Ohio City’s Mayor Apologizes After Police Falsely Arrest Emirati Tourist, Giving Him a Stroke

The mayor of the Ohio city of Avon, not far from Cleveland, has issued a formal apology after Emirati businessman Ahmed al-Menhali was falsely arrested by the city’s police as a “terrorist.”

Profiling of a man from the United Arab Emirates isn’t so unusual in 2016 America, but what happened was, with police bursting into the hotel he was staying at, guns drawn, one of them wielding an assault rifle, and screaming at him. Menhali, who was in the US for medical treatment, had a stroke during the ordeal, and ended up hospitalized for three days.

Menhali had been staying in an apartment since April, there for treatment while on a tourist visa, but was told he’d have to leave the week of the upcoming Republican National Convention, so he went to the Avon hotel in search of someplace to stay in the meantime.

The hotel clerk got the manager, who was supposedly going to give him a list of possible hotels to stay at, but instead they called 911, claiming he was in their lobby “pledging allegiance to ISIS.”

Menhali says what happened to him reflect the “mobilization of American society against Muslims,” adding that he was a victim of “state terrorism.”

18 thoughts on “Ohio City’s Mayor Apologizes After Police Falsely Arrest Emirati Tourist, Giving Him a Stroke”

  1. The USA is a failed state and a police state run by the criminally insane.

  2. If that needs to be approved. I think I wont be putting up ANY more of your stories on social media and maybe I should unfriend your boss!
    I am getting tired of being censored by people whom I am trying to help get more traffic and readership! I’ve put up at least a thousand plus. No more!
    I can’t figure out why alternative media censors.

  3. I don’t know why your previous comment was caught in our automated “a human needs to look at this” filters. I didn’t see anything problematic about it and approved it as soon as I saw it. As for the rest:

    Put up or don’t put up what you want to put up or not put up on social media.

    Friend or unfriend whomever you want to friend or unfriend.

    Comment here or don’t comment here. Sorry, but no, the rules won’t be changed just because you get in a snit about them.

    1. I wonder how many antiwar.com regulars and others are driven away by the past (mostlly) erratic nature of the comment censoring system we are forced to endure. I can remember spending an hour or more writing a comment here, and when I click to post, I find it gone with no trace, or ability to retrieve. I will concede this sort of thing has been happening a lot less lately. It would be a credit to you down there who conduct the deletions, or its software functionality, to bring SOME semblance of accountability to the process, especially during the times of fundraising…. It’$ not something that one would think would need to be mentioned to those with the responsibility of keeping this ship afloat. But when I see the responses to some of these complaints, I often wonder if such thoughts even occur or carry much, if any, weight concerning policy or oversight of such matters that effect our input in this tit for tat life of mostly small victories and defeats that punctuate the general stream of commentary.

    2. “Sorry, but no, the rules won’t be changed because you get in a snit about them”. Rules….????? There are rules…..????? Where can we find these rules….?????

  4. The hotel clerk should be made a prime example of, when making false accusations!!!!

  5. Im sure he will be, but a prime example of a hero by Fox News and the Right wing radicals. They will hold this clerk of as a “Patriot” being condemned by the Libtards for protecting Merica. He will likely be on Fox news with Sheriff Clarke and Joe the Plumber a couple times a week.

    1. Dude… Like, I haven’t gotten stoned for like 30 years now. So, I’d better watch out for people trying to stone me, eh? But this reminds me of PeeWee Herman (I know, that’s a character not his business name) in a Cheech and Chong movie. My God, it’s life imitating art. Cops give the motel clerk crap about a 911 call and then he says “I think they’re Iranian” and the swat team comes roaring down the street. That’s only for the occasional never-been-drugged-citizen who wouldn’t recognize the parallel. I’m as close as I have been since childhood to being a straight normal, and I think it’s pretty common in here for people to have a purple past. I know, I know. Never explain a joke. I’m just shocked the almost exact scenario played out by so-called professional cops.. I know I shouldn’t be but damn…. The only difference is the real life clerk isn’t the one being forcibly removed by the SWAT. That’s where it ceases to be funny.

  6. Nice to see my comment about the automated filter system being held prisoner by that system, until its relevance has timed out, or some staff member frees it. Thereby validating my complaint.

  7. Time for clueless censors to”find out” why their system flags so many non-pernicious comments!

    1. Maybe it is. But it’s also definitely time for commenters to stop calling moderators censors. Nobody is stopping you from saying anything you want to say. Whether or not you get to use Antiwar.com’s microphone isn’t a question of censorship any more than is whether or not I get to put on a concert in your front yard.

      We have an automated system, and we try to tweak it to hold as few “non-pernicious” comments as possible. When a comment IS held, as soon as a moderator sees it, it is approved (if it doesn’t violate our guidelines against spam and hate language), deleted (if it does), and the user is banned if he or she is a persistent offender, or a new person with a REALLY bad entrance (if you burst onto Antiwar.com with a first comment of “Heil Hitler! The Holocaust never happened but it should happen again! Sieg Heil, xoxo StormfrontDude1488,” you’re just gonna be gone).

      Is it a perfect system? Not even close. Nor is it going to be. For every legitimate comment that gets held there are several times as many spam comments trying to sell you pr0n, penis enlargement, cruise tickets, membership in the Illuminati (no, I am not kidding), etc. and a few of the StormfrontDude1488 types. My job is keeping that stuff off of our comment pages while letting the legit stuff through. That job is GOING to get done. If that bugs you, well, didn’t mean to bug you, but it is what it is.

  8. “Where can we”

    You got a mouse in your pocket?

    “these rules….?????”

    They’re not complicated. No spam, no hate speech. Other than that, enjoy.

    1. Maybe the (unwritten) rules seem simple to you Thomas. For us they are too opaque. Many words have been banned here. The word everyone uses to describe the political system in Germany during the war (1937 to 1945) seems to be banned.. You know the 1 that begins with N and ends with I. with a z between. Look Thomas, I’ m not looking for a fight with you. As far as I’m concerned, you are an asset here and you are on the right side of the argument 85% or more of the time. You’ve got a great eye for argumentative slight of hand, and you are diligent and thurough. You seem to be willing to learn and you are mostly dogma adverse in my opinion… The unwritten rules here howeverre are oppressive and arbitrary… Imagine living in some country with unwritten laws…. What could be more tyrannical than that….????? We all need to keep the free exchange of ideas and opinion open to all comers with constructive contributions which do not unjustly demean.. I mostly try to avoid hot button topics, especially ones which involve religion and race. I do however wander off my non-confrontational mindset on ocassion into nasty thickets of hyper emotionalism from time to time… Can’t we all (here) get along…?????

      1. Mv,

        I just went to make sure I was right vis a vis which words are banned on this particular part of the site. Here’s the list:

        [This space intentionally left blank]

        That may not be the case on some other parts of the site (I didn’t go to check before beginning to write this comment), but if so they are words like ni**er and c*nt, not words like Nazi, Jew, etc. (and I’m almost certainly not the one who put those bans in place).

        Comments which get held for moderation get held for moderation by an automated system that does tap the rules options mentioned above if they are being used, but does not rely solely on those rules options — it’s third party software and I don’t entirely understand the criteria it uses, but it seems to be algorithmic and to use elements including user reputation, how many of the user’s comments have been flagged in the past, and yes, what words are in the post. At least that’s my best guess.

        When comments get held for moderation, I go look to see if they’re spam or hate speech. If they’re not, they get approved (whether or not I agree with their content is not a consideration). If they are, they get deleted and, if the offender is especially nasty or especially persistent that person gets banned (the determined ones who find ways around bans and start commenting again generally don’t get automatically re-banned; I wait until they offend again).

        Sorry to be prickly about this, but every once in awhile someone who got a comment deleted will claim — in the middle of a sea of un-deleted negative comments about Israel or Zionism — that their comment got deleted because it was negative about Israel or Zionism.

        No, it got deleted because the commenter went off on a rant about how Bolshevik Khazar Rothschild )ews used mind control to make Bush do 9/11 so that there would be plenty Christian blood to make Purim hamentaschen with for all those Jews who weren’t actually killed in the Holocaust but were secretly moved to Hoboken by THE CONSPIRACY.

        I’m not going to apologize for deleting that shit, and all anyone has to do to ensure that their comments get posted, even if automatically held for awhile first, is not post that kind of shit.

  9. Bingo dude….. You are the man… The US is dangerous to those disposed toward truth and Justice…. All others are charlatans…!!!!!

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