You will remember that Mets 102 wrote a searing diary about the three peoplewho were killed in a pre-Passover shooting on Overland Park, Kansas. In this diary, he talked about the rituals surrounding death in an observant Jewish household and how the Jew-hating killer had disrupted them for the survivors as well as taking the lives of their loved ones.
Only he didn't disrupt anyone sitting shiva. The three people shot in Kansas? Christian.
Not much to say here aside from a long quote (well within fair-use guidelines) from a column Frank Bruni write for the New York Times this morning. It's about hate crimes in general and this one in particular, which he notes was committed by an extreme hater, someone who had announced his hatred for Jews on the Howard Stern Show.
When Stern asked Miller whether he had more intense antipathy for Jews or for blacks (why that question?), Miller chose the Jews, definitely the Jews, “a thousand times more,” he said.
“Compared to our Jewish problem, all other problems are mere distractions,” he declaimed, and he apparently wasn’t just spouting off. He was gearing up.
On Sunday, according to the police, he drove to a Jewish community center in Overland Park, Kan., and opened fire, then moved on to a nearby Jewish retirement home and did the same. Three people were killed.
They were Christian, as it happens. When hatred is loosed, we’re all in the crossfire.
Yes, despite Miller's hatred for Jews, not all Christians feel the same way he does, and people of all religions in the contry work and play together in a good and pleasant way. When that's broken, it's a hate crime.
It's inbred prejudice. Bruni covers the fear of being accused of Islamophobia that the people at Brandeis University exhibited in withdrawing an invitation to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but he also points out that Pat Robertson has made some pretty scurrilous remarks, and he concludes with this response of a school district superintendent in upstate New York to Jewish parents who complained about the harassment of their children for religious reasons at a school in the district.
When a parent complained in 2011, the district’s superintendent responded, in an email: “Your expectations for changing inbred prejudice may be a bit unrealistic.”
I'm in my office at Pierce College waiting for my apartment manager to call me back because I locked my keys in my apartment on my way here> I'll be in and out and I have classes to teach but I should be here for about 30 minutes and back for a while between 2:30 and 3:30 Pacific.
UPDATE, 12:25 PM PST: Off to teach about the War of 1812. I'll be back in a couple of hours.