<p>I guess we’ll never be free from maniacal bigots.</p>
<p>Never.</p>
<p>He didn’t even get his intended target. Two of the people he killed were Christians last I heard. </p>
<p>Makes me sick.</p>
<p>This story is heartbreaking and hits a little close to home. As I read about the center’s festivities that were taking place, I can’t help but think of my church and our events and the like. It’s a shame how someone can just barge in and stir up a peaceful community. Prayers go out.</p>
<p>We will never be free from maniacal bigots. We should never expect to be, either. </p>
<p>It’s in the nature of human perception. We need to believe. We need to tell stories that make sense of the world and our lives and many of us need stories that explain why things happen. A lot of people focus on Jews. They have no way of explaining Jewish success, especially despite repeated legal and physical oppression of them. So they imagine stories and thus conspiracies. Even worse are the ones who imagine Jews are successful because their presence marks a corrupt world and thus they are a sign which must be eliminated for paradise to come. And then there’s a third group for whom “Jew” is a concept for evil “other”. We see a lot of that in places where there are no Jews, with a particular favorite being the way the Sisi government in Egypt labels the Muslim Brotherhood as Jews (or in cahoots with Jews) while the Muslim Brotherhood labels the Sisi government as pawns of the Jews - and has published claims that Sisi himself is Jewish. The beliefs are absurd but irrationality exists so it isn’t absurd that irrational belief exists. </p>
<p>If you pay any attention to the Western underground - or bluntly, the Middle Eastern and part of the far Eastern regular society - it’s a litany of this hateful idiocy. One of my favorites recently was by a guy named Dr. Kevin Barrett - you can look him up - on TV in Iran saying the Malaysian airline disappearance was an Israeli “false flag operation” gone wrong - whatever that would be - and that there’s a duplicate airliner in a hangar in Tel Aviv. People believe this garbage. </p>
<p>To put this in context, I had a conversation at my gym on Saturday with a nice kid who spent a year teaching in a town in Hungary. Though his father is Jewish, he repeated to me that Hungary had become increasingly anti-semitic because Israeli hedge funds took advantage of the country … he’d heard this so many times it became part of his explanation. It isn’t true; there isn’t much of a hedge fund business in Israel at all and certainly wasn’t 10 years ago. But George Soros is Hungarian Jew and he’s been accused of currency trading that hurts markets - accused btw by a Muslim minister in Malaysia who later retracted the words. So from a tiny grain grows an explanation that has no basis in fact. (Soros, btw, has given large amounts of money to Hungary, including nearly $1B to Central European University in Budapest. But he’s a currency trader and a Jew so …)</p>
<p>Yes, it seems that time after time all of these bigots are losers, looking for someone else to blame for their losses and their lack of significance in life. Terrorism by another name; gunning down innocent people. And from the looks of it, this madman will be laughing until his dying day in prison. Maybe no different from our last pair of madmen, the Tsarnevs.</p>
<p>I guess it was easier to identify the Jews when they all wore yellow stars. He killed 2 Methodists and a Catholic. </p>
<p>There is no way to educate or to eradicate the moron element.</p>
<p>This is literally where I live. It is so hard to imagine that something like this could happen here. People of all denominations go to the JCC or live in the “Jewish” retirement community. (I’m not Jewish, but immediate family members have been to both places multiple times. . .D babysits with her friend at a synagogue–never did it cross my mind that there could be any risk. . .) A lot of high school kids were at the community center auditioning for a local talent show, and there was also a play going on there–so just a lot of people around at that time.
We will always have crazies doing random acts of violence. But why? (I’m glad he didn’t kill more people–if he had an automatic weapon and had gone in the building–it could’ve been a lot worse. But still terrible and pointless.)</p>
<p>our local JCC erected a guard gate days after 9/11/2001. It is still there.</p>
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<p>As an aside, Soros used to sponsor, it’s now without his financial support, a six week summer program that brought together American private school students (including my son) with students from former Soviet bloc countries in Eastern Asian and Eastern Europe to study the principles of democracy at Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic. My son became friendly with a Muslim student as they both searched, often in vain, for non-pork based cuisine.</p>
<p>In that vein, there’s a terrific organization called “Seeds of Peace”. They run a camp in Maine for kids from various conflicts. They started with Israelis and Palestinians and branched out from there. </p>
<p>My 19-year-old son just got back from spending almost two months in Jordan. He said he got along great with the Muslim kids there. He hung out for a few days with one young man who told him, “You’re my best friend!” He was surprised that the young people were so friendly and welcoming to the Americans.</p>