Next April, the the boys accused in the Fawnbrook case admitted guilt — juvenile court is the equivalent of pleading guilty — and were sentenced in June. The judge barred city officials from commenting on the outcome of the trial, but juvenile justice experts told me the boys would most likely be placed on probation and required to undergo mandatory therapy to correct their behavior. Even in Idaho, a state with strict sentencing requirements, the law prohibits imprisonment for anyone under 10 and only allows it in extreme cases for anyone under 12.
Late on a Monday evening in June, I received a phone call from Dalos, the Scanner Man. He asked me if I had heard of the “fireworks flying around Twin Falls.” News of the boys’ fate had reached the public. “The suspects didn’t go to jail or anything,” he said, adding that city residents were “angry.” Facebook posts about the story were flooding his news feed again. “They blame it on Muslim law,” he said. One of the circulating articles, from a site called Bare Naked Islam, included a photograph of the judge presiding over the case with a large red arrow pointing at his head, alongside the caption “Corrupt Judge.” Another article published the judge’s home address and telephone number, prompting a new wave of harassment a year after the initial attack.
The arguments between Shawn and Camille Barigar have calmed down, but they have discovered that they disagree on whether Islamic teachings conflict with American social norms. “I can’t take the plunge,” Shawn told me, “because you’re Muslim, you read the Koran verbatim, and you’re going to perform genital mutilation.” Camille said she supported the local resettlement program, but thought her husband’s reluctance to even consider cultural differences or acknowledge any nuance was naive. “I think we need to be careful,” she said. “And I don’t want to be afraid to talk about it entirely or sound racist.” It’s precisely this discomfort that allows people like Stranahan to dominate the conversation.
Part of the reason fear of Islam persists in Twin Falls is because local leaders refuse to defuse it, according to Matt Christensen, 36, a Times-News editor. While Brown wrote articles that revealed the truth about the Fawnbrook affair, Christensen posted comments lambasting people who spread lies. He told me he had closed-door meetings with city officials, in which he asked them to write guest editorials doing the same, but none of them did so. Christensen suspected they feared one of the region’s most reliable political dangers, the same force that drives Democratic candidates to register as Republicans: Being outflanked on the right is the quickest way to lose your job.
“Behind closed doors, they were all telling you that they were pro-refugees, and we wanted them to come out and make that statement in a public space, but that never really happened,” he told me. -he says. “It was frustrating for us, especially at the beginning, because we really felt like the paper was on its own.” He continued: “There were days where we were like, God, what are we doing here? We are writing a story and it will reach 50,000 people. Breitbart writes a story and it will reach 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 million people. What kind of voice do we have in this debate?
The refugee resettlement center has received a dramatic increase in donations from local residents over the past year. But those in the city who support the program have often been drowned out by the relatively smaller, but more vocal, group of activists who oppose it. Brown said he expects an anti-Sharia bill to be introduced in the state Legislature early in the next session in 2018. Bills like this, which attempts to ban the use of Islamic law in U.S. courts, were introduced over the past two years in 2018. Boise but never passed. He speculated that the dynamics of the past year could lead to a different outcome. “There are a lot of people who feel like society is changing too fast, that the community is changing too fast,” he told me. “And who view others who don’t like them or who don’t speak their language as a threat or a sign that their culture will weaken. And they want to do what they can to stop this.
