By John Burtis
Thursday, august 3, 2006
a few days ago Seattle, Washington, was a witness to one of those small dramas of urban violence which in most cases might have passed us by except for the fact that the alleged murderer, Naveed afzal Haq, was a Muslim, and the victims - all women, one of whom was killed and five of whom were wounded - were all employees of the Jewish Federation of Seattle.
While all the facts aren't in, it appears that the troubled Mr. Haq may have attended a Muslim rally before picking up his two semi-automatic handguns and calmly driving to the Jewish Federation to wreak some havoc.
On the way, Mr. Haq was stopped for a minor motor vehicle violation, but his demeanor betrayed no evidence of any base motives and he was let go to continue on his mission, a telling indication of his placid demeanor, reminiscent of Mr. Mohammed atta's behavior at the Bangor airport on the morning of his grisly triumph.
according to the Seattle Police, Mr. Haq hid behind a plant in the building's foyer then forced his way inside the building by holding a pistol to the head of a 13 —year-old girl, who remained unharmed in the incident.
Once inside, the suspect opened fire with his weapons, killing Pam Waechter outright, and wounding Dayna Klein, Cheryl Stumbo, Layla Bush, Christina Rexroad, and Carol Goldman, all of Seattle.
Tammy Kaiser, who told her story to Cheryl Phillips of the Seattle Times, escaped by climbing out her office window and fell onto a dumpster, catching her hair in the window latch, which finally gave way and dropped with her, while losing her sandals and her Star of David in the process.
as she hid in her office before her plunge to safety, listening to the gunshots, and the "tons of screaming," she thought to herself, "Here I am. I'm a Jew. I'm hunted."
Yes, in america today, in an enlightened city, a Jewish woman is hiding in her office listening to the screams of other innocent victims as they are stalked and murdered.
as a European historian, Tammy's story really put the hook in me, especially it's confluence with the detached inanimate villainy of Mr. Naveed avzal Haq, who explained over the 911 line, offered to him by the heroine of the story, the pregnant Dayna Klein, who was shot in the arm she held up to protect her baby, "These are Jews and I'm tired of getting pushed around…"
There is a book, The Good Old Days, by Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen and Volker Riess, editors, which documents by actual Nazi reports, diaries, photos, letters, verdicts of Nazi police courts, and the statements of the participants, a chilling expose on the Holocaust, and contains a shocking parallel to Mr. Haq's actions.
"One of the Jewish people killed by me was a Jewish woman aged between twenty and thirty, I cannot remember exactly. She was a beautiful woman. I was glad to be able to shoot her… My only thought was that if I had to do something I should cause the person as little pain as possible… On the way to the grave or graves, which had already been dug, I suddenly shot her from behind," explained SS private Heinrich Hesse. (The Good Old Days, Klee, et al, Konecky & Konecky, Old Saybrook, CT, 1991, page 201)
ah, yes, a little bit of that Holocaust came to america last Friday in Seattle. Not much different really than the one which burned so brightly in Germany from 1933 to 1945, except for the scale, the locale and for the fact that this murder, mayhem, and shooting in Seattle are illegal and possibly a "hate" crime.
But the fear experienced by Ms. Tammy Kaiser as she heard the gunshots and screams in her office, then as she dangled from her window ledge, with her hair at first hopelessly caught on the errant latch, is the same old fear felt in "the good old days" when terrible driven men with runic S's on their collars broke into homes and offices in newly conquered countries in Europe and did exactly the same things to innocent people of every religion, but with a special predilection and hatred reserved for Jews.
Yes, dreadful men rampaged across Europe then, men wearing Feldgrau uniforms, serving in the SS, Gestapo, the Polizei, the SD and Wehrmacht, with their thousands of black clad Ukrainian helpers. They loudly kicked in the doors and quietly turned the doorknobs and hunted anne Frank then, just as Mr. Haq slowly turned the doorknob looking for Tammy Kaiser the other day.
We, all of us, have a Herculean task ahead of us — to prevent any such goings on in america. We must stamp out the vintage where these grapes of wrath are stored.
Where just one such crime is allowed to happen, the goose stepping ghosts of the perpetrators of the Holocaust strike the innocent.
While the sleeping snoring pole cats in the US Senate loll around in their eternal indolence and keep alive the fatuous notions of a safe and open border and the sickness of a fatally weak enforcement to the south, the forces of terror are flooding our shores, waiting for the day to strike their victims in america.
and today's terror will target the same innocents as were targeted in that Holocaust of lore.
all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing," said Edmund Burke.
Good men did nothing before, and all of Europe descended into a barbarous mediaeval darkness between 1939 and 1945, and somewhere between 30 and 40 million people died. Have we not yet learned this repetitive historical lesson yet?
Must we now learn it again inside america because of the craven folly of our leaders?
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