08/30/2006
Yesterday, an Afghan immigrant used his SUV as a weapon and ran down more than a dozen people in the San Francisco Bay area. The rampage started in Fremont, where 29-year-old Omeed Aziz Popal struck and killed a man walking in a bike lane.He then drove 33 miles in busy mid-day traffic, crossing the Bay Bridge to reach San Francisco, where he proceeded to run down at least 14 pedestrians and a bike rider. He struck people in crosswalks and on the sidewalk, starting in the Tenderloin and ending up in Laurel Heights (map). In one case, he returned to chase down a good Samaritan who was trying to help a victim. At the Jewish Community Center on California, he hit two people on the sidewalk.
Predictably, the family goes for the insanity defense, saying Popal has been strange since he returned from his
arranged marriage in Afghanistan
, where his wife remains a month later. And yes, the local Afghan community is concerned about a "backlash": they are "worried about what Popal’s arrest might mean for other area Afghans." If they expressed any concern for the many victims, some in critical condition, it wasn’t in the papers.Daniel Pipes has coined a term, Sudden Jihad Syndrome, for Muslims living in the west who are thought reasonable yet suddenly start mass-murdering infidels. The occasion of the phrase was when another SUV-driving Muslim immigrant, Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, ran down nine people at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill last March.
After the horrific shootings in July at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle in which one woman was killed, I suggested that the interior culture clash of young Muslim immigrants can unhinge some, at which time they revert to the jihadist ideology of killing infidels learned in the mosque. Popal might well have been psychologically stressed, but if so, it was his religion and culture which defined how he acted out that anxiety.
But in the uber-lib media of the San Francisco Bay Area, the word "Muslim" is apparently hard for many reporters to spell, and "terrorist" even more so. At this time, no media source has even called Popal an immigrant, though one article admitted he was "born in Afghanistan." In many others, the perp is "a Fremont man."
There is a big problem with importing avowed enemies to America and calling it immigration diversity. One symptom is the growing incidence of culture- and religion-based murders of Americans by Muslims. But you won’t find that discussion in the MSM, only in Vdare.com and other purveyors of reason in the blogosphere.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.