attacker, but the knife got five centimetres deep into his body anyway and blood started seeping through his jogging sweatshirt.
Isaac staggered back a few metres and waited in a defence position whether the fight would go on. But the men only shouted at him, calling him an “Islamic fucker”, and they ran away.
Doctors told Isaac in hospital that, luckily, the injury was not serious. The police ordered Isaac and Eva not to talk about the incident because of the investigation, Tyden writes, adding that its interview with them took place before this order.
Isaac received many threats from extremists in the past few months. Somebody scrabbled a swastika on his car several weeks before the attack. He had two messages under the windshield wiper, “Go back to where you belong” and “We’ll burn you alive.”
Eva received threats on Facebook and her phone. Somebody called her in the middle of the night and a male voice told her that this was the last day of her life. On New Year’ Eve, her voice mail was full of messages such as “We’ll get you”, “We tapped your phone” and “We know which school your kids attend.”
Isaac says he is not afraid of anybody, but that he fears that the aggressive stances on Muslims would get stronger and one of the Muslim would not stand it and retaliate. “That would be a real problem then,” he said.
Extremists had several reasons to hate Isaac and Eva: the couple actively supported refugees, they visited them and raised money for them. They were active on social networks and in media: Eva wrote reports about trips to the Balkans for the Svobodne forum server and TV Barrandov.
But, first of all, Isaac and Eva became a symbol of the decline of the Czech nation because they allegedly broke a Czech family and because a married Czech woman lived together with a divorced Muslim man, Tyden writes.
Martin Konvicka, leader of the Bloc against Islam movement, wrote about Zahradnickova on his Facebook profile in December, saying the Czech mother of four welcomed refugees so much that she left her Czech husband and found Islam in the arms of one of the visa- and sex-craving men, Tyden writes.
Eva raised several children with her husband and they owned a publishing house in Brno together, but their marriage underwent a crisis and they split last year. Eva decided to go to the Balkans to see the situation of refugees by her own eyes. She planned only a single journey, but she was so terrified by what she saw at the Roszke border crossing between Serbia and Hungary that she started going there regularly, in a car full of food and clothing. She also started visiting the Czech detention centre for refugees in Bela, central Bohemia, where she met Isaac who was a Arabic-Czech translator here, Tyden writes.
Isaac was born in the Caucasus, but his family had to flee the Soviet Union because his father was involved in a movement fighting for a broader autonomy of the Circassian ethnic group who are Muslims. The family settled in Damascus where Isaac graduated in medicine and met his first Czech partner. They married, had a son and moved to the Czech Republic 16 years ago.
Isaac first ran a restaurant in Prague and then he started working for a firm exporting wood to the Middle East. His marriage was divorced eight years ago. Isaac began to take an active part in public life. Shortly after the terrorist attacks in Paris last November, Isaac addressed a Prague rally. “I felt that a Czech Muslim should say aloud that he condemns terrorism and that their community is non-violent,” he told Tyden.
But extremists began to focus even more negative attention on him afterwards. The neo-Nazi server White Media, which released Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka’s private e-mails, put Isaac and Eva on the list on “xenophiles, perverts and unwanted persons,” which includes for example journalist Petr Honzejk, economist Tomas Sedlacek and lawmaker Jiri Zlatuska, Tyden writes.
The news about the attack on Isaac did not provoke many reactions in Czech society and no leading politician explicitly condemned it, the weekly writes.
When Sudanese student Hassan Elamin Abdelradi died after he was stabbed by a radical at a Prague university campus in 1997, then parliament speaker Milos Zeman even called for the ban on the skinhead neo-Nazi movement in the country, Tyden writes.
Jan Charvat, who specialises in extremism, said the public knows little about Isaac’s case as neither the attacker nor the result of the police investigation are known, while in 1997 the student died, the murderer was caught and he was clearly identified as a right-wing extremist. Moreover, Isaac is a Muslim activist, which is a combination that is viewed very negatively in the Czech Republic now, Charvat added.
