I shared, last time, how Wal-Mart had wantonly crushed my holiday dreams of gunning down – nolle prosequi – Negroes in their stores.  Apparently, I was not alone.  Veronica Rutledge enticed her two-year-old son to Hayden, Idaho – birthplace of the Aryan Nations – with promises of blasting some jigaboos.  But when Wal-Mart greeters informed the family that the yuletide hunting season was unquestionably over, the indignant toddler fished his mother’s 9mm Smith & Wesson out of her purse and recusantly blew her brains out.

I guess it’s left to dad, then, to whip up Veronica’s famous tuna casserole next time Easter brunch rolls around.  Hard as it may be to believe, more than two billion sentient human beings annually celebrate Jesus’ supposed reanimation; yet not one of them is waiting around for either Rafael Ramos or Wenjian Liu to rise from the dead.  After vowing to avenge the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, Ismaaiyl Brinsley coldly executed the NYPD officers as they sat in their patrol car.  As I predicted last month, the “community of color” would, given the absence of indictments against killer cops, seek retribution.  Against white cops.  So when the news broke that the slain officers were closer in hue to Tamir Rice than Mark Rine, the street roiled once again.  Two weeks later, the NYPD high command feared an ambush had targeted several officers in the Bronx; many stressful hours later it was determined that the shootout was merely the afterclap of an armed robbery.   Both sides, needless to say, remain on edge.

Hard segue: As a self-styled satirist, I cannot escape commenting on the murders at Charlie Hebdo.  First and foremost, that ditty about the pen being mightier than the sword has been proven, despite its longevity, wholly inaccurate. Perhaps if the pens were really, really sharp and shot out of a crossbow, but even then…

Secondly, numerous Islamic leaders across the earth swiftly and sternly denounced the massacre.  Mohammed Shafiq, for example, tweeted:  “I strongly condemn the armed attack on #CharlieHedbo offices is Paris.  #notinmyname.”  The response was widespread as it was overt.  Yet we in the West refuse to abandon the belief that all these critics, once the cameras avert, will frenziedly exchange virtual high-fives, like Barbary pirates celebrating another takedown in the establishment of a global caliphate.

Thirdly, a debate has been entered as to the underlying motivation or conditions that led to this bloody denouement.  Fox News paints Muslims as bloodthirsty and hegemonic, while others, such as Berkeley’s M. Steven Fish and Michigan’s Juan Cole, argue that violence is a human, not religious characteristic.  The professors independently tally history’s killings, ascribing the overwhelming percentage to non-Muslims.   One flaw, as I see it, is inclusion of both World Wars and the twentieth century’s Communist mass killings (see: Stalin, Mao, etc.) in the analysis.   These had nothing to do with the imposition of religious ideology (though Hitler sought to erase it) and should not, therefore, append the sums aggregated by the Crusades, the Inquisition, or various arrogating conquistadors.  Moreover, there remains a passable argument that the conflicts in Northern Ireland and the Indian sub continent have more to do with geopolitics than with faith.   Through this lens, then, one can only view videoed ISIS beheadings, the Taliban school massacre in Peshwar or Boko Haram’s spate of butchery and kidnappings as events that have no justification in the modern world.

Other points raised by the media include the lingering effects of European colonialism, the dearth of economic opportunity for eurozone immigrants, and Western Muslims’ lack of assimilation.  It is this last point that begins to nudge me towards professors Fish and Cole’s point of view.  Once such “outsiders” fully enmesh themselves into the fabric of American society, are we to take comfort that our mass killings have become purely secular in nature (think: Columbine, Virginia Tech, Oklahoma City) as opposed to parts of a larger religious war (recall: 9/11, Ft. Hood)?  To me, the distinction between martyr and madman is hardly relevant; in the end, dead is dead.