4 posts tagged “violence”

CNN -- A gunman attacked worshippers at a Colorado Springs, Colorado, megachurch Sunday afternoon, killing one person and wounding four others before being killed by a security staff member, the city's police chief said.

NYTIMES -- A gunman and three people were killed and five others wounded yesterday in two apparently unprovoked shootings that unfolded about 12 hours and 70 miles apart at a missionary training center and a church in Colorado, law-enforcement authorities reported.

[..] in Colorado Springs, an hour’s drive to the south of Arvada, a gunman also clad in dark clothing invaded the grounds of the New Life Church, a 14,000-member institution founded by the Rev. Ted Haggard, who resigned in disgrace last year after acknowledging a three-year sexual relationship with a male prostitute.

Wearing combat boots and carrying an assault rifle and at least one pistol, the gunman, apparently without provocation, opened fire in a parking lot and shot four people, one of them fatally, as bystanders dashed for cover. There were about 7,000 worshipers inside the church when the shooting erupted, a church official said.

Terrible news about more violence in the United Free States of America.

A gunman (or gunmen), disgruntled at the world no doubt, vents his anger on folks who seem to have it together. Is this home-grown terrorism? Well, we need to know if the gunman did a stint in Iraq, in which case we can safely say he was home brewed, then grown to maturity in Iraq. My comments (uneducated and rude as usual) is that this represents total breakdown of a normal and humane social fabric due, in no small part, to the US war raging foreign and domestic policies, poor social services and general mayhem.

America should really take out the log from it's own eye, before exporting violence to the rest of the world in its so called "war on terror". It's time to define that concept "terror". A long overdue task.

Full article:
Gunman killed (cnn)
2 fatal shootings (nytimes)

And amidst all the terror they have created, they lie and lie and lie and lie......
This New Zealand interview shows the legendary reporter, Robert Fisk explaining his reasons for retiring. A seemingly broken man. The inhumanity he has witnessed in 30 plus years, has not turned him into a sub-human, but it may have nearly broken a very good man.

If he doesn't return to his job, his legacy will certainly live on in the journalists who follow his footsteps. This interview brings me to tears. I have long last seen the film called the Road to Guantanamo, and seeing these news clips in the video remind me why I have often turned the film off midway. I apologise for the language in the title, but I couldn't use the"F' word, so we will have to make do with the word "bastards".

Shame on you Bush and Blair and all your cronies. Shame on all who support these lies against all reason. Those who howl down the voices of reason and civilization, and continue to support these tyrants. History will not deal kindly with this generation. Shame on us all, for we have not done enough.

60km west of Baghdad, there is peace. But residents describe it as the peace of the dead. Resistance to the invasion is still common however. Unemployment is at 80%. Car movement is banned. There is no longer freedom of the press. People often go missing and then turn up as unidentified bodies in the streets. Medical supplies are denied to the residents. It is a slow death that residents are being subjected to.

The city sees no more of the kind of resistance attacks of old, and no more of the 2004 kind of crackdown. "We are so happy that our city is peaceful and quiet after all the battling that killed thousands of our citizens," a captain in the local police force of Fallujah, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS. "We can patrol the streets without fear now, and arrest any person that we suspect to be a terrorist." ...

... Several of those found dead had been arrested earlier, eyewitnesses and families of several of the men killed have said.

"This is fascist behaviour that shows the brutality of the Americans and the so-called Iraqi government," a former member of the Fallujah city council who asked to be referred to as Mahmood told IPS. "Those young guys were executed without any trial. This brutality was not known in our city before this occupation began." ...

... Journalists inside the city are also quiet after a few of them were arrested and held for several days.

One of the detained journalists spoke with IPS on condition of anonymity. Visibly shaken, he said that a major in the Fallujah police force had told him that freedom of the media had been misused and that the police would not allow it any more. He said the major told him that "the news you transmit to the world will be what we tell you, not what you pick up from the street". ...

... Medical services also continue to suffer under the vehicle ban. Doctors at Fallujah General Hospital told IPS that the government in Baghdad is not supplying them with medicines and medical equipment.

"The officials of the Ministry of Health tell us we are terrorists, and so we do not deserve their support," a doctor said. "As if they own Iraqi money and it is up to them whether to give it or not."

The Ministry of Health was headed by Ali al-Shemari from the group of Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr until Sadr withdrew from the government Apr. 16.

Inter Press Service
By Ali al-Fadhily (August 28th, 2007)

The article leads with this statement:

One of the most durable features of the U.S. culture is the inability or refusal to recognize U.S. crimes.

Herman goes on to debunk the idea that religious fanaticism is at the root of terror. He lists what he perceives as the contributing factors at the root of violence and hatred for the United States. He identifies the US installation of tyrants like the Shah of Iran in 1953, the military backing given to Saddam Hussein during the brutal war waged against the new Islamic Republic of Iran, and the US support for the illegal zionist entity in Palestine.

The statement ends with this relevant observation:

imperial terrorism inevitably produces retail terrorist responses; that the urgent need is the curbing of the causal force, which is the rampaging empire.

The complete posting is archived (right click to open in new tab)
http://web.archive.org/web/20011103060522/globalresearch.ca/articles/HER109A.html

In short, the much disliked yet apt words of brother Malcolm concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy remain true today:

a case of chicken coming home to roost

Moreover, apart from seeing their own violence turned on themselves,
Americans are paying the price for:

• their acquiescence of the fraudulent process which ushered in the current US presidency,
• their acquiescence of the assaults on freedoms which were instituted subsequent to Bush's election
• their acquiescence of the obvious deceptions created and then used as pre-texts for the military interventions
  
• their acquiescence of the abuses of the media meant to incite fear, then hatred
  
• their acquiescence of the illegal wars which are being waged today
• their acquiescence of the abuses at secret torture camps including but not exclusive to Guantanamo
  
• their acquiescence of the continued support for the criminal entity occupying Palestine

Sadly, we are all victims of this rampaging empire and we will all pay the price for inaction.

What feeds this process do you think? It defies all logic that so many will be fooled into so much irrational and blind support for a deceptive and a corrupt state. When confronted by reason, some people tend to bury their heads in the soil. Part of the problem of course is as a fellow blogger put it, a nation fed with the doctrine that it is superior to all others, cannot fathom anything other than this perception of themselves. To be exposed to anything other than confirmation of this illusion, becomes something tantamount to suicide. It is a fragile identity. Some would argue it is the mentality of a nation in a state of war, yet I cannot agree that this is a given or even natural state.

In the humble opinion of this blogger, this is more than natural. It is self-serving and it is obstinant. Another blogger noted that the Holy Quran mentions how the enemies of God will never accept the believers, until [the believers] embrace [the non-believers'] religion (identical in the translation to "way of life"). The Holy Bible mentions something similar in the book of Proverbs and elsewhere, I believe. We must in effect show our allegiance to the great satan by our wanton and obstinant embrace of death, violence, destruction, symbols of allegiance, if you will. Refusal to open one's mind to allow rational considerations into our thinking and our actions, is surely sinful at best, and dangerous at worst. For it prevents our God from using us as instruments in His correction of the wrongs of others.