Excellent piece on Gun Violence, Domestic Terror and Military Adventure

I find the terrorist attack on the Xmas party in San Bernardino a-typical of all other mass murders except the likes of Timothy Veigh in the Oklahoma bombing and the Tsarnaev brothers from Russia’s Caucasus in the Boston bombing.

Dreadful to think that our War on Islamic nations from the 1950s in overthrow of Mossadeq, the 1980s contra-Soviet terror in Afghanistan, supporting the freedom fighters in Chechnya [against the Soviet Union], supporting Saddam Hussein in the Iraq-Iran War, arming the Sunni tribes in Anbar province [where did a million AK-47s go that were dsitributed by US Gen. Petraeus] and the continued drone attacks in the countries led by our allies: Pakistan, Yemen and now in the Levant against Daesh. Who declared the War on Terror over?

Interesting background of Tasfeen Malik from Pakistan: Punjab province, father lives in Saudi Arabia, married a US ctizen in order to strike at the great satan as ordered by the Islamic State. This is just recent history and has absolutely nothing to do with the schism in Islam from the seventh century.

○ How to build your own AK-47 in California | Mother Jones – video |

Guns: ‘Somethin’s Happnin’ Here, What It is Ain’t Exactly Clear’ | Tikun Olam |

Another mass murder. Another gun assault. How many dead this time? Who did it? Was it terrorism? Was he from a group we hate? Or one which will embarrass us? Was he Muslim? White Supremacist? Anti-Abortion? A settler? Was he mentally ill? These are some of the questions that jump out at us when we first learn this horrid news.

We also ask about security. Did the FBI or local police do their jobs? Was there anything they let slip through the cracks? Was their a failure that was in their hands that might’ve prevented the tragedy?

Of course, there is always in the back of our minds the scourge of guns in our society. But we’ve learned to suppress that urge because we know that the gun lobby owns Congress. We know the NRA has an even stronger vise on public policy than the Israel Lobby does. So many of us have learned to withhold our outrage at the real cause of these massacres. Because we know nothing can be done.

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Some of our introspection may be worthwhile (though not all). It can never hurt to examine the underlying principles of a religion or society and their unspoken, unconscious patterns of hate or oppression. However, in some circumstances, especially related to Islamist violence, the blame game lapses too easily into Islamophobia.

« click for more info The terrorists in the gun lobby (Credit: Mother Jones)

The inability to address these two critical issues and resolve them for the benefit of all threatens to render fatal judgment on our entire society. Can a nation which can do nothing to save itself from these horrors long survive? Do we deserve to? If we were a species instead of a nation, Darwin would invoke the law of the survival of the fittest to determine our fate. We would have to say that we are not fit. We cannot do the least to ensure the survival of our citizens. We are shaming ourselves as individuals and as a country.