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.
