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..
It’s not the first instance we’ve seen where the government was hellbent on scapegoating a victim for the sake of the “war on terror.” Look at Jose Padilla; it’s almost impossible to even figure out that case, except that it was painfully clear Mr. Padilla’s mind was destroyed by the torture, isolation, sleep deprivation, etc. he was subjected to in 3 years of captivity. His own lawyer described him as a “piece of furniture.”
Muslims are still being subjected to profiling, which leads to entrapment by the FBI. Amazingly, they’re spying on Somalian immigrants and charging them with the mere intention of joining the freedom fighters in Somalia, accusing young boys of being terrorists and dooming them to being forever trapped in a legal system where they have no rights. Personally, I don’t know why more people aren’t concerned about this.
Yeah, the ‘hang em high’ attitude doesn’t fit with the particulars of this case, it’s mis-directed rage. From the sound of his history, he needs to be confined so as not to hurt anyone else but also needs some serious help.
I had to laugh out loud at this parentheses, though, “even though Haq was so disturbed that he at one time renounced his religion and became a Christian”. The Horror! From the context of what you’re saying it’s totally clear you didn’t mean this in an offensive way, but if you close one eye and read it from an angle in isolation, it is kind of comical. Yeah, we can be a pretty disturbed bunch, at least some of us. It’s a bizarre religion in a lot of ways—when you really look at the theology objectively, god knows why I find it compelling. The fact that I share this ‘label’ with the Pat Robertsons, the Falwells and the Christian Zionists (not to mention a good deal of horrid history) gives me no small amount of discomfort, let me tell you.
I have a deep respect for Islam and would at some point like to do more in-depth study of that religion (my knowledge of it is pretty superficial) and also do a comparative study of Christianity and Islam. They seem to share quite a lot, actually, one obvious thing being that between the two they account for a sizable chunk of the world’s population.
The casual mainstream respectability of Islamophobia in our society is very disturbing to me. Islam is vilified to no end in our media. It’s doesn’t help that some Islamophobia cloaks itself in the new militant atheism (see Hitchens).
I meant that Haq got hooked up with Christian evangelists & told them he was disenchanted w. his own religion & so wanted to become a Christian. Then he turns around & kills Jews in the name of a religion he renounced at one time. That’s what I meant by his actions being “disturbed.” Not that choosing to be Christian was disturbed.
What always seems to happen is that the religion gets blamed for the violence, and not the other salient factors such as insanity, political extremism, etc.
People like Hitchens, Geert Wilders, et al are what I call malignant atheists because they are not tolerant of other people’s right to a spiritual life, but instead find faith in God to be the root cause of all the ills of the world. They came crawling out of the woodwork after 9/11 and were instrumental in helping to promote a negative image of Islam.
I converted to Islam several years ago after living first as a Roman Catholic, then as an atheist/agnostic. What I find so amazing, and sometimes ironic, is how similar many aspects of Islam are not to Christianity, but to Judaism.
“What I find so amazing, and sometimes ironic, is how similar many aspects of Islam are not to Christianity, but to Judaism.”
There are historic reasons for that due to the fact that there was a lot of contact between Mohammad and the earliest Muslims, and the Jews and much less with the Christians. Compared to the Pagan society into which Mohammad was born, Jewish law was a model of how to create the orderly society that Mohammad saw as desirable. And in any case, Christianity was really based very much on Judaism. After all, Jesus was not looking to create a new religion. He mainly wanted people to be better Jews. What a shame that Jews, Christians, and Muslims have all to a significant extent lost sight of the original ideas.
I hear you. My comment was meant in fun and good humour, particularly the “the Horror!” bit. I totally got what you were saying, and agree with your analysis. Your initial post was quite clear, and I’m pretty good at reading things in context. I was just pointing out and joking with the beauty and duplicity of language, how when you wrongly isolate something, it can take on a different color. That’s all. And any excuse to launch into a brief comment on religion, however far-fetched, I’ll take. Jews aren’t the only ones who like to navel-gaze and engage in hand-wringing over their ethnic/religious identity and what it means.
My recent comments have been so angry and sarcastic (too much so), I suppose I should expect a serious response.
In that vein, I’d also like to say I haven’t totally given up on Barack Obama yet. I’m just profoundly disappointed so far, particularly regarding four things: Obama’s capitulation to the banks and Wall Street, his back-pedalling on his settlements stance, his rejection of the Goldstone Report, and his Afghanistan policy. These are cataclysmic failures. Having said that, I really like Obama a lot as a person (how can one not love Obama and his beautiful family?). I find his whole life story inspiring and moving. I know that he’s a supremely intelligent man and believe he’s a truly decent human being. All the more reason I’ve been shocked by some of his policy choices these first 10 months. I know I said I wouldn’t vote for him again. I probably will; I just don’t want to have to do what so many progressive liberal Democrats end up doing come election time, and hold my nose while I vote. I want to be enthusiastic about who I vote for, like I was voting for Obama the first time around. I’m sick of the lesser of two evils thing. Is that democracy?
If Obama can somehow turn the boat around at this point and get with it, after these serious blunders and profound misjudgements, I’ll be happy to support him. (and yes, I realize this is off-topic.)
Don’t forget Pakistan – horrible, simply horrible – and one of his very first acts as President was to sign off on bombings that killed bunches of civilians, including children.
Unlike you, though, I had very low expectations of Obama in terms of foreign and military policy from early in the campaign. And yet as low as my expectations were he has managed to disappoint me a number of times.
RE: “unless you want to argue that Haq is a Muslim extremist programmed to kill Jews”
MY COMMENT: Doesn’t Bibi’s father think that virtually all non-Jews are “programmed to kill Jews”? (rhetorical)
FROM A WONDERFUL ARTICLE BY URI AVNERY (AND QUITE A NICE TRIBUTE TO RABIN):
Rabin was a child of the classic Zionist ideology. He never rebelled against it. He carried in his body the genetic code of the Zionist movement, a movement whose aim from the beginning was to turn the Land of Israel into an exclusively Jewish state, which denied the very existence of the Arab Palestinian people and whose logic ultimately meant their displacement.
Like most of his generation in the country, he absorbed this ideology with his mother’s milk and was raised on it throughout. It shaped his ideas so thoroughly that he was not even aware of it. At the critical juncture of his life, he fell victim to an insoluble inner contradiction: his analytical mind told him to make peace with the Palestinians, to “give up” a part of the country, and to dismantle the settlements, while his Zionist genetic heritage opposed this with all its might. That manifested itself visibly at the Oslo agreement signing ceremony: he offered his hand to Arafat because his mind commanded it, but all his body language expressed rejection.
SOURCE – http://original.antiwar.com/avnery/2009/11/01/remembering-yitzhak-rabin/
Blogging is cheap. If you really believe that injustice is being done here, protest in front of the Seattle courthouse. Take out ads in the Seattle Jewish newspapers explaining your position. Picket outside of synagogues.
Spoken by someone who isn’t a blogger. I’m putting up thousands of dollars of my own money to host an Iran conference next month. I went to the J St. conference last month. Who do you think paid for that?
And thanks for the advice about how to conduct myself. Much appreciated (& ignored). As an old pop song used to go:
You’ve lost yr mind & you want me to join in yr insanity!
As a former Christian, I am well aware that there are so many sects of Christianity, many of whom were the product of political situations, that whatever original Christianity existed during the time of the Prophet Muhammad is long gone.
Actually, Judaism and Islam are similar because they share the same prophets, or messengers. Neither recognize that Jesus is the son of God.
Richard, I know the song. “Sunshine,” it was called.