Terror and Timing

It's unbelievable. A terrorist attack occured last Friday at the offices of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle. This is not only in my vicinity, but is also where my wife used to work. Great. I'm well-poised to cover the events as they unfold and even steal a march on the rest of the blogosphere with my insider's angle. What happens? I'm stuck in a cabin on the San Juan Islands without an internet connection in sight when the story breaks and only find out about it from a newspaper in the marina shop the next day.

Now that I'm back, the story is, of course, as dead as mutton and the only thread left is how the media and "community leaders" are handling this. Despite the fact that the perpetrator walked into a Jewish office declared "I am a Muslim" and started blazing away with a couple of hand guns, the local authorities and the press immediately jumped into action and dismissed any idea that this might be terrorism. Following the pattern of the El Al shootings, the DC snipers, the North Carolina SUV attack and others, this has been stamped "isolated incident" where the motives remain as much a mystery as the recent case where a man walked into a post-rave party and shot up the room before committing suicide. Disaffected infidel and self-proven anti-Semitic Muslim-- the line between is so blurred. Three days after a coldly calculated attack on an office guarded by a security system by a man with a clearly expressed identity and motive that left one person was left dead and five others, including a pregnant woman, in hospital, the "gunman's" own words have been disregarded and he has now been safely pegged as a confused loner who had nothing to do with Islam and even flirted with Christianity recently.

I would have thought that a well-adjusted terrorist is not exactly a common thing, and that by his own words and deeds it's pretty damn obvious that he'd made up his mind and chose the Religion of Peace, but according the the likes of the Seattle PI, this has nothing whatsoever to do with Jihad.

Move along, people. Nothing to see here.

On the plus side, the local Muslim community has condemned the shooting and stood with their Jewish counterparts, though the Looney Left has shown all the sensitivity of a doorknob, as illustrated by one Cindy Sherbert of the Palestine Solidarity Committee:

This clash of Seattle cultures was bitterly in evidence Friday as Sherbert and dozens of others gathered in Westlake Park to protest Israel -- even as a man was firing a semiautomatic pistol at women in the Jewish Federation building a few blocks away.

"It was just a bizarre coincidence that everything happened all at once that day," said Sherbert, who learned of Haq's attack as she was preparing to attend the rally. "I wasn't sure if we were even going to go ahead with it. I was terribly sad, and didn't want to be seen as insensitive -- I was quite devastated."

But she went, anyway, finding it impossible not to protest Israel's military.

She might have been marching through her fellow citizen's blood, but that's okay, because she was "devastated."

How will this play out in Seattle? That's easily predicted-- if you wear big enough blinkers.

"We debate, we argue and discuss, and we go on and on and on, frankly never reaching consensus," said Robert Jacobs, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League in the Northwest. Everlasting peaceful debate is just as he likes it.

"This is Seattle. The issues don't get resolved."

Yes, just talk and talk and talk. Unfortunately, the barbarians we face tend to do their talking with Kalashnikovs, bombs, rockets and airliners filled with innocent people.

We might just end up talking ourselves to death.