Trust Western media channels to ensure that for the next week and more, no story in this world makes it into newspaper front pages or the airwaves nearly as much as the small shooting incident in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday. Several shots were said to have rung out but only one of them managed to scrape former President Donald Trump, very gently, in the least dangerous of all places, namely his ear lobe.
Within an hour of the news breaking, conspiracy theories were all over Nigerian social media channels. The most popular one was that Donald Trump staged it in order to further boost his election chances by fueling his diehard supporters’ anger. They are likely to say, “[Expletive]! They [meaning Democrats, Liberal Establishment, illegal immigrants, Mexicans, would-be Latino immigrants, supporters of Palestine and Gaza, NATO, Ukrainian government, Muslims and left-wingers all over the world] have tried to knock him out of this race using various courts, and when it all failed, they resorted to shooting!”
The young man said by the Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI] to have fired the shot from a tall building near Trump’s rally venue, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, was a poor shot by American standards. In a country estimated by a 2020 Pew Research Centre survey where 30% of all adults, or 93 million persons, own firearms, including many assault rifles, this boy Crooks must be a toy shooter, luckily for Trump. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms estimated in 2020 that there were 434 million civilian-owned firearms in the United States, of which only one or two belonged to Crooks. Did I say Crooks? The would-be assassin’s name itself sounds suspicious. Was he so named by his parents in readiness for this event?
Thomas Crooks has never voted in an American election. He was only 16 during the last vote in 2020 and was expecting to vote for the first time in November. He was said to have registered as a Republican, the Grand Old Party [GOP] now near-totally remolded in Donald Trump’s shadow. Why should a registered Republican shoot his own party’s presidential candidate? Could it be that he is angry that Democrats have dominated the airwaves in recent weeks with their attempt to force President Joe Biden off their presidential ticket, and Crooks wanted his party to regain the media attention?
Maybe we shall never know for sure, since he was shot dead at the scene. Unless if he told someone beforehand, or if he punched something into a computer or mobile phone or he left a note lying somewhere, his real motive may never be known. That the Secret Service shot him right after he fired the shots reminded me of Herman Radnitz, the famous James Hadley Character who often said, “There shall be no loose ends.” Whenever Radnitz ordered a murder, he will ensure that the killer himself is swiftly eliminated lest he tells someone.
As the arch-hero of American conservatives, I wonder if this shot at Trump will help change their opinion about their country’s gun ownership tradition. Frequent school shootings and the murder of innocent pupils and their teachers never moved Trump and other conservatives to accept a major regulation of gun ownership, even just of assault rifles. If Thomas Crooks had used an assault rifle instead of an ordinary rifle, the story might have been different.
Political assassination used to be as American as the apple pie. In 1981, Ronald Reagan was only a few weeks into his arch-conservative presidency when John Hinckley fired a shot at him as he emerged from Washington’s Hilton Hotel. The bullet missed Reagan but, ironically, hit his bullet-proof Lincoln Continental limousine, ricochetted off its armoured body, hit the president under his raised arm and lodged inside him. Reagan, who in earlier life was a Grade B Hollywood movie actor, later told reporters, “I forgot to dodge” as in the movies. Donald Trump, who completely lacks Reagan’s sense of humour, only said after this shooting, “I will never give up.”
1960s was the golden age of American political assassination. In November 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald hid in a tall building in Dallas, Texas and shot President John Kennedy as his motorcade drove past. Two years later in 1965, three members of the Nation of Islam organization, Muhammad Abdul Aziz, Khalil Islam and Thomas Hagan, shot and killed fiery black activist Malcolmx X as he gave a speech in a New York theatre. Three years after that in 1968, James Earl Ray shot the great black American civil rights leader Martin Luther King as he stood on a hotel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee. That killing caused instant riots by black Americans in nearly all major American cities. Only two months later, Sirhan Sirhan shot leading anti-Vietnam War presidential candidate Senator Robert Kennedy as he spoke at a hotel in Los Angeles, California.
Well before Kennedy, American assassins had killed three US Presidents. In April 1865, fresh from leading the Federal side into victory in the American Civil War of 1861-5, John Wilkes Booth shot the Great Emancipator, President Abraham Lincoln in a theatre. Sixteen years later, assassin Charles Guiteau shot and killed US President James Garfield in 1881. And twenty years later in 1901, 28-year-old Leon Czolgosz shot US President William McKinley at close range and killed him.
I will not say it is Americans who taught the world to assassinate leaders, since Roman emperor Julius Ceasar was assassinated by his own courtiers nearly a thousand years earlier in 44BC. In the contemporary world, some of the most shocking assassinations include the 1984 assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her two Sikh bodyguards, Satwant Singh and Beant Singh. Mrs. Ghandi had ordered the Indian Army to enter the Golden Temple at Amritsar and rout out terrorists who were hiding there. In response, the Sikh Holy Gurus ordered her killing. She was advised to remove Sikhs in her bodyguards as a precaution but Mrs. Ghandi refused, saying they had been with her for 16 years. Six years later, her son and successor, Prime Minister Rajiv Ghandi, was killed during a trip to southern India when a Tamil woman who pretended to kiss his feet suddenly exploded a bomb.
I was around when both Indira and Rajiv were assassinated, but I was not here in 1947 when one of the biggest assassinations of all time took place. Right wing Hindu nationalist Nathuram Godse fired shots at Mahatma Mohandas Karamchand Ghandi, the father of Indian independence movement and universally acknowledged champion of non-violent resistance. The Mahatma fell to the ground saying, “Oh, Rama!” [Oh, Ram].
The 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat by four young military officers led by Lt Khalid Islambouli as he inspected a parade in Cairo caused shock all over the world. They jumped from the back of a truck in the parade and opened fire at Sadat in the VIP stands. We saw pictures then of the Egyptian Defence Minister, Field Marshal Abdelhalim Abu Ghazala, who sat next to Sadat but was not grazed by the hail of bullets.
In March 1975, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia was shot by his deranged nephew, Prince Faisal ibn Musaid as he left a mosque. The killing in 1988 of Pakistan’s military ruler General Zia ul-Haque was even more grisly, because a bomb was planted on his plane and it exploded as the plane took off. A slight variation of that happened in Rwanda in 1994. President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane was shot by Hutu extremists as it came in to land at Kigali airport, the event that led to the Rwandan genocide of that year and the coming into power of President Paul Kagame.
Quite shocking, in 1979, was the assassination of President of South Korea, the iron-fisted Pak Chung-hee by Kim Jae-gyu, his security chief. A staunch American ally, Pak was the opposite of everything democratic. He was however succeeded in short order by Generals and Admirals even more brutal than he was, such as Generals Chun Do-Hwan and Roh Tae-woo. Everywhere there are crazy people. In 1975, rebel soldiers killed Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the father of Bangladesh who led it out of Pakistan. His daughter Sheikh Hassina Wajad is still ruling the country today. In July 2022, former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated in an act that shocked Nippon, once the world’s capital of political assassination.
Men, and women, who looked like peace makers to the rest of the world could easily fall victims of assassination by zealots at home. In 1995, two years after he signed the Oslo Peace Accord with Palestinian Liberation Organization [PLO] leader Yaser Arafat, Jewish law student Yigal Amir shot Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at a rally Tel Aviv. There was a story I read two years earlier, about a young Israeli demonstrator outside the Prime Minister’s office who raised a placard saying, “Rabin is a traitor. He is giving our land to Arabs.” Foreign Minister Shimon Peres was passing by, and he stopped and asked the demonstrator when he was born. I think he said 1975. So Peres said, “You were not even born when we seized this West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan during the 1967 Yom Kippur War. This man Rabin was the Army Chief of Staff who captured these lands. If he now says we should hand it back, don’t you think he knows something that you don’t?”
I was just wondering. Sure, many people in the US and around the world think Donald Trump’s likely return to the White House for another four years will have disastrous consequences. But Thomas Crooks was only 20 years old. He would have been 24 in January 2029 when Trump finishes his second and final term [unless, with the help of the conservative majority in US Supreme Court, he amends the US Constitution and makes himself Life President]. Age 24 leaves plenty of time to witness the undoing of whatever damage Trump might have wrought, but now Crooks is gone and will not even know the results of the November election. There is even a chance that Trump might lose the election. This is a lesson for youngsters everywhere, not to take rash actions because of what they perceive to be a bad situation. To paraphrase what the great English philosopher Bertrand Russell said during the Cold War, if Trump is as bad as his worst enemies say, at least if we are alive, there is room for improvement.
