There are rumours being spread that the shooting in Las Vegas might not actually be the one claiming the most victims in the USA. There is the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890, when the better part of a US Army regiment killed about 250 Lakota Sioux Indians, and the 1921 race riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where as many as 300 African-Americans were killed.
One issue is that at neither Wounded Knee nor Tulsa is there an accurate casualty count. At Las Vegas, however, it’s 59. And at neither Wounded Knee nor Tulsa were the victims unarmed. They might have been heavily outgunned, but US soldiers were shot dead at Wounded Knee and whites in Tulsa. The Las Vegas victims were unarmed. After all, they had gone to attend a concert.
And I must say, I don’t agree with this militant method of musical criticism. Look, if you don’t like country and Western, no need to shoot up a crowd of fans. No need to bring 23 guns to Las Vegas (leaving 19 at home).
But it seems militants started the method. They attacked an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester on 22 May, killing 22, and earlier, on 13 November 2015, an Eagles of Death Concert in Paris, killing 89 of the 129 killed that night.
Indeed, it’s a pity that the Las Vegas shooter, Stephen Paddock, didn’t yell “Allahu Akbar” before his attack. He has some signs of mental instability, being the son of a bank robber who escaped from jail, and there have been brave attempts to have him linked to the Islamic State (through conversion). But that yelling would have ‘sealed the deal’.
Like for the militant who yelled, and then stabbed two women, at a train station in Marseilles. No yells have been recorded for the Somali man who stabbed cops in Canada before being arrested. Best of all has been the issuing of a shooter alert (but no shooter) at the US Air Force Academy, in Colorado. You can blame it on militants without having any yells. The Academy needed something to distract from racist slogans being painted on the doors of African-American cadets’ rooms.
Remember, Paddock is merely a shooter, not a terrorist. Just like the couple arrested in Krasnodar Russia for killing 30 people, whom they then ate. If only it could be shown that they yelled ‘Allahu Akbar’ before tucking in…. But at present, they’re just cannibals. Not terrorists.
He’s supposed to be an example of white privilege, because he’s not a terrorist. White privilege saw the racist, anti-immigrant AfD enter the Bundestag for the first time. Like Donald Trump got elected US President.
I wonder if the election of Jimmy Dhaliwal (originally Jagmeet Singh) as leader of the Canadian Free Democratic Party is part of the same trend, white privilege in reverse. Sikhs are doing well in Canada. Ujjal Dev Dosanjh was premier of British Columbia in 2000-2001, and was a mona Sikh. But Dhaliwal wears all the five Ks of Sikhism, like Harjit Sajjan, now Defence Minister. So wait for a Khalsa Sikh to become Prime Minister of Canada.
Harjit Sajjan is also the first Sikh to have commanded a Canadian battalion, making him a sort of match for US Defense Secretary Mike ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis, a retired general. Mattis was also fired at by militants, who let loose a rocket barrage at Kabul Airport when he was landing there, but he escaped, just as he did from being bitten by Khwaja Asif while he was in Washington.
The man who would have supervised the rabies shots for the US Cabinet, Health Secretary Tom Price, had already resigned, not because Mattis bit President Trump, but because Obamacare was not rolled back as Trump had promised.
Price may have made an exit, for using planes he wasn’t entitled to. While he resigned for that bit of corruption, Mian Nawaz Sharif, despite being found guilty of corruption by the Supreme Court, was re-elected President of his own faction of the Muslim League, and even though disqualified from being an MP, he can oust any MP, under the Constitution.
The least that could be done in protest was for Pakistan to lose against Sri Lanka, which should prove that the cricket team at last is behind Imran. It’s not all been good news for all-rounders, though, for England’s Ben Stokes was caught on camera beating up someone. Now look at Imran. Yes, he too went to nightclubs, which is where he first met his first wife Jemima, who is still trying to help him show his London flat’s money trail. But he went there to spread Islam. Now Stokes has not said he was preaching anything. So even if he wins the World Cup, no one will make him PM.
However, what made us happy was that Ashura passed without anyone being killed. A sign of a new Pakistan? That it is safe for cricket again? A new Ashura tradition has now solidified, that of turning off mobile signals.