Iranian gunman's takeover of Henry's Publick House and Grille, Berkeley,1990

A memory came to me today and I did some internet research on a tragic hostage takeover of a pub in Berkeley popular with UC students. My Iranian boyfriend who was a nuclear engineering student at UC Berkeley and I used to go to the pub all the time in the late 1980's. In 1990 an Iranian gunman took 33 hostages at gunpoint and killed one man and sexually abused female customers for 7 hours. He avowed hatred for Americans, blondes in particular. The media exacerbated the situation by reporting live from the scene and broadcasting all manner of untruths. The gunman was watching the media coverage on the bar television and some of the things the reporters were saying enraged him. He was resentful of the fact that American women showed their legs and felt that they were responsible for arousing his lust. Go and read the article. What was most interesting to me about the situation was that after the gunman was shot by a SWAT sniper he was taken to Oakland's Highland Hospital, which is the premier trauma center in Northern California and if you are a victim of head trauma, you do want to go there. The liberals here in the Bay Area were very upset that the Iranian killer had been sent to a hospital in Oakland instead of a hospital in Berkeley. They felt that the police did not want to "save" the gunman and that they wanted him to have a longer trip, thus being more likely to die. The leftists were, of course, wrong about the facts and indignant on account of their extreme ignorance. The letters to the Bay Guardian and the East bay Express, after the incident were full of outrage on behalf of the gunman and none for the victims. The sentiments were an amazing example of the lunatic leftist view of the perpetrators of evil as victims. It also shows the resentment that the left has for pretty and popular young college students, and the worshipful feelings they have for anyone from the third world. One letter writer even went so far as to claim that it was the American sexist culture which caused this Muslim fanatic to attack women. I composed quite a few letters to the editors of these papers, but was so enraged by the sentiments expressed by the leftist letter writers, that I could never get them to coalesce into a properly worded, printable form.