I’m Shocked…

Michelle Malkin has decided that the loon, Omeed Aziz Popal, is in fact, just your garden variety loon and not some sinister Jihadi that is carrying out a cunning plan of slowly killing Americans over the course of several millenia.

Of course, this hasn’t stopped her from pumping up her image as one of the few indefatigable warriors against Jihadism. In looking at her evidence that there is some sort of Isamofacist movement to sow the seeds of destruction via “lone whacko” muslim gunmen I have to say I’m deeply unimpressed. Over a 12 year period we have 9 shooters and 1 driver who have engaged in deranged and murderous behavior. This doesn’t strike me as sufficient evidence that there is some sort of “rash of ‘lone’ Muslim shooters who have murdered Americans”.

Of course, she leaves open the door that he could be a jihadi terrorist,

As I linked the other day, we have one report of an eyewitness who told KTVU that she heard Popal say “I’m a terrorist, I don’t care.”

It’s a piece of the puzzle. I’m just not sure how large it is, or how reliable. I do know that it is definitely not as strong a piece of evidence of jihadi intentions as the statements Haq and Taheri-Azar made at the time of, and in the aftermath of, their assaults made in the name of revenge on behalf of Muslims. Or consider the extensive Muslim diatribes of Beltway-area snipers Lee Malvo and John Muhammad. It’s possible this could change with an outburst during his arraignment, letters to the press citing chapter and verse of the Koran, or (unlikely) disclosure by San Francisco police of statements Popal may have made to them that indicate anti-Israel/anti-American bias. Possible, but unlikely, I think.

With this kind of thinking we have to conclude that environmentalists are dangerous nutjobs because Ted Kaczynski had a long and tedious manifesto on how man is destroying the environment. Or what if a psychopath who was brought up a Christian cited chapter and verse from the Bible? Are we to conclude that Christianity is the religion of psychopaths? There are some pretty disturbing passages in the Bible that one can point too, just as Malkin et. al. can with the Koran. Heck, I can point to Albert Fish as a fine example.

About the age of fifty-five, Fish started to experience hallucinations and delusions. “He had visions of Christ and His angels….he began to be engrossed in religious speculations about purging himself of iniquities and sins, atonement by physical suffering and self-torture, human sacrifices….He would go on endlessly with quotations from the Bible all mixed up with his own sentences, such as ‘Happy is he that taketh Thy little ones and dasheth their heads against the stones.”

Actually, that last line is very similar to Psalms 137:9 (King James Version),

Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

I think many Christians would be offended to have this kind of thing thrown in their face along with snide comments about Christianity being a religion of peace.

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t ignore Muslim terrorists, the threat of terrorism from Muslim countries/organizations. However, this idea that Muslims are prone to violence simply because they are Muslim strikes me as having damned little evidence to support it. It is the kind of thing that fuels the hysteria that lead to Raed Jarrar’s t-shirt incident.

FILED UNDER: Environment, Religion, Terrorism, US Politics, , , , , , ,
Steve Verdon
About Steve Verdon
Steve has a B.A. in Economics from the University of California, Los Angeles and attended graduate school at The George Washington University, leaving school shortly before staring work on his dissertation when his first child was born. He works in the energy industry and prior to that worked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Division of Price Index and Number Research. He joined the staff at OTB in November 2004.

Comments

  1. Bithead says:

    Michelle Malkin has decided that the loon, Omeed Aziz Popal, is in fact, just your garden variety loon and not some sinister Jihadi that is carrying out a cunning plan of slowly killing Americans over the course of several millenia.

    I’m unaware she ever claimed he was more.
    Nor have I, in spite of the fact that I… correctly, I think… suggested he was an islamic terrorist.

    Does one really need to be an official member of a terrorist organization to qualify as a terrorist? Isn’t that like saying you have to be working for a TV station a radio station or a newspaper before somebody can call you a “journalist” ? or, isn’t that like saying that just because Dan rather was an unofficial part of the Democratic National Committee, that he hadn’t become a cheerleader for them?

    I suggest the linkage in the case of Omeed Aziz Popal, is a religious and cultural one, not so much in the membership of …(insert your favorite terrorist organization here )…

  2. Steve Verdon says:

    I’m unaware she ever claimed he was more.

    She didn’t nor did I say or imply that she did. She has jumped to this conclusion in the past, but this time she went slow. Why beats me, but maybe she decided to play this one responsibly for a change vs. simply throwing out red meat to her hangers-on.

    Does one really need to be an official member of a terrorist organization to qualify as a terrorist?

    No, but be careful, change the definition of terrorist to too broad a definition and soon garden variety criminals will be terrorists and the word will lose all meaning.

  3. LJD says:

    No, but be careful, change the definition of terrorist to too broad a definition and soon garden variety criminals will be terrorists and the word will lose all meaning.

    Ah yes, the old slippery slope…

    I don’t think we’ll be seeing litterbugs join the ranks of ‘terrorist’ any time soon.

  4. Steve Verdon says:

    True, LJD, but if somebody–black, white, asian, hispanic or even…gasp…muslim–were to run up to you, shove a gun in your face and demand your money…I bet you’d be terrified. Is that criminal a terrorist? Of course not. Despite the “rash” of postal workers going postal are you terrified when you go into the post office? Continue to feel afraid of muslims in general if you wish, but I think you are being unnecessarily afraid.

  5. LJD says:

    Continue to feel afraid of muslims in general if you wish, but I think you are being unnecessarily afraid.

    Don’t know where you got that, but, I’m more afraid of morons that vote (of any race, color or creed) than I am of ‘Muslims in general’.

  6. Steve Verdon says:

    LJD,

    Here is the problem:

    1. Psycho babbles religious gobbldygook when apprehended/in custody.

    2. Terrorist spews religious gobbldygook when apprehended/in custody.

    Looking at the “religious gobbldygook” and concluding terrorist in both cases strikes me as piss-poor thinking (or something worse). If you can’t see this difference then I can’t help you.

  7. I think it’s just a matter of time before they all start coming out of the woodwork.

  8. Mark Jaquith says:

    Hm, it would be interesting to do a study of Christians vs. Muslims in faith-based killing rampages in the U.S. I remember seeing a lot of reports over the years where people thought that God (you know, the Caucasian one named Jesus) told them to kill someone and they obeyed.

  9. Steve Verdon says:

    Andrea Yates anyone?

  10. Bithead says:

    I suppose an argument can be made that a terrorist is over the edge mentally, by definition.