Over breakfast a few days ago at Mae’s Cafe in Phinney Ridge, I read through The Stranger’s character study piece on Naveed Haq, the shooter who recently went on a rampage in the Jewish Federation building here in Seattle. Between bites of my country scramble I read through an account of this man’s last summer which was intended by it’s authors, Josh Feit and Brendan Kiley, to portray the conditions of pathetic squalor that leads to someone acting out so violently.

The article is alternately sympathetic and disparaging, making Haq look like both a victim of society and just a straight-up loser. Reading through it, I began to realize just how full of presuppositions the article is, without ever blatantly tipping it’s ideological hand. Let’s pick apart this short excerpt to illustrate my point:

“If someone had just given him a job, this never would have happened,” Renner [a close friend of Haq’s] speculates.

Indeed, Haq spent an idle summer in a studio apartment flirting with women on the internet—not in a radical mosque reading Sayyid Qutb. Despite his Islamic upbringing, Haq didn’t even consider himself a Muslim.

While Haq’s violence exploded inside a political context—the Jewish Federation, Israel’s war in Lebanon—his motivations were those of a frustrated man, who, according to Renner, didn’t fit in anywhere and felt persecuted and embarrassed by his parents’ Pakistani background. Haq is not a jihadi, nor a radical Islamist; his anti-Semitic rhetoric seems more like a veneer of politics on a man disturbed by feelings of inadequacy and rejection.

The print version of the article originally caught my eye because it featured a black and white photo (not included in the online version) of a ratty old couch and a messy computer table littered haphazardly with CD jewel cases. The caption said something about how Haq spent last summer whiling away the hours on the internet. As someone who spends a vast amount of time doing the same thing, that immediately caught my attention. I began to imagine myself the accused perpetrator of some crime, and a news article describing the filthy lifestyle which lead me to it:

Tim Boucher whiled away the summer behind closed doors, unemployed, hunched over a computer, scouring the internet for information related to secret occult conspiracies. He communicated with a shifting shadowy web of people all over the world who shared this odd obsession. Friends (if such a man could even be said to have friends) said he sometimes even was known to… drink beer. {gasp}

I’m not trying to make light of the crime or it’s victims, but my point is that we often see this retroactive character analysis done on people in these circumstances. We go back through their life looking for clues that would “explain” to us why whatever happened did. Hindsight may be 20/20, but it is also incredibly biased when its sole purpose is to explain one single solitary act in a person’s life - especially something which is so out of character as it seems in this case. Sure the guy was a loser who spent all his time online, but that doesn’t make him a killer, and if it did, it would make us all killers.

Maybe more important than that though is this quote from his friend about how if only someone had given Haq a job, that this violent act would have never taken place. Though it may not have been their conscious intent to do so, the inclusion of this line I think is another good example of how you can convey your message overtly through someone else’s words rather than your own. Let someone else say what you mean, and then pretend like you’re impartial. The inclusion of it out of all possible quotes from this person though was a choice made by the writers and editors.

Why? Well, I would speculate that it is because it reflects the popular liberal notion of society being at fault for the actions of the individual. In this reading, Haq only shot people because he couldn’t find a job. What a load of crap! Again, this would make us all killers at some point or another in our lives. It neatly serves though to reinforce social values: the idea that work is healthy and necessary for the functioning of the individual and society, that everyone has a “right” to work, that “idle hands” are the devil’s something or other… You get the idea.

And doesn’t “a veneer of politics on a man disturbed by feelings of inadequacy” describe just about - I don’t know - everyone involved in politics? I mean, that’s what politics is about: feeling inadequate or not powerful enough as an individual so that you must band together with others for the sake of mutual protection and progress. It’s a totally natural and normal behavior of man, whom Aristotle called a “political animal.” Nevermind any arguments we could get into about how we all project internal dramas onto the world around us.

This is also a bedeviling bit of writing:

The pair drove to Marysville earlier this summer to see United 93, the movie about the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania on 9/11. “The movie mesmerized him,” Renner said. “[After the movie], he was just running red lights, not paying attention.” During our interview, Renner wondered if Haq had gotten the idea to force his way into the Jewish Federation—grabbing a girl at gunpoint—from the scene in the movie when the terrorists grabbed a stewardess and forced their way into the cockpit.

We have to step way back to unpack this one: the argument at first glance appears to be the typical one of media violence prompting real violence (another example of blaming society for the individual’s autonomous acts). But on further inspection it’s much more convoluted. Flight 93 is the one that went down outside Shanksville, PA on September 11, 2001. The official government story is that the passengers courageously rose up to fight the terrorist, and to protect America and this is why the plane crashed. It’s the source of the famous “Let’s roll!” comment that Bush took to the bank for a while. The movie United 93, from what I can gather without having actually seen it myself, is essentially a propaganda piece re-telling that flimsy story so that it gains credibility within people’s minds. When it seems much more probable and in line with the existing evidence that this plane was simply shot down by the US Air Force. If that’s the case then (and hey, maybe I’m wrong), what we have here is an instance where a man saw a fictional story… based on a propaganda lie… created by the government to protect it’s image (”Oh they would never shoot down a plane full of Americans! God bless those brave passengers!”)… and then based on that fictional story about a possibly real act of terrorism (or possibly perpetrated by or in collusion with the US government), this man proceeded to commit his own “act of terrorism,” whose only point of similarity between the two acts (one of which may be fake) is that a person was taken hostage… which is of course a totally normal, common occurrence in violent high stress situations. And the man didn’t even consider himself a Muslim…

So, wait, what it that we’re supposed to believe here again? Oh, right - that terrorists are bad and Muslims are terrorists. Whew! That’s a lot easier to remember! Now where’s that beer….?