Well it looks like Utah shooter and “non-religious” Bosnian Muslim Sulejman Talovic is in the ground after his funeral this weekend in Tuzla, Bosnia, where he was interred with Islamic burial rites.
Slavojub Josipovic, of the American Bosnian and Herzegovenian Association, not a Muslim himself but married to a Muslim, reminds us that Bosnian Muslims are secular and “don’t practice too much.”
One wonders why strangers showed up to pay their respects at the funeral of a murderer. But all present forgave the mass murderer:
Before the casket was taken to the cemetery, lead imam Sulejman Sulejmanovic asked all the gathered women if they would ‘’halaliti’’ (forgive) all of Sulejman’s sins before he departed to another world. By tradition, the question was repeated three times, and the women forgave Sulejman.
By Muslim custom, the casket was moved from hand to hand by the men all the way to the grave, where it was placed headfirst by the closest family member, in this case, Suljo Talovic. Only men were allowed to witness the burial.
After the prayers led by three imams, the question: “Are we going to forgive?’’ was repeated three more times. “He is forgiven!” said the men gathered.
Sulejmanovic “said the victims of the Trolley Square shootings should know that ‘we Bosnians are not maniacs, that we are normal and mellow people.’”
Our media have been scrambling to underscore the same point. The image we were supposed to have of “Bosnians” was the long-cultivated non-Muslim Muslims (“non-religious”; “secular”; “non-practicing”; “Europeanized”; “non-observant” Muslims). Now the explanation before us is that “Bosnian Muslims” are simply the non-terrorist type of Muslim. Let the record show: In the language of the media that had us take up the Bosnian jihad, “non-observant Muslim” = “non-terrorist Muslim.” Ergo, observant Muslim = terrorist Muslim. In other words, Talovic died practicing his faith.
Tuzla is a place where wahhabis are causing daily incidents at mosques and schools as part of the radicalization program that Bosnia’s war for independence invited, and the authorities are reluctant to do much about it. It’s also where, as Belgrade’s Tanjug news agency reported, “Serbs Again Flee Bosnian Federation due to Discrimination”:
The Association for the Return of Displaced Persons to the Tuzla Kanton (canton) has warned once again that the position of somewhat 7,000 Serb returnees in 13 cantonal municipalities is unbearable, due to the deprivation of their rights and discriminatory attitude of the Bosniak and cantonal authorities towards them…Bosniaks have committed ethnic cleansing against local Serbs [of] whom there used to be 82,000 in this region before the war, the Association underlined.
At Saturday’s funeral, the killer’s father, Suljo Talovic, “said he would not make excuses for his son, but did not understand how a teenager could buy a gun in the United States.”:
“The authorities are guilty for not alerting us that he bought a gun. In the U.S., you cannot buy cigarettes if you are underaged, but you can buy a gun,” he said.
Of course, if Suljo had alerted authorities that his teenage son had taken a recent interest in mosque attendance, then they would have known when he was buying a gun. The father’s transparent gun-control spin is the same route that Brooklyn-based Albanian arms smuggler Florin Krasniqi took when he realized he could get in trouble for what he revealed in the 2005 Dutch documentary “The Brooklyn Connection,” which showed him illegally shipping legally purchased hunting and assault rifles ($15 million-worth) to help arm the Kosovo Liberation Army against NATO. With the goal of deflecting from his activities, Krasniqi went on “60 Minutes” expressing his altruistic concern over how easy it is to acquire weapons in the U.S.
But notice how quickly these immigrants learn — already blaming America for their American-killing children — because we showed them how it’s done.
For a whole week there hasn’t been a peep from investigators since they scolded Americans (particularly “right-wing websites and Fox News”) for hearing something that sounded like “Allah Akbar” on a recording. Though police refuse to reveal what it was that Talovic did yell, it’s possible that by now they’ve found evidence that the massacre was a jihadist act after all — with or without Allah invoked — and so we won’t be hearing any more about the progress of the investigation. (As we learned from the D.C. sniper case, massacre or serial killer stories don’t have legs unless they’re not committed by Muslims. So perhaps from now on, the only kind of headline we should see is “Non-Muslim Killer Strikes” — since it’s news only when the perp isn’t Muslim.)
Why the official reticence about the terrorist nature of this act? Because investigators and officials are worried about a possible backlash by Americans against the Bosnian community.
They must be worried about card stores and florists being emptied out and a major diversion of charitable contributions going to the Bosnian community, since so far the American reaction has been to shower the shooter’s family and Utah’s Bosnian community with flowers, donations and neighborly support in general. From the New York Times:
The family could not be reached by telephone, and no one answered the door at their bungalow. On the front porch, someone had left a gift-wrapped potted flower. Wedged into the door jamb was a sealed envelope with one hand-written and underlined word: “Sorry.” Inside it, visible through the address window, were $20 bills.
Indeed, this backlash of sympathy could cause a disaster, leaving not enough sympathy cards, flowers, chocolates or donations for the forgotten non-killer victims, and non-killer immigrant communities in general. It’s possible that fights broke out among Utahns over who would get the privilege of buying the best oak casket for Talovic and cover the cost of the family’s flight to Bosnia for the funeral. This is no joke. The local “Bosna” restaurant had one tackle box for donations to Talovic’s nine victims, and a second tackle box for the Talovic family’s funeral and burial expenses. Yes, Americans financed the family’s trip to Bosnia for the killer’s burial. More, from the Salt Lake Tribune:
Utah State student Jake Freeman, a junior studying industrial psychology, opened the CITTLOC (Charity is the True Love of Christ) Fund at Wells Fargo Bank with Talovic family members as the beneficiaries, which Wells Fargo confirmed.
“They [the Talovics] just needed to get some support,” Freeman said.
The shooter’s aunt, Ajka Omerovic, said there was about $6,000 in the account, which would be used to help ship Sulejman’s body back to Bosnia for burial.
Perhaps the law enforcement concern is that other young Bosnians — seeing this backlash and getting assurances that just because they kill us, it’s not a sign that we hate them — might be tempted to go out and kill a few Americans themselves — which would have the negative effect of Americans emptying out even more card stores, florists and bank accounts.
I know we’re a sick society, but isn’t this the first time that we’re collecting donations for a killer’s family? Islam sure does have a way of bringing out the best in people. Then again, this is Utah we’re talking about — a socially isolated population of extremely good people, who invite strangers into their homes, thereby getting their daughters kidnapped for nine months, because they think everyone is as good as they are. In short, their goodness makes them even more naïve than the average American.
Any casual observer would think the primary victims in this incident are the killer and his family, who are getting the lion’s share of attention and sympathy. Who even remembers that anyone but the killer was killed? One of the only displays of concern for the non-killer victims could be heard on Salt Lake City’s local KSL News. That concern by Robin Snyder of the Salt Lake City Police Department on behalf of the victims was that rumors about the killer aren’t accurate: “Snyder adds the victims are the ones hurt most by speculation and rumor, at a time when they’re trying to sort through their grief.”
The other high-profile “victim” and recipient of sympathetic outpouring, the Bosnian community at large, has been assured by the mayor and police department that they won’t allow any harm to come to it. So far, that harm has come in the form of verbal accosting in six incidents reported to the Utah Consortium of Minority Groups, “mostly about how they got into the country…or whether they intended to commit violence.” It’s good that our vigilant officials take such cases seriously as potential hate crimes, while dismissing Talovic’s actions as nothing of the sort.
Perish the thought that, rather than a co-victim, the community from which the killer sprang potentially could have served as an accomplice. Talovic’s father said on the radio that he suspects “somebody” got to his son. From the Pipeline blog:
That “somebody” could easily be any one or more of the several thousand Bosnian Muslim refugees who settled in the Salt Lake City area and who like Talovic’s father gained military training and jihad experience during the Bosnian war.
Dave Gaubatz, a former federal agent in the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, asks,
Has the FBI told the people of Utah that Arabic websites have continuous chatter from Al-Qaeda supporters living in Salt Lake City, Utah? I know because I monitor these sites. Are there Bosnian Muslims with anti-U.S. views? Do you doubt it?
In “trying to grasp what led a son to kill,” as a New York Times headline read, no one is looking at whether the father was also a killer. There was a reason that Suljo Talovic initially took to the mountains with the rest of the men from his village and later stayed in Srebrenica long after his family was evacuated. That reason is that he was a fighter, and one thing that Srebrenica fighters did was raid nearby Serb villages, killing any civilians in sight and sometimes stuffing the bodies down wells.
The reason that no one will look into the possibly violent family history and ask if and how many people the elder Talovic has killed is that those killed would have been Serbs, which aren’t considered “people” per se. Perhaps if we started considering Serbs “people,” then we could begin extrapolating their experiences to ours, and be better prepared for future Talovics.
Meanwhile, Utah’s Bosnian community wasn’t too distracted with the massacre by one of its own to express outrage over the exoneration of Serbia by the UN court on charges of genocide in Srebrenica. Bosnians in nearby St. Louis — perhaps the largest concentration of Bosnians outside Europe with 35 to 40 thousand Bosniaks including 4,000-5,000 from Srebrenica — also condemned Serbia’s acquittal. Let’s hope this indignation doesn’t translate into another massacre for us.
http://inverted-world.com/index.php/news/news/in_bosnia_a_funeral_for_the_utah_killer_fit_for_a_hero/