Anyone Care About Murder In A Jewish Office?
by Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor, The Jewish Week, December 9, 2009
June 28, 2006 was quite a day for anti-Semitism, wasn’t it? Surely, you remember how an intoxicated Mel Gibson was pulled over by a Malibu cop, only for Gibson to tell the officer, “Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.” That, of course, was just after Gibson’s movie, “The Passion of the Christ,” led to nationwide headlines, such as the one in The Jewish Week, “Jews Horrified By Gibson’s Jesus Film.” Countless Jewish organizations, rabbis and executive directors told us to be afraid, very afraid, of what that movie might unleash in unsophisticated American Christians.
Even this week, in light of the Tiger Woods apology for “transgressions,” Time magazine online re-explored Gibson’s old apology for his drunken anti-Semitic rant.
Surely, you remember all that about Gibson. But on the very same day as Gibson’s Malibu transgression, another man (not an extremist Christian like Gibson) also blamed Jews “for all these problems,” including wars — just like Gibson.
That man, Naveed Haq, stuck a gun into the back of a teenage girl to gain entrance into the offices of the Seattle Jewish Federation, shooting one woman, Pamela Waechter, to death, and injuring five others. According to the Seattle Jewish Transcript, one of the injured, Layla Bush, 24, the federation’s receptionist at the time, was hit by three bullets, one in her spine, flooding her with pain. To this day she says she can longer dance, engage in athletics or even put on a pair of slacks while standing up. She has trouble even sitting, and can no longer work full time.
Are we “horrified” yet? Or are we waiting for the movie?
Naveed Haq’s first trial for the Jewish federation shootings, that he admitted doing albeit pleading insanity, ended in a mistrial. A second trial will likely go to the jury next week. Is it fair to say that no one in the media cares?
A search (Dec. 8) of Google News for “Seattle Haq” got exactly two returns, one from the Seattle Times, the local paper covering the trial, and one from the Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle, where it appeared in a column that was prompted by the shootings in Fort Hood. A similar search in Yahoo News yielded seven returns, three about football, three primarily about Fort Hood (from the Oklahoma City Oklahoman, a column in Jewish World Review, and Yahoo News), and the Seattle Times. It has also been covered online by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which no longer has a print edition. For those who mock blogs, let it be known that the case has been mentioned in more blogs than newspapers.
The retrial is obviously being treated by journalists outside Seattle as a local crime, no different than a gas station holdup gone wrong, but it was not local. We now know that Haq, who lived more than 220 miles away from Seattle, went searching on the Internet for a Jewish organization, anywhere, in which to kill. He just as easily could have picked your favorite organization, dear reader, or your synagogue. He was willing to travel.
Holding his gun to the head of a pregnant woman in the federation office, Haq himself dialed 911 and explained that he was a “Muslim-American” who felt his people were “getting pushed around” by Israel. This was not just about Israel, he told detectives, “This is about Jews, and what they are doing. The Jews are running the country.”
From jail, Haq called his mother, according to a recording played at the trial, telling her, “You should be proud of me. I’m a martyr now ... I’m a soldier. I’m a soldier of Islam.”
The Los Angeles Times wasn’t convinced. It teased the story on the front page (July 30, 2006), “Jewish Center Shooter’s Motives Remain A Mystery.”
(Similarly, The New York Times also often tries to avoid identifying someone, or linking criminal motives to a religion, or Arab background. That led to this March 5, 1993 headline after the first World Trade Center bombing: “Jersey City Man Is Charged In Bombing Of Trade Center Blast,” though a New Jersey address was hardly the bomber’s most pertinent identification.)
A columnist in London’s Guardian (June 10, 2008), at the start of Haq’s first trial, scolded those who linked the killings to Islam and the larger context: “Naveed Haq,” he mocked, “has become a poster child of Islamophobes the world over.”
Hardly. If that were the case, Haq’s current trial would now be of interest to somebody, somewhere. It’s not.
The New York Times (April 18, 2008) did a story on Haq’s first trial but is ignoring the retrial. It is not alone.
The New York Times, though, was nevertheless surprised, and possibly moved to disinterest, even back then, by the fact that even though Haq’s own words reflected “a stunning local eruption of that overseas tension ... Yet, there was no gathering of [Jewish] protesters outside the courthouse.”
Oh, but there were protests. Just blocks away from the courthouse there was a protest against Israel.
What is interesting is that media coverage of Haq’s new trial has gone AWOL even as Jewish fears of sudden, random Muslim-American terror are escalating.
For example, the very first response by the Anti-Defamation League (July 28, 2006) did not mention the word Muslim. Two weeks later, two ADL West Coast staffers wrote an op-ed in The Jewish News of Northern California (Aug. 18, 2006), reminding Jews, who presumably needed reminding, that Jewish “hate is not kosher.” It would be terrible if there were to be “more stereotypes, more discrimination or more hate.” After all, “this tragedy was the work of an individual ... What a shame it would be to add insult to injury and allow more hate to proliferate from the blood that was shed.”
By 2009, however, with Daniel Pipes documenting numerous cases of “sudden Jihad” shootings and terror by individual American Muslims, the ADL now has sent out a new warning. Not about Jewish “hate” but about “American Muslim extremists, fueled by hatred of Jews and Israel,” who have “planned a number of terrorist attacks within the United States.” Haq is now being thematically linked by the ADL to other American Muslims whose have engaged in “terror-related” activity in Illinois, North Carolina, Arkansas, New York City, New Jersey, California, Virginia, Florida, and Oregon.
And yet a columnist in The Nation, the progressive journal, wrote earlier this year, “since 9/11 not a single American has even been punched in the nose by an angry Muslim, as far as I can tell.”
Someone ought to send him — and other journalists — to that courthouse in Seattle and Pamela Waechter’s grave.
[Editor's Note: We at Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives care a lot about this. The kllling of Jews because they work at Jewish institutions is a great outrage. No murderous actions on the part of the State of Israel can ever justify the random killing of Jews anyplace in the world.]
