Seattle

This is just lovely. Mel Gibson's a tool, who's surprised there? But a woman was killed--and others shot--at a Jewish charitable organization in Seattle. Looks like the killer was a Muslim man who decided to express his anger over the Mideast crisis not in the Middle East, not even (as is traditional) in the suburbs of Paris, but in Seattle. Why did this gentleman feel the need to bring terror to Anytown, USA? "'I think his not being able to finish college had a big impact on him,'" is one mosque-member's interpretation. Interesting. If the "cycles-of-violence" rhetoric were true, then all those Jewish kids who had the audacity to head for neither law nor medical school would be off to the local Muslim federation or equivalent with uzis. Not so likely, then, is it?

Obviously this story freaks me out--when I worked at the NYC version of the place in Seattle, my only fear was that the building might fall apart from all the construction. And the first thing you notice reading the piece about this tragedy is just how bad the Muslim community in Seattle feels... for this man's family. How about Jews who don't even live in Israel, don't even live in New York for crying out loud, getting shot at because this guy's angst at never making much of himself has made him more, uh, politically aware?

Yeah, odd, isn't it, how all those Israelis are staying put. So much better to be in America, where you have no actual political power as a Jew, by which I mean you are not a citizen of the Jewish state, but you can still be slaughtered over the conflict. Although, to be fair, that woman at the Seattle federation had it coming. If only Israel--a country whose every military action, due to her presence at a Jewish charitable organization, she must surely support--had let its soliders get kidnapped and not made such a fuss, she'd be alive today. Oh, but it was also about Iraq? Well surely she ought to have stopped the Cabal in its tracks. If the killer's anything like Mel Gibson, he believes the Jews are behind all wars, so surely all murders of Jews are justified in the name of acheiving world peace.

I'd say now's the moment for us American Jews to stop smugly asking French Jews why they remain in France.

This is just so awful.