A Violent & Hopeless Course

Seattle shooting ought to trigger questions about American foreign policy

opinion by Joel Hanson

Who made this decision? I wondered with a trace of irritation, and why was it made? Had some anonymous bureaucrat decided that the period of grieving was officially over or was the decision made for purely cosmetic reasons? I thought the move premature, a deliberate attempt to bury the attack's uglier, but largely unexplored, meanings before they tarnished the official version of the event.

For those who missed the story, at approximately 4pm on July 28, a self-described "Muslim-American" man disgruntled by American foreign policy in the Middle East, specifically with regard to the Israel/Hezbollah conflict, walked into the offices of the Jewish Federation and shot six employees, killing Pamela Waechter, the group's 58-year-old campaign director. During the rampage, a 37-year-old pregnant woman named Dayna Klein was hit in the arm but crawled to the phone and called 911 despite threats from the gunman. Eventually, she handed the phone to Haq who spoke with the 911 operator before surrendering to police minutes later.

At 3:30 pm on that same afternoon, I had lingered in my office at Worksource Affiliate across the street, stuffing work clothes into a large black backpack while deliberating between two choices. Should I participate in a protest against the Israeli military offensive in Lebanon in nearby Westlake Park at 4pm, or return to a neighborhood bike shop to get a flat tire fixed before the place closed at five? Since my bike is my primary mode of transportation, I chose to attend to the tire. I balanced the wounded cycle on my right shoulder and jaywalked across 3rd Avenue near the entrance to the Jewish Federation at approximately 3:45-less than 15 minutes before Haq entered the building. When the shooting began, I was still waiting at a bus stop two blocks away.

The sirens of emergency vehicles are such a common sound on 3rd Avenue that my co-workers at Worksource weren't even aware what was happening until the building manager told them there was a gunman in an office across the street and that the Seattle Police had closed the building. One woman behind the front desk then peered through the second-floor windows to observe, to her surprise, the street already blocked off, a chain of police cars lined up in front of the Jewish Federation, and officers with guns drawn guarding the entrance to every other building on the block.

Had I remained in my office, I would have been temporarily quarantined there with my co-workers for over an hour until the Seattle Police determined it was safe for everyone to leave at 5pm. Recounting her experiences to me the following Monday, the woman concluded, "We'll have to start getting some better security measures around here to protect ourselves."

"Definitely," I agreed "but perhaps we should start pressuring our government to change its terrible foreign policy in the Middle East." Another Worksource employee with a distinctive tattoo on his neck nodded his affirmation. "I mean, as long as we keep shipping arms to Israel while it kills innocent civilians in Lebanon," I continued, "we can probably expect these kinds of attacks to increase."

Indeed, if the fire of American hatred smoldering throughout the Middle East was beginning to die, America's indirect support of Israel's five-week assault in Lebanon has stirred those coals back to life while simultaneously sabotaging our country's credibility as a purveyor of peace in the region. These facts seem obvious to anyone with a passing knowledge of the history of American involvement in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, not to mention the current US-sponsored debacle in Iraq. But as a motivation for Haq's violence, these factors have been left mostly unexplored by Seattle's major newspapers. Instead, Haq has been mostly portrayed as a madman.

While unequivocally condemning Haq's violent actions, I believe they were carried out for specific reasons that are worth discussing if our society is intent on stopping our government's own acts of terrorism in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and elsewhere.

Haq may have perceived the killing of innocent civilians in Lebanon as a personal attack. This concept is difficult to grasp until we consider that many Muslims' conception of the self is connected to the entire Muslim community of believers (the "ummah"). As historian Jonathan Raban points out: "Muslims put an overwhelming stress on the idea of the individual as social being. The self exists as the sum of its interactions with othersÉ Broadly speaking who you are is: who you know, who depends on you, and to whom you owe allegiance-a visible web of relationships that can be mapped and enumerated. Just as the person is public-so is the public personal. [Thus] a commitment toÉ Palestine, or to the people of Iraq can be a defining constituent of the self in a way Westerners don't easily understand." Any attack on people one is connected to causes intense personal injury-in other words, a violation of the self.

Does Israel's bombing of Lebanese civilians in its fruitless fight with Hezbollah constitute an attack on the ummah? As far as I know, no one has asked Haq this question. But if the answer is yes, then there's a cruel logic to his actions: they are retaliation for an outrage to an innocent Muslim community in Lebanon and not a random act of madness. "Attack innocent people in Lebanon," Haq seems to be saying to the Israeli and American governments, "and I'll attack innocent Jewish people in America."

The American public gives tacit approval of its government's might-makes-right policies in the Middle East if it refuses to educate itself and speak out against the USA's unquestioning military support of Israel and Bush's refusal to immediately push for a cease-fire to the current crisis. Does anyone take the US seriously when it proclaims it wants peace and then ships some of its most savage conventional weaponry (e.g. cluster bombs) to Israel in the same week? More importantly, how long can the US military create violence in other communities without people in those communities retaliating with violence in ours?

A friend in Morocco made similar observations in an email two days after the shootings:

It is sad what happened to those women in Seattle. But it does not really surprise me and I can not say I am shocked for the simple reason that it is less sad and tragic compared to what is happening in Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq. There is innocent blood all over Lebanese, Palestinian, and Iraqi streets every day: 6,000 civilian deaths in Iraq in the last two months and more than 400 deaths-including a large number of children-in Lebanon in the last few weeks....

What is the appropriate (way) to face a country that imposes its brutal power against the world's people in illegitimate, immoral and illegal ways? I feel exactly the same thing as this man who yesterday opened fire on the Jewish Federation: I am angry at both Israel and the USA. It seems that the West is not bothered when Muslim and Arab blood is spilled. UN resolutions or no UN resolutions, Arab and Muslim life is worth less compared to an Israeli or Western life.

British journalist Robert Fisk, who's been covering Lebanese politics in Beirut for the past 30 years, succinctly summarized the madness of the Israeli/American strategy during a July 31 interview with Amy Goodman of the radio program Democracy Now!: "What's going on in southern Lebanon is an outrage. It's an atrocity. The idea that more than 600 civilians must die because three Israeli soldiers were killed and two were captured on the border by the Hezbollah on July 12É is outrageous. It's against all morality to suggest that 600 innocent civilians must die for this. There is no other country in the world that could get away with this."

Fisk is correct: the Israeli invasion is an atrocity. But nothing will change in Lebanon, Iraq, or Afghanistan until more Americans pressure our government to change its violent and hopeless present course. Should we refuse this responsibility, we should not be shocked if more politically motivated violence is committed on our streets.¥