connecting the dots @ Liberal Street Fighter
From time to time, politicians, comedians, radio hosts and your average schlub on the street will launch a rant about how Muslim extremists are the greatest threat we face, that we’d be justified to profile a group of people who, after all, are followers of a violent take on their religion. The media will trumpet the latest fatwa, the newest grusome pictures on websites. Strangely, though, there often isn’t as much outrage about statements like Pat Robertson’s call for assassination of Hugo Chavez, as Wilfred has nicely highlighted this morning.
I doubt very much that our Christian President will say a word about this, but it’s important for more than just what Robertson said. It’s part and parcel of a tendency on the Christian Right to advocate and use terrorism to further their goals.
As the USA story goes on to mention, Robertson has a history of using eliminationist language toward his political enemies and targets:
Robertson has made controversial statements in the past. In October 2003, he suggested that the State Department be blown up with a nuclear device. He has also said that feminism encourages women to “kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”
Religious extremists here can be every bit as dangerous as others, and have demonstrated their willingness to use terrorism as a tactic. Clerics like Robertson only feed those who are willing to terrorize, maim and kill to pursue their political and religious objectives. People like Eric Rudolph:
Still, Mr. Rudolph said that he believed in the justice of his cause and that his intent had been “to confound, anger and embarrass the Washington government in the eyes of the world for its abominable sanctioning of abortion on demand.”
Mr. Rudolph made no mention of the other three bombings for which he has taken responsibility. Those other explosions occurred at an abortion clinic and a gay nightclub in Atlanta in 1997 and at another clinic in Birmingham, Ala., in 1998. Altogether, the bombings killed two people and injured 150.
[…]
But Mr. Rudolph was unrepentant in his first public statement after striking the deal, instead exulting that the agreement “deprived the government of its goal of sentencing me to death.” Asked during a hearing if he had detonated a bomb that killed an off-duty police officer and maimed a nurse in Birmingham, Mr. Rudolph replied, “I certainly did, Your Honor.”
He was similarly self-assured when he was sentenced last month for that bombing. “As I go to a prison cell for a lifetime, I know that ‘I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith,’ ” he said, quoting from the New Testament.
These are not just isolated crazies, but rather semi-organized cells of violent extremists willing to kill in the name of God. Arsonists target abortion clinics with frightening regularity, and psychos like executed Presbyterian minister and killer of abortion doctors Paul Hill are celebrated as heroes:
Since losing his automatic appeals, Hill has not fought his execution and insisted up to the day before his death that he would be forgiven by God for killing to save the unborn.
“I expect a great reward in heaven,” he said in an interview Tuesday, during which he was cheerful, often smiling. “I am looking forward to glory.”
Hill suggested others should take up his violent cause.
While the Justice Department and FBI publicly describe the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) as a “grave threat”, with claims like:
John Lewis, the FBI’s deputy assistant director for counterterrorism, said animal and environmental rights extremists have claimed credit for more than 1,200 criminal incidents since 1990. The FBI has 150 pending investigations associated with animal rights or eco-terrorist activities, and ATF officials say they have opened 58 investigations in the past six years related to violence attributed to the ELF and ALF.
In the same period violence from groups like the Ku Klux Klan and anti-abortion extremists have declined, Lewis said.
The Southern Poverty Law Center would beg to differ, and has a handy timeline of terrorist attacks right here in the US since 1996:
Ten years after the Oklahoma City bombing left 168 people dead, the guardians of American national security seem to have decided that the domestic radical right does not pose a substantial threat to U.S. citizens.
A draft internal document from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that was obtained this spring by The Congressional Quarterly lists the only serious domestic terrorist threats as radical animal rights and environmental groups like the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front. But for all the property damage they have wreaked, eco-radicals have killed no one — something that most definitely cannot be said of the white supremacists and others who people the American radical right.In the 10 years since the April 19, 1995, bombing in Oklahoma City, in fact, the radical right has produced some 60 terrorist plots. These have included plans to bomb or burn government buildings, banks, refineries, utilities, clinics, synagogues, mosques, memorials and bridges; to assassinate police officers, judges, politicians, civil rights figures and others; to rob banks, armored cars and other criminals; and to amass illegal machine guns, missiles, explosives, and biological and chemical weapons. What follows is a list of key right-wing plots of the last 10 years.
Many of these groups use Christian iconography and language to justify their actions.
Supposedly mainstream Christians like Pat Robertson own television networks and are feted by politicians, even though their rhetoric is every bit as disturbing as extreme muslim clerics.
Where is the outrage, President Bush, when your political allies call for murders and violence?
Probably makes you smile.