Overseas Roundup

Good Morning! We've made it to another Friday, so it's time to take our weekly trip around the world and see what everyone else is thinking about...


Switzerland is looking at itself very closely this week, as they had a rare shooting in a hotel in Baden. They are comparing it to the shootings at Virginia Tech and thinking that the US has become the world leader in mass killings.

For the past twenty years, all forms of media have published the long list of mass shooting deaths committed outside the context of war. It's obvious that this list reveals a profound malaise in our society. And it's not surprising that here again, the United States holds the role of pioneer, just as it has in other areas.

America has developed the culture of confrontation on all levels. From the legal system to Hollywood, and encompassing politics, economics and even religion, free market beliefs govern everything. This type of culture has indeed enabled the West to develop its technological creativity. But to favor confrontation in human relations has deleterious moral consequences. Society then becomes akin to a battlefield where everything is allowed, the only goal being victory of one over another. Such a combative environment can only act disastrously on fragile spirits. “To blow a fuse” or “to blow a cable” are expressions that are quite literally in the air, and are accurate expressions of the state of psychic tension that corrodes the life of society.

We would hope in vain for a world without conflict, misfortune or crime. Violence is an essential element of human nature. But each one of us has a vague sense that balance must be restored.

And this goal will not be met by spreading a few ounces of brotherhood over this world of brutality.

An Iraqi newspaper has also chimed in on the shooting, by thanking Allah that the killer was not Muslim. I'd have to agree....could you imagine what Bush would have done if it was a student from Iran?

The blood which flowed following the crime at Virginia Tech was of a very rare kind: we Arabs and Muslims had absolutely nothing to do with it!!

American police continue to investigate the motives behind the incident at Virginia Polytechnic Institute - in which a gunman opened fire killing 32 students and faculty members before turning the gun on himself - and will likely find a thread that links us [Muslims] to this heinous crime. This was a crime that has made everyone tremble with anger - including President Bush. In a case like this, speculation abounds, which is why we praise Allah, and give him our thanks that the gunman was not a Muslim! The crime overwhelmed police and at first they asserted that this was an act of terrorism. But God was kind to his Muslim worshipers when he did not make the killer one of us. Thus, the charges against us were dropped!

We also praise Allah and thank Him that the gunman was not of Arab descent, as the investigation has confirmed that the killer was from South Korea. What if the gunman had been Iraqi or Sudanese? The whole world would have been up in arms over it!

As long as we Arabs and Muslims are far away from this case, "it's springtime and the weather is marvelous," as the late Egyptian singer and actress Suad Husni once observed. But our innocence complicates matters for the investigators, and they are now caught up in a whirlwind of questions.

How could it be that this expert killer isn't a member of our [Muslim] clan? Not one of our cousins? Not even one of our neighbors? Especially since the specifics of this repugnant crime correspond to us: The Virginia Tech killer murdered innocent people, just as bad men killed innocent people on September 11, 2001. The killer committed terrible evil on a university campus, and we certainly have no taboos about slitting throats in order to preserve our existence!

The Virginia Tech killer murdered students of science. We Arabs and Muslims are an ignorant and backward people, and we fight against education from cradle to grave, or so the Western media likes to say!

And lastly, our neighbor to the south is paraphrasing a timeworn phrase about the Roman Empire....in that the all paths of death lead to Washington.

The loss of life being generated in Latin America by the war on drugs is, in part, a result of a mistaken and hypocritical strategy imposed on the continent by Washington and other governments: the prohibition of psychotropic substances and the prohibition of their production, sale and consumption.

By creating conditions that allow the extreme enrichment of drug traffickers, governments have transferred the problem of addiction from the realm of public health to that of police officers, military men and national security, thereby creating a monster with unlimited economic power, which exhibits an almost unlimited capacity to corrupt public officials at all levels. It also equips drug traffickers with firepower at least as lethal as institutions of provide public safety.

Regarding the outbreaks of individual violence that regularly inflict United States society - such as the slaughter perpetrated on Monday in Virginia by an unbalanced South Korean immigrant, who only weeks before and without difficulty, purchased an automatic firearm and hundreds of rounds of ammunition to assassinate 32 people - these are overwhelmingly due to the extreme proliferation of firearms in the hands of the general population.

It should not go unnoticed that the main promoter of this civilian arms buildup - the National Rifle Association - is an ultraconservative organization closely tied to the ruling Republican Party. Similarly, it should be considered that the present administration permitted the few regulations on the indiscriminate sale of high-powered weapons adopted in the days of Bill Clinton to fall into disuse.

The key to stopping all this violence - the colonial war in Iraq, the drug trafficking and the massive number of homicides within the territory of the United States - is in the hands of Washington's political class. At this point it's clear that the first condition for stopping the daily atrocities being committed against Iraq's civilian population, the bloody confrontation between local factions, the losses of British and American troops and the growing disintegration of Iraq's social fabric, consists of the immediate withdrawal of the occupying forces from Iraq.

With respect to the war on drugs, the solution can be found in the very history of the United States itself: the adoption of so called prohibition , outlawing the production and sale of spirits did not eliminate, nor did it reduce alcoholism, Rather, it generated a black market, the members of which defied the government for over a decade, submerging the country in a wave of criminal violence that could not be staunched until the legalization and decriminalization of alcoholic beverages was restored. It's time to come back to our senses and recognize that public health issues cannot be resolved by the army or police, and that combating addictions requires medical and social strategies other than the prohibition of addictive substances.

But for now, the paths of death - the war in Iraq, the war on drugs and the bloody shootings in the United States - have one thing common: they all lead to the White House and the U.S. Capitol.

So....there you have it. Another week of death and mayhem in these United States. No surprise, the rest of the world has taken notice.