The first one we've all heard about. From DPA [2], July 30:
Muslim charged in Jewsh center shooting
A Muslim man who allegedly killed a woman and wounded five others inside a Jewish community centre in Seattle, Washington, gained entry by holding a teenaged girl at gunpoint, police said Saturday.A judge on Saturday ordered Naveed Afzal Haq, 30, held on 30 million dollars bail on suspicion of first-degree murder and five charges of attempted murder.
He was arrested Friday inside the offices of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle. Haq was described as a loner who grew up in the Seattle area with a history of mental problems.
Police said that he shouted anti-Israeli slurs during the shooting and was motivated by anger over the ongoing Israeli offensive in Lebanon. He is believed to have acted alone, but authorities in Washington state in the Pacific North-west boosted security at both Jewish and Muslim sites as a precaution.
Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske revealed Saturday that Haq hid in the lobby of the office building before putting a handgun to a 13-year-old girl and forcing her to take him inside.
'She could not have kept him out,' the Seattle Times quoted Kerlikowske as saying. 'She was a hostage.'
Haq was armed with two semiautomatic handguns and carried ammunition with which to reload and 'immediately started firing at people' inside the office, Kerlikowske said.
The girl was apparently unhurt.
The shooting left Pamela Waechter, 58, dead. She was described by the newspaper as a convert who continued to practise Judaism after divorcing her Jewish husband.
All five of the wounded women remained hospitalized Saturday. Threw who had been in critical condition were upgraded to serious, the Seattle Times reported.
These you may have missed. From AP [3], July 30:
Vandals deface Berlin's Holocaust memorial
BERLIN -- Vandals scratched a swastika into one of the slabs of Berlin's Holocaust memorial, police said Sunday.Security officers found the swastika Saturday morning, police said. The damage was swiftly repaired.
The memorial - a vast field of more than 2,700 gray slabs situated close to the Brandenburg Gate in the heart of Berlin - opened to the public in May 2005. Open around the clock, it drew some 3.5 million visitors in its first year, authorities said.
In a separate incident, a 42-year-old man was detained after he was seen painting a swastika on the facade of the Swiss Embassy in Berlin, police said.
Some of these jerks have it in for Muslims as well as Jews. Or maybe they are too dumb to tell the difference. From DPA [4], July 30:
Swastika painted on New Zealand mosque
Wellington - Swastikas and the satanic number 666 were painted on a mosque over the weekend in Lower Hutt, near New Zealand's capital Wellington, it was reported Monday.Four windows were also smashed in the mosque, which has been vandalized at least six times this year, prayer leader Khaled Abbas told the Dominion Post.
He said he believed teenagers acting out of ignorance were to blame, and officials were replacing some windows that had been smashed several times with plastic.
Hanif Khan, who chairs the Islamic Hutt Valley Trust, said that local Muslims were becoming very upset over the attacks.
'We have not done anything at all,' he said. 'We are peaceful and not motivated to go against people.'
The below case is fairly ubiquitous at anti-Israel protests, but at least the Swedes are smart enough to be outraged over it. We oppose prosecution on free speech grounds, but these people should still be condemned as idiots—especially by their fellow anti-war protesters. From Sweden's English-language The Local [5], July 25:
No prosecution over demo swastika
Prosecutors in Malmö have decided not to press charges against demonstrators were who carried a banner depicting a swastika during a demonstration over the war in Lebanon."Political demonstrations should be allowed some lee-way," prosecutor Bo Albrektsson said.
The prosecutor's office in Malmö has given contradictory signals in the last few days as to whether there would be prosecutions for the crime of Agitation against Minority Groups.
Duty prosecutor Mats Svensson said on Friday that the placards, which compared the swastika to the Star of David, were not illegal.
On Monday, however, Malmö's chief prosecutor Sven-Erik Alhem expressed a different opinion, saying that even in the context of a political demonstration, displaying the swastika was clearly disrespectful of Jews as a minority group. Alhem was only commenting on general principles, and was not responsible for dealing with the case in hand...
Liberal councillor Iva Parizkova Ryggeståhl had earlier called for the Palestinian Association of Malmö to have its subsidies stopped following the appearance of the swastika at the demonstration. The association denied having any connection to the controversial placard.
This one is from July 11, the day before the Lebanon crisis began. From the AP [6]:
Italy's Premier Denounces Graffiti
ROME -- Premier Romano Prodi on Tuesday denounced a swastika and other graffiti scrawled on doors and walls in a Jewish neighborhood of Rome overnight, when soccer fans thronged the streets to celebrate Italy's World Cup triumph.Some of the graffiti was painted on a door along a wall near outdoor tables of a trattoria along the main street of the Old Ghetto, as the neighborhood is known. Graffiti was also spray-painted on a motorscooter saddle and on name plates and intercoms on apartment building doors.
Oh, and look what the Seattle area witnessed just a few weeks before the shooting. From the Post-Intelligencer [7], July 5:
Neo-Nazis: Swastika silliness
Peddling Nazism in Olympia makes about as much sense as selling space heaters in the Sahara, but a dingbat dozen from the National Socialist Movement gave it a shot, anyway, on Monday. (Even "Movement" seems overstated. It's more like a twitch.)The really big turnout Monday in Olympia, of course, was among those who assembled to heckle, harass and laugh at these silly brown-shirt boys. Resplendent in black boots and red swastikas, they railed against Jews, non-whites, gays, immigrants and whomever else they've decided to blame for their own failed lot in life.
Perhaps the most appropriate counterdemonstration came from folks dressed as clowns, performing floppy-footed goose steps in mockery of such a deserving gathering.
The rally's purpose was recruiting new members. Good luck with that. The bloody, brutal and racist scar the real Nazis left on human history offers nothing to recommend a rebirth.
There is, of course, nothing funny about the atrocities perpetrated by the National Socialist Party before and during World War II, and nothing laughable about the millions murdered. But it's hard to imagine a more appropriate response to these ninnies than a hearty laugh, and nothing they'd like more than being taken seriously.
We wonder if these jerks are happy about the Jewish Federation shootings and see Naveed Afzal Haq as a hero? Hard to say. As the New Zealand case indicates, Nazis (neo and retro) can never seem to make up their minds whether they see Islamic extremists as enemies of the Aryan race or allies against the common Jewish menace.
Nazis and other assorted Jew-haters have been very busy lately in Russia [8], Poland [9], France [10], Uzbekistan [11] and, oh yeah, Norway [12].
See our last post on the Lebanon crisis [13].
