A correspondent in Pakistan brought this incident and publication to my attention:

Reference: http://pakshia.com/en/shia-killing-pakistan/lahore-sipah-e-sahaba-terrorists-open-fire-shiite-doctor-and-son-martyred/ –>

“A famous Eye-Specialist Dr. Ali Haider, and his 11 year-old son Murtaza Ali Haider, was martyred Saudi-funded terrorists of Sipah-e-Sahaba and Punjab Government-backed Taliban opened fire on their car in Lahore’s Kinal Road.”

My return:

Bookmarked: Islam, Sectarian Conflict. 😦 Without a broad and common law enforcement (paramilitary) umbrella, this atrocious criminality would seem without end.

The special interest press reports these items also as a badge of honor and claim of grievous injustice — both fair enough — but the effect may be to encourage and sustain more of the same in cycle. Some groups — “Pallywood”, for sure, the remote Catholic press, maybe, sometimes — make stuff up: pure propaganda; but this is not.

It may be one reason Obama’s Administration has approached violence associated with Islamic Jihad or a Muslim defensive posture (e.g., Fort Hood Massacre) as clinically criminal — these events add up to “murder in the first degree” and nothing else — rather than legitimize them as culturally, politically, or socially expressive.

I mentioned posting the exchange to this blog.

So done.

As I had mentioned Fort Hood in the exchange, I may mention here that on Facebook, the Coalition of Fort Hood Heroes: More Than Remembrance wants the same sense of the crime — that is, a Muslim American military officer upset with the American military mission in Afghanistan opened fire on his (unarmed) brothers and sisters in uniform while shouting “Allahu Akbar” all the way through.

Just another “gun nut”?

Same category as any other mass shooting (i.e., the “mass shooting”, “massacre”, or “rampage” category — plain force of nature)?

Aviva Shen’s “A Timeline of Mass Shootings in the U.S. Since Columbine” (ThinkProgress, December 14, 2012) provides an overview of the same kind of crime variously motivated.  Stateside racially-motivated killings may come closest to the sectarian experience (of similar crimes) within the Islamic Small Wars.

Where nationality, race, or religion — a simple generalized “discriminator” — provides excuse for aggression and murder, no one wins.  In fact, such violence would seem to backfire and set off an “antibody” type reaction in the populations surrounding events.  Every assassination, every ambush of the innocent and of the unarmed, becomes — or should become — cause for a different kind of courage.

Whether such crimes should be stripped of the rhetorical filigree that would make them more grounded (in something, even poison) if no less hateful, I don’t know.

In the west, this ploy goes both ways: legislators and states on the modern track have a still new classification in “hate crimes” and may add to recognized felonies additional penalties for a crime having been anti-gay, anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim, and so on.

At the same time and as demonstrated by the Obama Administration in its handling of the context or framing of the Fort Hood Massacre, taking the chief contributor to cause — ideological conviction and identification within the Islamic frame (or a version of it) — and officially minimizing its role in the crime has become a part of the Administration’s display of appeasement, courtship, and denial in the American (Christian-majority nation) relationship with Islam or Muslim-majority states and the internal wiring that keeps many of the same (from Afghanistan to Yemen) slipping in pools of their own blood.