OPINION:
When a religious zealot fires 13 shots at a Philadelphia policeman, hitting him three times, and says he did it in the name of radical Islam and the mayor says no, religious belief had nothing to do with the shooter’s motives, who should we believe? The mayor or our very own eyes and ears?
Mayor Jim Kenney, who seems to aspire to be the municipal theologian, was adamant that the shooter, who was eager to say that he did the deed in the name of the Islamic State, or ISIS, didn’t know what he was talking about. “In no way, shape or form,” said His Honor, “does anyone in this room believe that Islam or the teachings of Islam has anything to do with what you’ve seen on the screen.” Such an assertion takes in a lot of unknown territory.
The mayor, speaking at a press conference hours after Edward Archer, 30, walked up to a parked police cruiser, pulled a 9 mm Glock 17 revolver and fired it at point-blank range at Officer Jesse Hartner, a five-year veteran of the force. Fortunately, the gunman had not been spending much time on the firing range. He missed 10 times, but hit Officer Hartner three times in the arm.
Bleeding profusely, the officer nevertheless chased the gunman down the street and fired back, hitting him in the buttocks. The officer deserves the applause of all. The shooter will have to carry a pillow for awhile to sit down when he, as the London newspapers famously put it in accounts of such cases, “assists police in their investigation.”
Police Commissioner Richard Ross, who does not appear to be as sanguine about the shooter’s motives as the mayor, said the gunman told officers “he did it in the name of Islam.” Mr. Archer told investigators that he targeted a policeman because the police defend and enforce laws that are “contrary to the Koran,” the book holy to Muslims.
The gunman does not, in fact, sound like a scholar of Koranic scripture, and the mayor is right to do all he can to discourage leaps to judgment, and he is right to keep the investigation focused on the gunman, and not Islamic scripture and Edward Archer’s interpretation of the Prophet’s words as recorded in the Koran. All religious faiths attract a share of nuts, just as there are a larger share of nuts of no faith.
But Mayor Kenney, despite his aspirations, is no known professor of anybody’s theology. When he says flatly and with considerable heat that he knows what’s in the heart of everyone — “in no way, shape or form does anyone in this room believe that Islam or the teachings of Islam has anything to do with what you’ve seen on the [television] screen — he steps well beyond what anybody knows. Finding out what was in the mind of the shooter is the job of the authorities investigating a cold-blooded attempt to assassinate a police officer. Let the investigation continue. The shooting has implications for all of us.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.