Donald Trump will meet Thursday with families and survivors of last week's stabbing attack at Ohio State University — but the president-elect's Twitter rant about the assault has led one victim to pass on the opportunity.
"I was frankly a little put off by Mr. Trump's initial reaction to the attack, where he got on Twitter and quickly blamed immigration policies for allowing this to happen," William Clark, an engineering professor emeritus who was stabbed in the Nov. 29 attack, told Brooke Baldwin on CNN.
"I've been a professor for 35 years — and I know these issues when students do these things, they're often more complex than that."
Ohio State student Abdul Razak Ali Artan, 18, first rammed a campus crowd with his car before jumping out with a butcher's knife and stabbing Clark and 10 other people.
Artan, a Somali immigrant, was then shot to death by a university police officer.
The Islamic State claimed Artan as a "soldier" — and law enforcement officials said that he was radicalized by the terrorist group.
Trump slammed the attack on Twitter:
Artan's car struck Clark in the attack — and the retired professor suffered deep cuts above his right ankle and bruising on his left leg, Cleveland.com reports.
He was later treated and released from a local hospital.
Clark told Baldwin Thursday that another reason why he would not meet with Trump was because other victims suffered far more serious injuries than he did.
"From my healing standpoint, I didn't feel it was a necessary step for me," he said. "I'm older than most of the other victims — and they had a more traumatic experience being chased by a guy with a knife than I did."
But if he did talk with Trump, Clark said that he would encourage the president-elect to embrace diversity and inclusion.
"I'd like him to embrace a message that a vital component of all our universities is their multidisciplinary multinational, multi-everything character," he said.
"I'd like to hear him open up and embrace that rather than start singling out specific minority groups and essentially addressing them and saying we can exclude them from this country and our society.
"I don't think that's the way America has been built — and I don't think that's the way forward for this country."
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