As scores of Eid-celebrating Somalis headed for the Masjida Salaam mosque recently, Maine Wire writer Jon Fetherston stood outside on a public sidewalk yelling questions at them and later waving a sword.

A 16-year-old boy approaching the door reached into his pocket and pulled out a small wad of dollar bills — and maybe a $5 one, too — that he’d received from family and friends who were in a giving mood during the holiday. He planned to take a younger brother to McDonald’s with the money.

The boy held the money like a fan over his face, to try to prevent his picture from winding up on Maine Wire’s race-baiting website — and also perhaps because teens have a mischievous streak.

Then the boy went inside to pray.

I spoke to his family at length last week about what happened next and how the casual cruelty of The Maine Wire is affecting Lewiston’s growing Somali community.

The Maine Wire raced to turn an image captured by a Maine Wire operative of the moment the boy held up his cash into a life-size cutout that stood at the entrance to the influential nonprofit’s Republican gubernatorial debate last week in Bangor. Its staff posed beside it and every GOP contender for the Blaine House walked past it.

At the end of the debate, Maire Wire editor Steve Robinson offered a last word online about the debate he moderated and then, for the final word on the event, turned to the cutout and asked, “What do you think, sir? Do you think we should have asked more questions about home health care fraud?”

After a pause, he smirked. “Man of few words,” Robinson concluded.

Somehow, in the twisted world of The Maine Wire, a happy teenage boy had become a symbol of the unproven charges of fraud against a handful of Somali businesses. His picture has been splashed across the internet, spurring relatives and friends from as far away as Arizona and Utah to phone in concern.

The boy’s mother, Shafea Omar, said her son hasn’t left their apartment since, skipping school and more because he’s “afraid to just go outside.”

Omar said she and her husband raised eight children in Lewiston during the past 23 years, working hard to get by and, usually, appreciating the support of most people in the city.

The Maine Wire, she said, is trying to shatter the community with a parade of hyped-up stories that it has churned out for months.

“Why are they after the Somalis?” Omar asked. “A lot of people in our community are crying. I don’t know how to live anymore. It’s frightening.”

The boy’s aunt, Hasno Omar, said it feels as though The Maine Wire and its often rabid fans “are coming for the whole community.”

The Maine Wire obviously relishes its stream of racist clickbait and the sickening influence it holds over Republican politics in the state.

The boy it smeared looked at me with deep sadness when I asked him if he wanted to talk about any of this. I readily understood why he didn’t.

It’s time every decent Mainer challenges these purveyors of hate. Every honorable person, and voter, in this state should be standing in solidarity with the Somalis and shunning the extremists who haunt them. This is a moment when the eyes of history are on us.