I am pissed off at Syed Farook.
He was born in America, with all the advantages that offers. He was married, he had a job with the State of California doing useful work, he earned a middle class income, with PERS and great benefits.
Yet he shot up a workplace. He killed 14 people, so far. The ingrate.
At this moment, when I write, at 11:00 a.m. Thursday morning we don't know the motive for the shooter, but what we do know is that the internet and cable news world is all buzzed up hoping the identity and motives of the shooter can be used as a point of attack.
We are witnessing a partisan search for motive: no one wants the shooter to have been a member of "their team".
People who want to blame guns hope the guy is "just another crazy American with easy access to firearms", in this case having "gone postal" and shot up his workplace.
The Fox-talk radio-Republican candidate group is emphasizing his Middle Eastern ethnicity, his Saudi bride, the preparation for the attack. I am confident that a jihadi-Muslim-threat story will be the one that has political significance. After all, the male shooter is named Syed Farook, and he is Muslim. Case closed.
The Fox News people might feel a bit of whiplash. In the days following the shooting at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs the Fox News anchors--plus their media correspondent Howard Kurtz--have been indignant and angry that anyone would think there could be any cause and effect relationship between widespread public statements on Fox and by candidates denouncing Planned Parenthood claiming they are selling baby parts and a shooter who went to a Planned Parenthood clinic, murdered people, and then when captured muttered "no more baby parts."
A relationship between politics and a shooting at Planned Parenthood? Impossible!!! Ted Cruz actually publicly opined that the shooter was actually a left wing transgender Democrat, acting out of gender confusion. Anything is better than admitting that political language created a crime.
But my liberal and pro-immigration friends need to take stock and realize that this event has moved the political center of gravity. A native born American citizen, settled into a solidly middle class occupation--a union job with a pension and great benefits--shot up a Christmas Party. Apparently the usual liberal multicultural verities do not always work. He was not in an impoverished underclass. He was a young man in a good job with a future. He was married. He was born in America. He had every advantage in assimilation that I would presume would inoculate a person against domestic terror.
But--unlike Fox--I am willing to face the facts as they appear to be emerging: An American Muslim wantonly killed 14 people at current count.
Muslims are not "my team". But acceptance of immigrants is "my team", and this event is a huge backward step for immigrant acceptance because it is an undeniable data point: some immigrants do inexplicable murder and terror, (probably--the evidence is still coming in) for religious and ideological reasons relating to the ethnic-religious identity of the former country.
This will strengthen Donald Trump's hand. And it will weaken Hillary's. And, alas, it will not be simply the politics of prejudice, it will be politics informed in part by observation of real life. Farook shot up a Christmas party at a government office.
I don't have compassion for Farook, I don't want to relate to and contextualize his situation; I am shocked by this shooting and condemn it. And I fully expect renewed efforts to protect the public from other crimes like this. One does not need to be racist or anti-immigrant to feel this way. People got killed.
A warning to Hillary: any candidate who attempts to put this crime into some sort of sociological context of American failure will be punished harshly by voters. It is OK for liberals to note a crime (mass murder), assess a motive (very possibly jihad), and then to take actions to reduce likelihood of repetition.
If Hillary handles this correctly, this will be a small win for Trump. If she handles it poorly it will be a big win for Trump.
3 comments:
14 killed 21 now reported as injured
RLS corrected an error in my death count. Thanks!
But for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, three months from now, only two great American debates-- gun control and Muslim (Syrian is the subset) immigration-- would have kept the San Bernardino Islamic shooters a little bit in the news, save for prosecution of any of their aiders and abettors. This couple is the perfect storm of gun control and Muslim immigration, with Syed Rizwan Farook having a gun background, and his wife Tashfeen Malik being a green card wife from Pakistan. Our Muslim immigration versus gun control debate has a few ground rules from what I can tell. 1. American born Muslims don't count as "Muslim immigrants" just because their parents were Muslim immigrants. 2. Caucasian or Black American Islam converts don't count at all on the immigration issue, but may count just on the gun control issue. 3. Automatic weapons, guns or rifles, count on the gun control issue whether legally purchased or not, but neither revolvers nor pressure cookers will count. 4. Anyone who states that Islam is part of the problem is an actual or suspected Islamophobe (Trump and all Republican candidates), and anyone who won't say the words "Islamic Terrorism" is a feckless liberal (Obama, Hillary and all Democratic candidates). Note: Hillary's positioning on the Muslim immigration debate is a little complicated because she was slow to admit Benghazi was “Islamic terrorism”, and her assistant Huma Mahmood Abedi is a USA born Muslim of Muslim immigrants who married a Jew, Anthony Weiner, in 2010. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huma_Abedin). But Trump saying he’d consider putting all Muslim Americans in a database makes the matchup a litter fairer.
The April 15, 2013 Boston Marathon Islamic bombing seems so long ago now, when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his brother used, not guns, but a pressure cooker bomb. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Marathon_bombing). Lacking the gun issue, what keeps Boston in the news is the string of convictions this year of their various aiders and abettors (http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/05/us/boston-tsarnaev-friends-sentenced/). Under the rules, being children of Muslim immigrants generally does not count as ammo on the Muslim immigration issue. Even May 3, 2015 seems too far in the past for a mainstream press to recollect that day in Garland, Texas when two Islamic shooters, dressed and armed just like the San Bernardinoians, Elton Simpson and Nadir Hamid Soofi, were killed by police before they could avenge Mohamed cartoons. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Culwell_Center_attack#Perpetrators). These shooters count big time on gun control. But with Elton Simpson being a Muslim convert, he doesn't count on the immigration issue, nor does Nadir Soofi, USA born with his father from Pakistan and an American mother. Garland stays a little bit in the news still only because of the pending criminal case against an alleged accomplice providing the guns, Abdul Malik Abdul Kareem. (http://www.abc15.com/news/region-phoenix-metro/central-phoenix/accused-terror-suspect-in-phoenix-court). So he counts on guns, but even if guilty, Kareem doesn't count on immigration because he only converted to Islam in 2013 and gave up his US born name of Decarus Thomas. Similarly, the 2009 killing of 13 people by Islamist Nidal Malik Hasan doesn't count on immigration because he was USA born to Palestinian immigrants; and he doesn't count on guns because as an Army Major, guns were part of his job.
So, as fate often thrives on irony, the San Bernardinoians, Mr. Syed Rizwan Farook who obtained the guns, and who likes "target practice", and his freshly arrived Pakistani immigrant wife, Ms. Tashfeen Malik, are the ideal couple for America's debates on gun control and Muslim immigration. They will go down as the Bonnie and Clyde of these two American culture wars, and more clearly delineate the battlegrounds for Trump and Clinton.
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