A different perspective

Submitted by Bader S (United Arab Emirates), Mar 14, 2006 at 17:48

Beside the fact that this man was a Muslim, his behavior seems to fall perfectly well within a pattern that was well known in America -- violent school rampages.

Here are a few quotes from: Grief and Grievance Behind the Rampages
(http://www.harvardmagazine.com/on-line/0902128.html)

"Their names—and their respective tragedies—are now a part of the American lexicon: Littleton, Colorado; Paducah, Kentucky; Jonesboro, Arkansas. The school shootings of the late 1990s came to represent everything bad about youth and American culture. The urban youth-violence epidemic of the 1980s had reached the suburban and rural heartland—no place was safe anymore"

"The CDC's report studied 220 school-related shootings from 1994 to 1999 that resulted in 253 deaths"

"The researchers compared the suburban school-shooting sprees of the 1990s to an earlier wave of urban school violence that began in the 1980s. "While the inner-city epidemic of violence was fueled by well-understood causes—poverty, racial segregation, and the dynamics of the illicit drug trade—the violence in the suburban and rural schools more closely resembles 'rampage' shootings that occur in places other than schools, such as workplaces," explains the NRC report. "In the inner-city cases," the report continues, "the shooting incidents involved specific grievances between individuals that were well known in the school community. In contrast, the suburban and rural shooting incidents did not involve specific grievances. These shooters felt aggrieved, but their grievances were a more general and abstract sense of feeling attacked, rather than a specific threat by an individual."

This man grew up in the US, his family is well integrated into society. His mother works for the US government according to one newspaper I read. He is successful at school. He is a US citizen.

So he had a few grievances against his government, or felt aggrieved, and this made him think of ways to express himself violently. And not being able to get hold of a gun he used a car instead.

Had he been a non-muslim he would have been treated as a liberal traitor for being against his country and a criminal for attempting to kill fellow students. But because he is a Muslim he becomes the personification of the Sudden Jihad Syndrome.

It is a crime to act on your grievances but if you are a Muslim it is a double crime.

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