Editorial about the Seattle shooting with some great points

This is an excerpt from the middle of an editorial in today's Seattle PI about yesterday's shooting.

Please read the article to see this excerpt in its full context.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/jamieson/279394_robert29x.html

Excerpt:

"Witnesses say the gunman -- who police identified as Naveed Afzal Haq -- said he was a Muslim American. He stormed the building, huffing about being "angry at Israel."

What else is new? Plenty of folks are angry at Israel.

People either have longstanding and ignorant views about the validity of a Jewish state, or they raise rational concerns about Israel's missile strikes in Lebanon.

People intellectually grasp Israel's stated need to have to deal with Hezbollah terrorists and Palestinian suicide bombers.

At the same time, reasonable people anguish over the mounting civilian toll when Israeli bombs exact collateral damage.

Jews will defend Israel to the end even as the American Jewish community debates internally whether Israel's use of military force is excessive. Meanwhile, Muslims and Palestinians will tell the world their people in the Middle East are forced to live like animals because of what Israel has done.

For every argument there is a gripe, a countergripe and a gripe to the countergripe.

But pulling a semiautomatic trigger before the evening rush hour is not the answer. Violence never is.

Whatever thread of intelligence might have been inside the shooter's mind has become forever lost in a tragic act of exceptional rage directed at Jews.

If he had entered the building with an open mind -- instead of declaring open season -- he could have learned something."


This same author has another editorial from Thursday about how criticizing Israel leads to unfair accusations of antisemitism:

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/jamieson/279019_robert27.html?source=mypi

The language used in this is un-real.

I'm not getting why the attacks on Israel are based on hatred of Jews but the reverse attacks are just collateral damage.

Why is a "Jewish state" any more valid than a "Muslim state?" Religion is at the bottom of this, along with ethnicity. When people understand the concept of a secular state and that everyone has equal rights no matter what religion or ethnicity people are born into, that's when we'll have peace.

That is the great advantage of the US. We have far greater variety and differences, but you don't see anybody killing other people over it, if they do, the incidents are isolated and labeled as hate crimes. True there are fundies claiming it is a "Christian nation" but they are wrong and even they don't kill people for living as nonChristians.

Should there be a "gypsy state?" Because the Nazis systematically killed gypsies, too. Should there be a "homosexual state?" The idea of separating people along these lines is silly and old fashioned. The Muslims are behind the rest of the world in having their Muslim theocratic states. They are not something to emulate.

This article states that the attack on the Jewish Federation Center in Seattle was based on hatred of Jews, not that attacks on Israel are based on hatred of Jews.

Incidentally, many Roma consider the term Gypsy to be pejorative.

Someone who has antagonism towards Muslims who seizes on this incident as an excuse for shooting Muslims, and will walk into a mosque and murder other innocents.

When you have the desire to kill in your blood, any excuse will suffice as a catalyst.

sometimes attends a mosque in Seattle. He told me in that there was an incident with a crazy guy trying to shoot up the mosque, but fortunately no one got hurt because the gun malfunctioned. This just happened a couple of months ago...