What They Didn’t Tell You About Eric Fuller

The news media all dutifully reported that Eric Fuller, a former campaign worker for Gabrielle Giffords who was of the last persons to actually speak to her before she was shot in the head and he took bullets in the knee and back, yelled and screamed “You’re dead!” at Tucson Tea Party leader Trent Humphries, which action caused Fuller to be hauled off and involuntarily committed to a mental hospital pending a medical evaluation.

What these stories didn’t mention is what might have led Fuller to confront Humphries in the first place.

Humphries has been caught on YouTube saying things like this:

“It’s political gamesmanship. The real case is that she [Giffords] had no security whatsoever at this event. So if she lived under a constant fear of being targeted, if she lived under this constant fear of this rhetoric and hatred that was seething, why would she attend an event in full view of the public with no security whatsoever?” he said. “For all the stuff they accuse her [Palin] of, that gun poster has not done a tenth of the damage to the political discourse as what we’re hearing right now.”

As Raw Story points out, Giffords herself, prior to being shot, pointed out the poisonous effects of the sleazy and violence-baiting campaign Humphries and the rest of the Arizona Republicans were running with her opponent Jesse Kelly. And now Humphries is trying to dodge the blame for this.

If you were a disabled combat veteran who had just been through working during a grueling campaign where for over a year Tea Partiers and their Queen Bee Palin had done the whole Radio Rwanda bit, all but ordering their followers to shoot your boss, then be forced to watch your boss be shot in the head before your eyes and get shot yourself along nearly twenty others, six of whom would die, by a David-Wynn-Miller-worshiping, right-wing-theory-spouting, Gold and Silver Bug (Beck being the most notable current promoter of metallic currency) named Jared Loughner, and THEN, with your physical and emotional wounds still raw, have to listen to the guy who you hold responsible for all of this try to weasel out of it like the sleazy creep he is, I expect you might have a tough time not yelling a few intemperate remarks, too.

Shaking the foundations

Juan Cole has an excellent series on the Tunisian revolution, starting here:

Tunisian President Zine al-Abidin Bin Ali has fled the country before the advancing crowds pouring in to the capital’s center. A French eye-witness said of the masses thronging Bourguiba Avenue that “it was black with people.” The Speaker of Parliament [first minister] is caretaker leader of the country, though Aljazeera is reporting that there are already demonstrations in the southern town of Qabis rejecting him, as well. The dramatic events in Tunisia yesterday and today may shake the Middle East, as my colleague Marc Lynch suggested. As usual, the important news from the region is being ignored by US television news. (Here is an English-language eyewitness blog from one corner of the country).

It sounds to me as if the danger is that Tunisia will become a military dictatorship because the military sided with the people in this uprising. The problem with military dictatorships is that, once established, they won’t side with the people in the next uprising.

I would not be surprised to see other uprisings. Egypt, in particular, is ripe for something like this. The prolonged wars that the United States has engaged in have shaken the very foundations of its power.

Jihad: Not What You’ve Been Told It Means

Courtesy of Mohammed ibn Laith of Gorilla’s Guides:

Of all of the concepts and aspects of Islam, Jihad the struggle in the way of The Prophet is perhaps the most deliberately misrepresented and reviled in the west. To engage in Jihad is to make an effort, often a strenuous effort, to achieve a good end. Jihad connotes “struggle“, and to engage in such struggles is a duty laid by Allah upon every Muslim Sunni and Shia alike. Sunni and Shia alike take that duty seriously. Indeed, the Shi’i (Muslims such as myself who are of the Shi’at u Ali), consider the duty to wage jihad as being one of the Furū al-Dīn — one of the ten practices that Shi’a Muslims must perform. The purpose of this posting is to introduce you to Jihad and hopefully clear up some misconceptions.

[…]

If you are struggling with something and you are doing so in order to please God then you are engaging in Jihad. There are many types of Jihad. At one point during my dialogues with the American Christian priest Mike Kinman he asked me to talk to him about the practical aspects of love:

Tell me stories of how you see people in your life manifesting love. How has that changed you? How has that made you follow God’s will more closely? How do those stories give you hope?

Source: 25 Muharram 1429 (03 February 2008) Mike and Mohammed | Gorilla’s Guides

Though he did not know it he was asking me about Jihad. I told him of the women who risk their lives to get water and food to the most desperate, of the teenagers who willingly allow themselves to be locked up with a street child who wants to stop taking drugs so that the child will not endure the agonies of drug withdrawal alone. I told him of people risking their lives to collect money for school books in Touz Khormatou, and of the Red Crescent volunteers and the Red Crescent Staff who go about their business despite the many among them who have been attacked, kidnapped, killed. I told him about the people who raise money to build . I see it in the schoolmaster who continues to teach despite many death threats, and of his pupils. I told him about the people who built and who run this new orphanage. I told him about the societies for uplifting women, the societies that teach women to read and write, the societies that teach women what they need to know of law when they begin to trade, the societies that train women journalists, the societies that help the huge number of women and children in desperate need.

The millions of families who struggle to live ordinary decent lives and strive to live their lives as good Muslims against impossible difficulties of not enough food, no water, no money for fuel to cook with or to warm their houses. Those families must battel to live ordinary decent lives that too is Jihad.

While my younger brother Ali was alive that he would force himself to rise early and come and wake me when it was time for the first prayers of the day. He did this so that I could sleep a little longer and still carry out my duties of prayer. It was very difficult for him to do this (he loved to sleep late), but he did it and made sure that when he had woken me that the first thing I would see would be a smiling face – that was Jihad.

There’s much more at this link. Don’t forget to read the comments section — the author talks directly to readers therein.

(Soon to be crossposted at Renaissance Post.)