Seattle Shooter’s Motive A Mystery?
From the L.A. Times:
A mystery eh? Let’s take a look at the Times’ reporting on the shooting:
SEATTLE — The future once seemed very bright for Naveed Afzal Haq, the son of a Pakistan-born civil structural engineer at the Hanford nuclear complex in Washington state.
Bound for a prestigious bio-dentistry program in Philadelphia, Haq had a huge smile on his face in his 1994 senior yearbook photo at Richland High School in south-central Washington. “RHS, Peace Be Unto You” were his parting words to classmates.
It was Haq — now 30 and facing trial in his hometown on a lewd-conduct charge — who came to Seattle on Friday and is accused of using two semi-automatic handguns to unload a barrage of bullets inside the offices of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle.
To force his way in, he took a 13-year-old girl hostage at gunpoint, police and witnesses said Saturday.
Haq reportedly shouted about his anger toward Jews, toward Israel and its war in Lebanon, and toward U.S. policy in Iraq. One woman, Pam Waechter, 58, the federation’s assistant director, was killed, and five other women were injured.
Doesn’t seem very mysterious to me.
This from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer makes it even more clear:
The gunman, brandishing a large-caliber semi-automatic pistol, forced his way through the security door at the federation, on Third Avenue downtown, after an employee had punched in her security code.
“He said, ‘I am a Muslim American, angry at Israel,’ before opening fire on everyone,” said Marla Meislin-Dietrich, a database coordinator for the center. “He was randomly shooting at everyone.”
Mystery solved, as far as I’m concerned. Unless you’re a leftist media type intent on white washing this massacre lest Americans get the idea that the war on terror and Islamic extremism is real and has consequences that can impact us here at home. Because that would mean that President Bush is right about something, and they just can’t have that.
Patterico has more.
