Hasta La Gadget!

DENVER ― Police have arrested a man suspected of hurling rocks and a Bible through the glass doors of an Islamic center in Fort Collins, Colorado, early Sunday morning.

Fort Collins police arrested 35-year-old Joseph Scott Giaquinto on Monday evening, charging him with criminal mischief, trespassing and bias motivated crime.

“We will not tolerate acts of hatred in our community, and I hope this arrest sends that message loud and clear,” Fort Collins Police Chief John Hutto said in a statement. “While the building can be repaired, this incident caused deeper hurt that won’t just go away.”

Giaquinto lives in an apartment complex near the mosque and worked as a combat medic in the Army for eight years, serving tours in Iraq and South Korea, the Fort Collins Coloradoan reports.

Giaquinto’s father, Michael Giaquinto, told the paper his son can be moody at times, but defended him.

“No matter what we find out happened, my son is a good man,” he said. “He served his country well. Even if he was involved, and I’m not saying he was, it would just indicate that he was in a kind of a bad place.”

After the mosque was vandalized, about 1,000 people rallied outside it on Sunday in solidarity, including congregants of a Christian church who left their service early to show support for their Muslim neighbors.  

“I urge all of our citizens to continue showing the kind of support and acceptance demonstrated at the Islamic Center rally on Sunday night,” Hutto said on Monday.

A GoFundMe campaign to repair the damage and improve the mosque’s security exceeded its $20,000 goal within 24 hours of the incident.

“We thank law enforcement authorities for their swift action in apprehending a suspect, and we thank the local interfaith community for the outpouring of support experienced by the mosque and its members,” said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American–Islamic Relations, in a statement emailed to The Huffington Post.

Hooper noted the vandalism in Fort Collins is not an isolated incident and reflects a much broader national problem. There have been 35 similar incidents at mosques across the country so far this year, nearly double the number at this time last year.

America does not do a good job of tracking incidents of hate and bias. We need your help to create a database of such incidents across the country, so we all know what’s going on. Tell us your story.

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Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Recently, the historian Marilyn Young, an old friend, died.  She spent her life writing about America’s wars and a country at war.  Her New York Times obituary quoted this telling passage from a speech she gave to the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations:

“I find that I have spent most of my life as a teacher and scholar thinking and writing about war. I moved from war to war, from the War of 1898 and U.S. participation in the Boxer Expedition and the Chinese civil war, to the Vietnam War, back to the Korean War, then further back to World War II and forward to the wars of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Initially, I wrote about all these as if war and peace were discrete: prewar, war, peace, or postwar. Over time, this progression of wars has looked to me less like a progression than a continuation: as if between one war and the next, the country was on hold.”

Curiously enough, with the exception of World War II and Vietnam (for quite different reasons), Americans have lived through our many wars of the last century, years drenched in blood and suffering when this country became the most dominant power on the planet, in a state of relative obliviousness.  Nonetheless, peaceable as the United States seemed in those decades domestically, its wars did come home in all sorts of ways or you would have a hard time explaining the militarization of this country, the growth of the Pentagon budget to staggering proportions, and the rise of the national security state (and its surveillance systems). 

That’s why John Dower’s new book, The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War Two, arrives at such an opportune moment (as does his new piece “An American Century of Carnage”), just as the era of Donald Trump begins with a visible ramping up (yet again) of America’s wars across the Greater Middle East. It offers a rare assessment of what that century’s human toll actually looks like and of our country’s involvement in it.  In his article today, adapted from that book’s first chapter, Dower offers some striking thoughts on how to begin to measure the toll of the last 75 years of global war and conflict.  And I must admit that, under the circumstances, it seems particularly fitting to me that Marilyn Young gave what must have been the last blurb of her life to his book, writing, “In The Violent American Century, John Dower has produced a sharply eloquent account of the use of U.S. military power since World War II. From ‘hot’ Cold War conflicts to drone strikes, Dower examines the machinery of American violence and its staggering toll. This is an indispensable book.” 

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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