This is a talk I delivered at the Confronting Islamophobia: I am My Brother’s Keeper conference on Saturday at St. Mark’s Cathedral here in Seattle.  I’m grateful to the organizing committee for inviting me to speak.  I’m delighted to report that the event was very well attended.  Last night, the St. Mark’s main sactuary was full with I estimate about 800 or more in attendance to hear Imam Faisal Rauf.  There were TV crews there last night and today.  The Seattle Times ran a front page story and both Steve Scher and Dave Ross interviewed Imam Rauf on radio.  Congratulations to the steering committee which did yeoman work planning a massive enterprise very successfully.

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In conceiving this conference, the organizers knew in theory they were going to be addressing an important issue in American life.  But events since we first began organizing it have proven just how fortuitous our choice of topics has been. American Islamophobes like Rep. Peter King, and Pamela Geller and David Yerushalmi have turned up the heat and volume on this debate and placed into even starker relief the necessity of having a rational, tolerant discussion of the role of Islam and American Muslims in the life of this nation.

Here’s what we can’t do: we can’t score political points, we can’t try to win elections, we can’t single out our fellow citizens as terrorists merely because of their religious beliefs.  We can’t demonize all American Muslims for the beliefs of a handful of hating extremists among them.  Anyone who does this must be held up for the bigot he or she is. In the light of the American assassination of Osama bin Laden, this becomes an even more urgent task.  No matter how many times a president says that he isn’t seeking to tar an entire religion with a broad brush merely because of the acts of one adherent or one Islamist terror group, it doesn’t mean the rest of us have gotten the message.  In fact, yesterday a pilot on a Delta Airlines flight out of Memphis refused to take off until two imams were removed from the plane.  Apparently, their dress so spooked him that he must’ve believed he had Osama’s cousins flying with him.

Whatever we may’ve thought of the Bin Laden killing, Barack Obama now has an opportunity to head off the bigots in the Republican Party and Tea Party movement who will try to make hay from this.  Clearly, it’s going to be a tough election for Republicans.  A major issue of national security has practically been foreclosed to them.  When a Party becomes desperate it seeks the weakest link to attack.  Unfortunately, some in this country see American Muslims as this weak link. They will tar and feather them. 

Remember the smears against Obama during the presidential election, which still cause a majority of Republicans in this country to believe that he is Muslim?  Look to the political right to exploit fear of Islam and make hay in the 2012 elections.  It may be used in the presidential election and it may be used in other federal or state elections.  We must be alert to fight back against such bigotry.  That’s why it’s important for non-Muslims, specifically Jews because of our complicated, fraught relationship, to step up and say we will not stand for it.

I wanted to speak about a few specific events that have occurred here in Seattle and in other places that might instruct us about the problems we face as Jews and Muslims in overcoming our suspicions and conflict.

Naveed Haq

In 2006, a mentally-ill Pakistani-American named Naveed Haq forced his way into the Seattle Jewish federation building and proceeded to shoot at the staff killing one woman and seriously injuring five.  In his twisted mind, he equated Jews in Seattle with the acts of Israel committed in Lebanon during the 2006 war.  This was an act of hatred and violence unprecedented in Seattle’s Jewish community.  It shook many people to the core.  Thankfully, the strident ideologues in the community representing groups like Stand With Us, didn’t set the tone for the response.

But the best that can be said, is that the community’s response wasn’t worse than it might otherwise have been.  The first jury to hear the case couldn’t agree on a sentence and there was a mistrial.  The prosecution announced it was retrying the case.  It insisted on trying Haq for first degree murder despite his documented history of mental illness going back ten years.  The district attorney attempted to argue that this deranged individual knew right from wrong and rationally planned his acts of violence.  All this, despite the fact that he was a deeply confused, disoriented, alienated and sick man.

One of the federation victims even said to the press that the most important aspect of this case was not religious hatred or anti-Semitism, but rather the fact that it was so incredibly easy for such a disturbed individual to procure a gun. The prosecution refused to consider a sentence to a mental asylum.  All this in large part, because the Jewish communal leadership would not settle for anything less than prison and punishment.  Sadly, the Jews of Seattle lacked the capacity to understand that–despite the fact that Haq, in his delusional state, blamed American Jews for Lebanon’s suffering–he was a sick man, and not an Islamist radical.  For Seattle Jews, this was a hate crime, not a crime committed by someone who was mentally ill.  And this, I think, is the tragedy that is beyond the actual tragedy of the shootings.  American Jews had a chance to understand the difference between anti-Semitism and mental illness and they chose to see themselves as victims of a Muslim extremist, rather than a man who himself was a victim of his own demons.

Naveed Haq was not Osama bin Laden.  If anything, he was Arthur Bremer.  Men whose delusions and twisted imaginations combined all sorts of hatred and set them on a homicidal rampage.  Naveed Haq needed treatment, not punishment.  Besides, life in a mental asylum for violent felons wouldn’t have been a vacation.

Southern Poverty Law Center

When Brenda Bentz was considering which speakers to invite for this conference, she had no lack of Muslims with deep expertise on these subjects.  But we wanted non-Muslim experts on racial hatred to speak as well.  So Brenda invited Mark Potok, the chief researcher of the Southern Poverty Law Center to address us.  Both Brenda and I were impressed that SPLC had recently added to its national list of prominent hate groups several Islamophobic organizations like Pam Geller’s Stop the Islamization of America and the Jewish Task Force, a successor to the Jewish Defense League.  And Mark wanted to come.

It seemed that SPLC might be ready to branch out from its bread and butter reliance on white supremacist groups to include far-right anti-Muslim scapegoat groups as well.  However, Brenda and a number of us were disappointed when Potok and SPLC’s president informed us that because CAIR was a co-sponsor of the conference, SPLC couldn’t participate. Though I don’t know a whole lot about SPLC’s internal structure and politics, you can be sure that there are many liberal Jews among its major donors.  The group’s president, Richard Cohen, seems concerned among other things about preserving his six-figure paycheck by not rocking the boat in any substantial way.  Even liberal Jews get spooked by spurious charges that CAIR supports Hamas and Islamist terror.  It probably won’t even help much that CAIR publicly approved of the death of Osama bin Laden.  Some people are just too frightened to give up those fears.

Apparently, the campaign of demonization by the likes of Peter King and Frank Gaffney prevented even a group like SPLC from associating itself, in even the most distant way, with a mainstream Muslim entity like CAIR.  This is what hate, fear and ignorance does to us, folks.  It twists our judgment, prevents us from trusting our instincts.  It turns us away from alliances we should be making with like-minded individuals and groups to advance our respective goals. I don’t know whether my primary emotion should be anger or disappointment regarding SPLC.  Mostly I just feel sorry for their caution and ultimately cowardice.  Groups like this who refuse to address the most divisive issues of the day out of such fear, either are, or will shortly be irrelevant to the concerns of most Americans.  If we want to make a difference as a religious community or as NGOs, we have to take a stand, even if we risk alienating those sitting on the fence.

Mosque-Synagogue Twinning

Now, I want to tell you about another small local tragedy with which I was intimately involved.  The Foundation for Ethnic Understanding was founded by New York Rabbi Marc Schneier.  It organizes a mosque-synagogue Twinning project each year that is devoted to education around the issues of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.  Several years ago, I spent months with my friend, Jeff Siddiqui, desperately searching for two such partners here in Seattle.  We had a very hard time of it, frankly.  This was just after the Haq shooting and memories may’ve been tender on both sides.

At my synagogue, Congregation Beth Sholom, our rabbi enthusiastically agreed to participate.  She delegated me to search for a local Muslim partner. With Jeff’s help I identified MAPS as our Muslim partner.  I had a wonderful meeting with several mosque members and we mapped out what I thought would be a warm, stimulating series of programs for both communities.  We’d go to MAPS and they would come to us.  We’d pray there and they would pray with us, much like Imam Rauf did so movingly here in Church yesterday night.  Our rabbi would address them and their imam would address us, each from our respective religious altars.

Then I reported back to the rabbi.  In the meantime, the Stand With Us members of the congregation had pressured her into backing off on her commitment.  She apologetically told me the time wasn’t quite right to do this.  She didn’t know how she could’ve possibly agreed to an imam speaking from the bima of the synagogue.  It just couldn’t be done, she told me.  She needed at most another month to bring the shul’s membership and leadership around.  She promised the idea for the program would not die and that she was committed to making it happen.

It never did.  And my relationship with this rabbi has never been the same nor will it likely ever be.

The issue of Muslim-Jewish relations is too important to allow our leaders to fumble their commitments to it.  There are other communal leaders who try to mollify both sides.  Two years ago, the rabbi at Temple De Hirsh Sinai sponsored a highly-partisan Jewish federation program at which representatives of Aipac and the Israeli consul general for the Pacific NW spoke about the dangers posed by Iran to the Middle East and the entire world.  They claimed it was seeking to develop nuclear weapons and that it supported terrorism, among other things.  The fact that Israel had nuclear weapons and engaged in wars against its neighbors was not considered relevant to the discussion.  After the program ended I asked the rabbi how he could allow his temple to a venue for such partisan propaganda. 

Unfortunately, this escalated into a heated discussion during which he affirmed that he was in favor of regime change in Iran. This same rabbi invited Prof. John Esposito, a colleague of Prof. Haddad’s, to speak a few days from now at his temple about the role and history of Islam in America.  There is a major disconnect among some Jews regarding relations with Muslims and Islam.  Like Rabbi Weiner, they seem to think they can compartmentalize Islam into good guys and bad.  That they can demonize bad Muslims in Iran while embracing good ones here at home. I am not arguing that the Iranian regime is worthy of anyone’s support.  But I am arguing that rhetoric which accuses the Iranian regime of being mass murderers and supports its violent overthrow, while ignoring the negative role that Israel often plays, is not conducive to constructive dialogue with any Muslim, whether Iranian or American.

Peter King Hearings

After 9/11, the Republican Party discovered there was gold in them thar’ hills of Islamophobia and Muslim-bashing.  It was joined in this by a group I call Jewish neocons, whose hatred of Islam is bound up with a devotion to a far-right brand of Israeli nationalism which embraces the settler movement.  That is how Peter King and Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy created a match made in heaven.  With the new Republican majority in the House, King became chair of the Committee on Homeland Security.  Looking for an issue to call his own, and hailing from a state with a substantial Jewish population, he made common cause with Gaffney over the alleged issue of Sharia law and the alleged plot by Muslims to take over the U.S. government and replace it with one governed by Sharia.

King’s hearings were originally conceived very much in the mold of Gaffney’s histrionics which warn of the Muslim menace to American life as we know it.  But due to critical media coverage and criticism from fellow members of Congress, King presented a still offensive, but watered-down version in his hearings last month.

Anti-Sharia Movement

Gaffney is joined in his anti-sharia jihad by Jewish far-right figures like David Yerushalmi.  The latter, who is a devout Orthodox Jewish attorney and supporter of the settler movement in Israel, is Gaffney’s chief legal counsel.  Mother Jones has profiled the Yerushalmi-Gaffney national campaign to write anti-sharia sentiment into state law.  Such provisions have either passed, or are being seriously discussed in 11 states.  Yerushalmi is the author of such bills and paid handsome consulting fees no doubt for his “expertise,” and much sought after on the Tea Party circuit.

I’m pleased to tell you that the organized Jewish community is beginning to wake up to the perils of the anti-Sharia movement because it could hit Jews where they live.  Just as Muslims conform their religious lives to Sharia so observant Jews conform theirs to halacha.  Just as Sharia may be applied to normally civil functions like marriage, divorce and estate planning; so too Jews often use halacha in place of civil code in these important life milestones.  If state laws criminalize the application of Sharia to civil matters then there is no reason this wouldn’t happen to halacha as well.

I’m pleased to tell you that last month in St. Louis, the ACLU and Jewish Community Relations Council joined together to denounce publicly the effort to ban Sharia under Missouri state law.

I want to tell you something that may be a bit cynical.  In truth, I don’t think most observant Jews would normally care to make common cause with American Muslims on this issue.  But it’s the beauty of the American system that you must create political coalitions if you wish for your own communal, religious or ethnic interests to be addressed.  In our system, if you try to go it alone you won’t go far.  That encourages groups to look beyond their own narrow interests and consider the interests of other groups when they overlap yours.  It is this making of alliances, as opposed to confining oneself to a separatist ghetto, that makes this country great.

The Yerushalmis and Gaffneys favor an atomized America in which every individual or group is out for its own good and some mythical Judeo-Christian majority can impose its own will on the rest of us. That’s not my America and I know it’s not yours either. Yerushalmi’s views are so far to the right that Mother Jones, the Jewish Forward and I in my blog have called him different variations of the phrase “Jewish white supremacist.”  Hard to believe that there can be such a person or thing, given Jewish history in the last century.  But I’m sorry to say that there can be and is.

Yerushalmi didn’t take kindly to my critique of his political views.  He threatened to sue me for libel in Arizona, where he resides, making himself right at home with the anti-immigrant movement that presides in that state.  I, of course, had to scurry to find pro bono counsel to represent me in what I feared could be a long costly case.

But in a bit of providence, the Anti-Defamation League came out with a public statement denouncing Yerushalmi and likening his views to the white-supremacist New World Order.  I’m guessing that the anti-Muslim attorney decided that now might not be the right time to sue someone for calling him a white supremacist.  He withdrew his threat.

Yerushalmi also crusaded against the Khalil Gibran Academy in New York City and its Muslim principal, Debbie Almontaser, eventually getting her fired.  He sued her for libel too and she won at both the lower court and appeals court level.  She also won a substantial settlement from the City of New York for wrongful termination.

Ground Zero Mosque

Yerushalmi has also made common cause with Pamela Geller, author of the Atlas Shrugged blog, and the chief instigator of the campaign against what she branded the ‘Ground Zero mosque,’ an institution with which our keynote speaker, Imam Faisal Rauf, was intimately involved for some time. I watched the Jewish-led campaign against the mosque– conveniently timed during the 2010 Congressional election campaign–with horror. The arguments against it made no sense whatsoever.  They were clearly fueled by fear and ignorance.  They mixed up the tragedy perpetrated by Al Qaeda against this country on 9/11 with an entirely separate matter of building a Muslim house of worship.  In the minds of the hysterics, there was no difference between the two. This is a profoundly un-American attitude. 

One the hallmarks of America’s greatness is our tolerance toward religions.  Our Founding Fathers wisely chose not to create a national religion and this in turn enabled America to become a powerful engine of democracy, which could incorporate hundreds of ethnic groups and their respective religions into a single whole.  In diversity there is strength.  Alternatively, you’ll remember that slogan on our dollar bills: e pluribus unum (“out of many, one”).

But contrary to Yerushalmi and Geller, I don’t believe we become one by denying our difference, by papering them over or by forcing those who are different to conform to some artificial notion of what is properly American.  We gain the strength to be united by coming together over our shared interests and by respecting our differences.  That’s the beauty of America.

The opponents of the Park51 mosque lost sight of an American trademark: religious freedom.  In this country, you can worship your God and your religion as you please.  You can build a house of worship where you want and how you want as long as you obey zoning codes. America doesn’t police religions as other countries do.  We don’t tell people where they can build a church, synagogue or mosque.  We don’t interfere in their religious teachings.  We don’t demonize them because their religion is different from ours. The movement led by Pam Geller, David Yerushalmi and Frank Gaffney which seeks to criminalize being a Muslim is profoundly offensive to American values.  I’m proud to say this as an American and as a Jew.

Delmore Schwartz‘s most famous short story is entitled In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.  It is about a young man who dreams he is in a movie theater watching a movie which turns out to portray his parent’s courtship.  As he watches it, he worries that his parents may not actually end up marrying each other and he volubly urges them not to break up.  Otherwise, he might not be born.  When he wakes up, he realizes it is the morning of his 21st birthday.  His dreams teach him his responsibilities toward life, his own and his parents.

Today’s NY Times features an eerie journey into the dreaming subconscious of 22 year-old mass murderer, Jared Loughner.  Instead of leading him to life, the killer’s dreams brought him to the dark side.  That’s why I used the title for this post In Dreams Begin Murders:

Mr. Gutierrez said his friend [Loughner] had become obsessed with the meaning of dreams and their importance. He talked about reading Friedrich Nietzsche’s book “The Will To Power” and embraced ideas about the corrosive, destructive effects of nihilism — a belief in nothing. And every day, his friend said, Mr. Loughner would get up and write in his dream journal, recording the world he experienced in sleep and its possible meanings.

“Jared felt nothing existed but his subconscious,” Mr. Gutierrez said. “The dream world was what was real to Jared, not the day-to-day of our lives.”

And that dream world, his friend said, could be downright strange.

“He would ask me constantly, ‘Do you see that blue tree over there?’ He would admit to seeing the sky as orange and the grass as blue,” Mr. Gutierrez said. “Normal people don’t talk about that stuff.”

He added that Mr. Loughner “used the word hollow to describe how fake the real world was to him.”

Another NY Times article today notes a mental health expert who speculates that Loughner suffers from severe paranoid schizophrenia.  Those on the right who are fending off responsibility for the violence he wrought on Tuscon, Arizona and the nation, are fond of noting that the shooter was insane and not making a coherent political statement:

It is also not clear, some doctors said, that today’s partisan climate had any bearing on the assault. “The psychosis picks up on the grand themes of the day, whether those are antigovernment or something else,” Dr. Stone said.

In the logic of delusion, a grievance may be conflated with some larger mission, whether religious, political or artistic. “It’s not political thinking,” Dr. Torrey said. “It’s psychotic thinking.”

There’s a great deal to be said for this.  Psychotics who kill may formulate ideas that sound like coherent political statements and it may appear that such thoughts drive their behavior, often such ideas are inchoate and confused.  After all, one of Loughner’s friends of seven years ago called him a leftist.  Yet his MySpace profile notes among his favorite books are Mein Kampf (and The Communist Manifesto!) and he tried to kill a Democratic Congresswoman with moderate to liberal views.  Similary, Naveed Haq, the Pakistani-American who forced his way into the Jewish federation building in Seattle and shot five people, killing one, once had himself baptized in his search for religious meaning.

It seems to me that in some ways the violently mentally ill are, whether consciously or unconsciously, attempting to wreak upon the world some of the same internal anger, violence and chaos that rages within them.

Yet Haq, a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, received no mercy from the Jewish community here, which argued that Haq was perfectly competent, knew right from wrong, and should get what he had coming to him.  Bright lights like Pam Geller, in commenting on the Haq trial, even called Islam a mental illness.  To many Jews, Haq was a murderous anti-Semite who had to get a life sentence.  And that he did though it took the prosecution two trials to do it.  The prosecutor refused to accept a plea of insanity and confinement to a mental institution, which is what Haq really needed:

“The insanity defense, which may be tried in this case, is often unsuccessful,” Dr. Torrey said, “and one reason is that juries are afraid to send people to state hospitals, where they belong. They’d rather lock them up for longer, in prison.”

On a related subject, I’m rather amused by the claims from the right that violent political rhetoric characterizes both sides of the debate and not just their side alone.  On Warren Olney’s To the Point, one interviewee noted the extremism voiced on sites like Daily Kos.  There’s one major difference between the tone of the discussion on the right and left.  On the left the vituperative, intolerant rhetoric comes from the knuckleheads at the bottom of the heap like those in the DK talkbacks.  On the political right, the violence comes right from the top: from the talk show hosts, elected politicians, presidential hopefuls.

As Paul Krugman noted in his column this week, while Keith Olbermann is passionate and angry, he will never adopt the hateful swagger of a Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly.  He won’t physically threaten, he won’t use language that is violent.  Among elected officials, you won’t find any Democratic candidate who places crosshairs over the districts of Republican rivals as Sarah Palin did.  While Democrats can be just as cantankerous in their views as Republicans, they don’t tend to use eliminationist oratory as a good number do on the other side.

Someone needs to clean up their political act and it ain’t Democrats.

I recently did an interview with Bill Alford of Seattle’s Moral Politics community-access TV program. We spoke about the issues surrounding the Naveed Haq trial and his recent conviction for first degree murder in the 2006 attack on the Seattle Jewish federation, which left one employee dead and five seriously injured.

We grappled with whether Haq’s sentence was just in a moral and religious sense and the overall theme of Muslim-Jewish tension rooted in the intractable Israeli-Arab conflict.

I wanted to warn that I made an error during the interview in suggesting that in Haq’s first trial, which ended in a hung jury, he was charged with second degree murder. A local journalist reports to me that he was charged with first degree murder in both cases.

It’s a 30 minute interview. I hope you’ll watch it and suggest to others interested in Muslim-Jewish relations that they watch it too.

Bill Alford, host of the Seattle community-access show, Moral Politics, invited me for my second session. We did a follow-up show on the Iran-Israel conference I organized here in Seattle last month. The themes were the danger of military attack by Israel or the U.S. against Iran; the nature of contemporary Zionism and the impact of Jacobtinsky; the impact of the Holocaust on Israel’s approach to conflicts with its Arab neighbors. We covered the Times of London story claiming Iran was developing a nuclear trigger and the report that the alleged Iranian document on which the report was based was a forgery (just as the Niger yellow cake report was proven to be fake).

I’m pretty self-critical generally, but I was really happy with how this interview came out and hope you’ll be able to spend a half-hour watching. I’d also appreciate your spreading the word about this video so that others will watch it as well.

My next show with Bill will deal with the Naveed Haq murder trial here in Seattle and the guilty verdict which will send him to prison for life.

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Naveed Haq, does this man look sane to you?

A Seattle jury, deliberating for two and one-half days, found Naveed Haq guilty on all counts of aggravated first-degree murder.  In 2006, this Pakistani-American with a delusional personality who’d been treated for 10 years for mental illness, kidnapped his way into the Seattle federation building where he proceeded to kill one employee and wound five others, some very seriously.  The Jewish community, including a few, but not all the victims, breathed a sigh of relief at the verdict (since his first trial ended in a mistrial).  But I didn’t.  Here’s why:

The American justice system has an entirely loopy definition of mental illness and mental competency to stand trial.  The defense in this case pleaded insanity.  The prosecution conceded he was mentally ill.  Yet the jury still found him sane.  Go figure:

The prosecution throughout the trial had acknowledged Haq had suffered from mental illness. Symptoms appeared mostly in the form of paranoia and paranoid delusions, Raz said…

“No one ever asserted that paranoia had anything to do with his attack on the Jewish Federation,” Raz said.

Juror John Bennett said the defense was simply unable to convince he and his fellow jurors of Haq’s insanity at the time of the shooting.

“We were waiting with an open mind – waiting for someone to tell us that he was not sane. But there was just never anything to convince us,” he said.

So if you can follow that: he’s mentally ill, paranoid and delusional.  In fact, during the shootings he shouts out nasty comments about Jews hurting Muslims and this is the reason for his actions.  But somehow the paranoid, delusional beliefs that motivate his crime do not constitute insanity.  This is a guy who’s under doctor’s care and taking anti-psychotic medication who goes postal, yet nothing convinced the jury of his being totally loopy.

And what convinced the jury in particular of his sanity?  Jailhouse phone conversations with the killer’s mother in which she tells him his illness made him commit the crime.  He firmly rejects her view and declares his sanity.  That’s it.  He says he’s sane in a convincing manner and that clinches it.  Anyone out there who has a family member or friend who’s battled mental illness can tell you that there are almost no victims of this sickness who readily acknowledge they have it.  In fact, I’ve had almost the same exact conversation with someone close to me that Haq’s mother had with him.  That person swore up and down that there was nothing wrong with him.  That’s part of the illness–to deny it.  It’s the same with addiction.  Who in their right, or even wrong mind would publicly concede that there’s something terribly wrong with them?  Furthermore, many mentally ill individuals can put on a very convincing show proving they are sane.  No doubt Haq was doing precisely this when he spoke to his mother.

Telling a jury to believe a mentally ill man when he says he is not mentally ill is, well, crazy.

And so Naveed Haq will go into the state prison system and vegetate there for the rest of his life (no possibility of parole) because a Seattle jury couldn’t concede that a mentally ill individual who was guilty of a horrible crime should be treated as if he were mentally ill (the defense advocated that Haq be committed to a state mental hospital rather than prison).

Besides the tragedy of the murder and shooting victims whose lives were torn asunder and Naveed Haq, who will never see freedom again, there is the tragedy of Haq’s mother, who inadvertently provided evidence against her son that clinched the guilty verdict.  In attempting to get him to see the horror of what he had done, she sealed his fate.  Imagine being a parent and having the live with that guilt.

As for the Islam-haters out there who are circulating this verdict with glee because you believe it proves there is a Muslim hate machine, think again.  All this verdict proves is that one terribly ill individual fell victim to his personal demons and acted out in a horribly violent fashion.  The motivation for his acting out happened to be hatred of Israeli violence against Palestinians.  But he was no more capable of understanding the full implications of what he was doing than any seriously-ill paranoid schizophrenic is.

Cheryl Stumbo, one of the victims in the shooting, wrote the following at my blog shortly after the shooting.  Anyone who wishes to indict Islam for this act should remember this:

…The man who shot me and five of my colleagues…was raised Muslim, yes, but by peace-loving parents, from all accounts. His problem was long-term, very serious mental illness. Let’s not attribute blame to ethnicity/religion when there are documentable medical explanations. Rationality and reason should prevail…

I don’t think his religion…had anything to do with his decision to break into, assault and kill, but I do think it helped his agitated mind select a target for his frustration.

The Seattle district attorney tried Naveed Haq, accused Seattle federation attacker once and the trial ended in a mistrial.  Despite the fact that Haq has a long history of mental illness along with mental health professionals who testified in the first trial to the fact that his illness destroyed his ability to apprehend reality, the county prosecutor is trying again.  I fear that he is doing so because this has become a political, as much as a legal trial.  He doesn’t want to be perceived by the local Jewish community as being soft of Muslim extremism (even though Haq was so disturbed that he at one time renounced his religion and became a Christian).  The organized community leadership is leading the charge, in my opinion, in calling for judgment against Haq.  They were not satisfied with the mistrial and they’ve pressured the King County prosecutor for a second attempt.

The prosecutor betrays the willful confusion of its case:

Senior deputy prosecutor Don Raz argued that although Haq clearly suffers from mental illness, his actions cannot be attributed to his disorder. Rather, the shootings were a deliberate choice made out of anger, not delusion.

“Naveed Haq’s mental illness did not cause him to attack the Jewish Federation,” Raz said. “His anger did.”

Anyone with even a limited understanding of mental illness understands that irrational rage or anger is one of the most common symptoms of mental illness especially mental illness that manifests itself in violent acts.  Unless you want to argue that Haq is a Muslim extremist programmed to kill Jews, it is clear his mental illness led him to the attack.

If you polled most of the victims of this tragedy or the individual members of our community I have little doubt that most would say: plea bargain this out and get him locked away in a mental health facility and stop treating him like he’s Al Qaeda.  Haq should be treated as any mentally disturbed violent individual would be.  He should be monitored closely and incarcerated as a dangerous person.  But this retrial is a betrayal of our understanding of mental illness and doesn’t characterize the liberal attitude prevalent in our community on such issues..

Portrait of the cartoonist as an Islamophobe

Yes it is.  It truly is.  So says Pam Geller (notice the quotation marks–I didn’t say that) of Atlas Shrugged and one of the world’s most distinguished forensic psychologists and learned scholars of Islam.  Er, not really.  The only forensic psychology this woman has ever practiced involves writing her own blog which is a repository for pathological hatred.  As for her scholarly credentials, she earned them at the Merkaz HaRav Kahane yeshiva or was it the Bernard Lewis School of Neocon Anti-Jihadism?  Actually, she is the one of the blog world’s greatest Jewish purveyors of Muslim hate.  How else could she come up with this blog post title?

MISTRIAL IN JEWISH FEDERATION MASSACRE:ISLAM IS A MENTAL ILLNESS

I only learned about this dreck thanks to her link to a blog post I wrote about the Naveed Haq murder trial, which ended in a mistrial recently.  This, as you might guess, drove the Jewish anti-Muslim right into paroxysms of rage since it clearly meant that a hard-core jihadi was abusing the legal system to get off scot free.  As for the ten years during which Haq was under psychiatric care for serious mental disorders, well mental illness be damned.  Islam itself is a mental illness, don’t you know.

An irony totally lost on Geller is that Haq hated Islam and tortured his family with his angry outbursts against the religion.  In fact, he went so far as to be baptized a Christian in his twisted pursuit of a spiritual identity.  So much for Haq as a Muslim adherent.  Has it never crossed her mind how bizarre and contradictory it would be for a healthy individual to express hatred for his religion and then go out and supposedly kill for it?  This is clearly the act of a terribly deluded, twisted and ill mind.

Daniel Pipes, a more sophisticated but no less toxic Jewish anti-Muslim chirpily calls Haq “Seattle’s jihadi.”  He rails against Seattle’s soft Jews who don’t know a committed Al Qaeda fanatic when they see one.  Actually, if you look at a picture of Haq, you see an overweight, confused, and clouded individual.

Pipes practically screams out against the shooting victims: instead of recognizing the “real” threat Haq represents they persist in their Kumbaya notion that the true enemy in this case was freely available guns and a paucity of mental health options for the seriously ill:

In response to the hideous assault on herself and her co-workers, however, [Dayna] Klein offers this pablum: “I see this as an amazing opportunity. I see this as a chance for Seattleites and people across America … to look at some serious issues about workplace safety, gun control, gun violence and empowerment.” What about jihad, Ms Klein?

…Even more appalling, the parents of Layla Bush, 23, Haq’s most severely wounded victim who is battling for her life, focused entirely on Haq’s supposed mental illness.

Imagine that, shot by a Jihadi assassin and the victim’s parents refuse to acknowledge the evil looking at them in the face and get suckered by pablum about mental illness.  Imagine Pipes’ tut-tutting as he penned this attack on shooting victim, Cheryl Stumbo’s comment, published here at this blog:

One of Haq’s victims appears to remain in utter denial of the cause of her trauma. A writer identifying herself as Cheryl Stumbo writes today:

“…The man who shot me and five of my colleagues (killing one and seriously injuring the rest of us, not to mention traumatizing the entire staff and volunteer base) was raised Muslim, yes, but by peace-loving parents, from all accounts. His problem was long-term, very serious mental illness. Let’s not attribute blame to ethnicity/religion when there are documentable medical explanations. Rationality and reason should prevail.

Ah yes, rationality and reason–not qualities in great supply when it comes to the Jewish wingnut brigade epitomized by Pipes and Geller.  And to think of it, without his link to Stumbo’s comment at this blog I might’ve missed this jewel of penetrating anti-jihadi analysis.

What specially strikes me about all this blowhardery is the unmitigated chutzpah shown by them in attacking the feelings and beliefs of the victims.  Isn’t there some element of human decency which should require anyone, even a wingnut, to grant a few shreds of credence to the views of victims of this horrible tragedy?  Isn’t it sheer effrontery for them to substitute their superior wisdom and analysis for that of those ‘poor deluded sheep,’ victims Stumbo, Klein and Bush?

The problem with Pipes is that he’s got the world figured out.  He knows who are the good guys and who are the bad guys and he’s not afraid to tell you.  And woe betide anyone who stands in his way or muddies the waters of his moral clarity.  Off with their heads.  This is the mark of the true believer–the type of person who’ll lead you on a moral crusade.  The type of person in fact has brought nothing but devastation and pestilence on the human race.  He’s the Savanarola, the Torquemada, the Robespierre of the anti-jihadi set.  Woe unto a generation and a world that feels it must turn to such a one for moral leadership.

Personally, I am deeply thankful for the courage, bravery and moral clarity of these victims.  They can teach us all a thing or two about persevering in the face of tragic violence and adversity.  My Jewish tradition calls not only for strict justice, but for mercy as well.  The Midrash teaches us that a world where there is only justice and no mercy is a hellish world that cannot long endure.  Our victims have shown us that that is true and I am proud of them for it.

It is for this reason that I have dedicated myself to the Weekend of Twinning of mosques and synagogues sponsored by the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding.  Here in Seattle, we are planning a program in the coming weeks that will partner Congregation Beth Shalom with Redmond’s Muslim Association of Puget Sound mosque.  I look forward to sharing our questions, conflicts and mutual views about our religious traditions then.

I’m delighted to report that my first piece has been published by Huffington Post, McCain Invokes “Never Again!” to Warn of Iranian Attack on Israel. I’ve been querying the editors for some time about writing for the site and this is my first acceptance. Thanks to Sarah Posner and Mark Klempner, who publish there as well for suggesting editors to contact. Look for my byline there again sometime soon.

My weekly Comment is Free column, Justice and Mercy, about the Naveed Haq mistrial, has also been published.