Extra Lazy Saturday Afternoon Reads: Bobby Jindal’s Crusade

Posted: February 7, 2015 | Author: | Filed under: Barack Obama, Foreign Affairs, morning reads, Republican politics, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , | 27 Comments

 

Crusade - Before Battle, Kaye Miller-Dewing

Crusade – Before Battle, Kaye Miller-Dewing

Good Afternoon!!

Yesterday, Dakinikat wrote a very good post about the right wing’s hysterical response to President Obama’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast about violence in the name of religion. And predictably, her nemesis Gov. Bobby Jindal released a statement chiding the President later in the day.

Here’s what Jindal had to say, from the WaPo:

“It was nice of the President to give us a history lesson at the Prayer breakfast,” Jindal said. “Today, however, the issue right in front of his nose, in the here and now, is the terrorism of Radical Islam, the assassination of journalists, the beheading and burning alive of captives. We will be happy to keep an eye out for runaway Christians, but it would be nice if he would face the reality of the situation today. The Medieval Christian threat is under control, Mr. President. Please deal with the Radical Islamic threat today.”

If Jindal really wants to “keep an eye out for runaway Christians,” maybe he ought to take a look in the mirror. I could go on and and on about modern right wing Christian terrorism, but I won’t–I’ll just give you a few examples below.

Battle of Antioch

Battle of Antioch

Apparently Jindal and the rest of his fellow “conservative” whiners have managed to ignore the Ku Klux Klan–a self-proclaimed [Protestant] Christian organization that is still active today–along with the Christian Identity Movement; abortion clinic bombings and murders of abortion doctors by “God-fearing” Christians; and mass-murders by self-proclaimed Christians like Andres Brevik and Timothy McVeigh, (a Catholic). Again, I could go on and on, but I’ll just offer this top-ten list from Raw Story: America’s 10 worst terror attacks by Christian fundamentalists and far-right extremists.

From Fox News to the Weekly Standard, neoconservatives have tried to paint terrorism as a largely or exclusively Islamic phenomenon. Their message of Islamophobia has been repeated many times since the George W. Bush era: Islam is inherently violent, Christianity is inherently peaceful, and there is no such thing as a Christian terrorist or a white male terrorist. But the facts don’t bear that out. Far-right white male radicals and extreme Christianists are every bit as capable of acts of terrorism as radical Islamists, and to pretend that such terrorists don’t exist does the public a huge disservice. Dzhokhar Anzorovich Tsarnaev and the late Tamerlan Anzorovich Tsarnaev (the Chechen brothers suspected in the Boston Marathon bombing of April 15, 2013) are both considered white and appear to have been motivated in part by radical Islam. And many terrorist attacks in the United States have been carried out by people who were neither Muslims nor dark-skinned.

When white males of the far right carry out violent attacks, neocons and Republicans typically describe them as lone-wolf extremists rather than people who are part of terrorist networks or well-organized terrorist movements. Yet many of the terrorist attacks in the United States have been carried out by people who had long histories of networking with other terrorists. In fact, most of the terrorist activity occurring in the United States in recent years has not come from Muslims, but from a combination of radical Christianists, white supremacists and far-right militia groups.

crusades

I’ll just list the incidents listed in the article, and you can read more about them at the link.

1. Wisconsin Sikh Temple massacre, Aug. 5, 2012.

2. The murder of Dr. George Tiller, May 31, 2009.

3. Knoxville Unitarian Universalist Church shooting, July 27, 2008.

4. The murder of Dr. John Britton, July 29, 1994.

5. The Centennial Olympic Park bombing, July 27, 1996.

6. The murder of Barnett Slepian by James Charles Kopp, Oct. 23, 1998.

7. Planned Parenthood bombing, Brookline, Massachusetts, 1994.

8. Suicide attack on IRS building in Austin, Texas, Feb. 18, 2010.

9. The murder of Alan Berg, June 18, 1984.

10. Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing, April 19, 1995.

Can anyone make a similar list of atheist terrorist attacks?

Read more below the fold . . .

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