It must be understood that, no matter their collective resolve, there’s absolutely nothing our governments can do to prevent such attacks. Meanwhile, that Americans reacted yesterday as if those explosions went off in Washington or New York should compel Westerners to focus on calming our collective nerves instead of fretting about (or worse, trying to figure out) the motivation for and timing of terrorist attacks by Islamic fanatics.
[From New York to London, Islamists are terrorizing us to death, TIJ, July 2, 2007]
Of course, it should also be self-evident that governments can do even less to protect us from a crazy, lone gunman hell-bent on some kamikaze mission for his delusional cause. Remember Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma bombing?
Unfortunately, it says more about our panicky state of mind than these terrorists without a cause that their cowardly attacks always incite such hysteria in law-enforcement and the media.
Never mind the pundits who are always so hell-bent on drawing connections between these incidents and al-Qaeda or neo-Nazi conspiracies that they end up looking almost as deranged as the gunmen. Frankly, they do more to encourage these wackos than to explain their attacks.
Most troubling in this respect, however, is that the media will now do all they can to turn this latest loser, 88-year-old James W. Von Brunn, into a racist and anti-Semitic martyr by publicizing his pathetic life story and idiotic rantings. And you don’t have to take my word for it because here’s what his ex-wife said about him in an interview with the New York Daily News after yesterday’s shooting:
[He was] an abusive alcoholic whose hatred against Jews and blacks ate him alive like a cancer. He used to make the statement that he was going out with his boots on… I took it to mean that he wasn’t just about to lay down and die of old age. That he was going to go out and try to take some people with him.
Actually, this suggests that his mission was more to commit suicide by cop to end his life of chronic failure and sociopathic frustration than to carry out a terrorist attack. After all, the man was so old and feeble that he could barely lift his rifle to fire off one good shot. This makes it all the more venal and irresponsible that the media are according this decrepit old fool the blaze of glory he coveted instead of letting him wither away in obscurity….
Gratitude and condolences should go out to the family of the heroic museum guard, Stephen T. Johns, who was shot and killed as he confronted Von Brunn just outside the Holocaust Museum. Because he and others who perform thankless guard duties in public places all over the country constitute our only defense against these home-grown terrorists.
Meanwhile, when Johns’ fellow guards came to his aid and opened fired on Von Brunn, they only wounded him critically. This means that he failed not only in his purported mission to kill a bunch of Jews but also in his wish to go out “with his boots on.”
All the same, the irony is not lost on me that the only person killed was a black guard fighting to protect this Jewish museum….
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From New York to London, Islamist are terrorizing us to death
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