Four days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Balbir Singh Sodhi, an Indian Sikh, was gunned down in front of his gas station in Mesa, Ariz., by a man who’d vowed to avenge the killings by shooting some “towel-heads.”

Police reported four more attacks within the next 30 minutes —all by a man driving a black pickup truck, all against people who appeared to be Middle Easterners.

Since Sept. 11, groups that monitor hate-based incidents in the U.S. have recorded more than 1,000 cases in which Sikhs were targeted — and many more thousands of equally unwarranted crimes against American-Muslims.

It is never right to attack innocent people. Not to avenge the deaths of other innocent people. Not ever.

We’ll never know for sure what Wade Michael Page was thinking when he opened fire on the Sikhs preparing for worship Sunday at their temple near Milwaukee. Page killed six people and wounded three before a police officer shot him dead outside the temple.

Witnesses said the gunman, a U.S. Army veteran, had a 9/11 tattoo on his arm. But Page didn’t enlist out of a patriotic zeal to find those responsible for the attacks; he wasn’t deployed repeatedly in the fight against terrorism. He served from 1992 to 1998. He was never stationed overseas, never saw combat. He earned a clutch of commendations, including two good conduct medals, before being discharged for “patterns of misconduct.”

The Southern Poverty Law Cen-ter says Page has been on its radar almost ever since because of his interactions with neo-Nazi groups. He founded a white-power band called End Apathy in 2005. But he’d had no major run-ins with the law, nothing to suggest he was capable of such violence.

So is the tattoo a display of patriotism, or something darker?

Frank Roque, the man in the black pickup truck in Mesa, Ariz., is serving a life sentence for firing randomly at anyone in a turban. “I’m an American!” he protested when police came to arrest him. “I stand for America all the way!”

It’s disturbing how often patriotism is conflated with racism, or white supremacism, or some other stripe of hatred. As if love of country justifies discrimination — or violence — against those who are different.

Is that what happened in Oak Creek, Wis.? Did Page target the Sikhs because he recognized no distinction between Sikhs and Muslims, or between Muslims and terrorists? Or did he target them simply because they didn’t look like him?

— Chicago Tribune

The murderous assault on a community of Sikh worshipers in Wisconsin is all the more horrifying for the combination of evil and ignorance it reveals.

The shooter in Oak Creek, Wis., took six lives and wounded three others in a mindless display of firepower fueled by a motive he surely cannot articulate.

At whom did he imagine he was shooting, and why? What threat did this community of faith represent?

Even those who might otherwise bear the excrementitious title “white supremacist” with perverse pride have to wonder what this gunman was doing in their contemptuous name.

Sikhs live a close-knit life bound by their religious values and links to family and faith in the Punjab region of India, a focal point of tensions between India and Pakistan. They are a minority at home and abroad, with a tenacious commitment to their beliefs.

For all of the ignorant, delusional trash in the shooter’s mind, what did he think he was doing or accomplishing? The horror compounded by rank stupidity is dizzying.

All the more grotesque to imagine is the high-fives and beer toasts among his pathetic colleagues after the attack.

— Seattle Times