St. Louis Park family loses son to ISIS

Stephen Montemayor covers the courts for the Star Tribune. If you’ve been following the saga of the “Minnesota men” — young Minnesota Somali Muslims who have conspired to lend a hand to ISIS over the past several years — you will want to take a look at Montemayor’s Star Tribune story on six open cases involving support for ISIS in Minnesota.

St. Louis Park is the Minneapolis suburb that was the home of such famous native Minnesotans as Pulitizer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, Academy Award-award-winning filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen and former humorist Al Franken. In the words of the Bob Dylan song, however, things have changed.

In his story today Montemayor focuses on one case in particular. As Montemayor tells it, it’s an interesting case involving a St. Louis Park family whose son left them in Morocco to join ISIS. At the time of his disappearance in 2015 he was a student at Normandale Community College in Bloomington, Minnesota. According to Montemayor, the son’s “motivation remains a mystery.” That is actually what he says.

The son’s name is Abdelhamid Al-Madioum. He left to join ISIS while on a family trip to visit relatives in Morocco. The reader is left to draw the inference that Al-Madioum is — how to put it? — Muslim, a word which appears nowhere within the four corners of Montemayor’s article. Conspicuous by their absence from Montemayor’s article are the words “Muslim” or “Islam.” I could say that their disappearance remains a mystery, but their disappearance is about as mysterious as Al-Madioum’s.

UPDATE: After writing this post I tweeted Steve. He took the trouble to respond. I appreciate his willingness to engage.

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