After a mosque in Pflugerville, Texas, was vandalized with torn Qur’ans and smeared feces last Monday in response to the terror attacks in Paris the previous Friday, a seven-year-old local boy is showing the rest of the country how to behave like an adult, and his humane gesture has not gone unnoticed.
“We’ve never had anything like this happen before,” Pflugerville Assistant Chief of Police Jim McLean said of the hate crime committed against the Islamic Center of Pflugerville, adding, “We’re not real sure what the reason for it was. We don’t have a lot of information on it. There’s not video or anything we can wrap our hands around. Our detectives are out working it. We have intelligence we’re trying to gather about folks who may have done it.”
Islamic Center board member Faisal Naeem was in the midst of an interview with local media, Monday, regarding the vandalism when he noticed a small child and his mother watching.
“I just thought they were watching on. This isn’t New York, so when there are a lot of TV cameras, people stop to look. But when I finished, the kid came over and gave me $20.”
Poet Shingi Mavima may have said it best when he wrote on Facebook:
Yet seven-year-old Jack Swanson had the intellectual and emotional maturity necessary for his humanity to rise to the occasion when he decided to donate the $20 he had in his piggy bank to the vandalized Center.
Swanson’s mother, Laura Swanson, told local KXAN, “We were talking in the car how someone smeared poop on their church and that was a really, really awful thing to do and we had a good conversation what churches are for and how everybody’s churches are important.”
She continued, commenting on the vandalism to the mosque, “It’s disgusting, it’s gross. It doesn’t matter what you believe, what I believe, what he believes or anybody believes, all faith is important.”
After such an ugly incident, Naeem said Jack’s gesture really did his heart good. “That kid is hope,” he said.
Mosque members have since come together to give young Swanson an early gift for the holidays – the very iPad he had been saving his money for in the first place.
Featured image via KXAN video screen capture
