Surging At Home
Former Senator Mike Gravel, in the Democratic Presidential debate Thursday night:
We are mischaracterizing terrorism. Terrorism has been with civilization from the beginning. And it will be there to the end. We’re going to be as successful fighting terrorism as we are fighting drugs with a war. It doesn’t work.
Zuzu at Feministe, about the bomb found at an Austin, Texas, abortion clinic:
Why is it that the media and the government never calls the “pro-life” groups who plant bombs at women’s clinics what they are: terrorists? …
We saw something similar with the Virginia Tech shooting — the campus police initially dismissed the idea that the gunman would be a danger to anyone else — even though they hadn’t identified or caught him at the time — because they saw a dead woman and just assumed that it was a “domestic incident” and there would be no further violence. Clinic bombings are treated as the equivalent of shrugged-off “domestic incidents” — hey, it’s just violence against women. It’s not like it’s going to affect real people or anything.
The Birmingham News, today:
Simultaneous raids carried out in four Alabama counties Thursday turned up truckloads of explosives and weapons, including 130 grenades, an improvised rocket launcher and 2,500 rounds of ammunition belonging to the small, but mightily armed, Alabama Free Militia. … The militia, which called itself the Naval Militia at one point, had enough armament to outfit a small army. …
Agents encountered booby traps at one site. They found trip wires and two hand grenades rigged as booby traps at the Collinsville camper home of 46-year-old Raymond Dillard, who holds titles of both militia major and fugitive from justice on an unrelated federal case in Mobile.
The conclusion is left to the student as an exercise.
April 27th, 2007 at 7:19 pm
Clinton Has Edge Over Obama In Debate…
The Democratic presidential debate in South Carolina was neither dynamic nor dramatic, but Sen. Hill…
April 28th, 2007 at 12:36 am
[…] As Judit noted two posts below, terror comes in many forms. […]
April 28th, 2007 at 5:06 am
The whole point of calling it “a war on terror” was to highlight its fundamental irrationality: it was about fear. Period. Not JUST fear. Fear of a particular kind of bogeyman… a swarthy A-rab bogeyman, uttering “”Allehu Akhbar” or something else… foreign. Irrational fear stoked by showing the moment or two of the WTC collapsing over… and over… and over… in a way that those of us present in lower Manhattan for the occasion that day who saw it all too live did not experience, and hence, could deal with it rationally, while those in Omaha, or Birmingham or Atlanta…could not.
So yes, if you THINK about “terrorism”, you realize that the big problem in this country is domestic, from the Branch Dividians to the tim McVeighs to the abortion clinic attackers… of course, all of those groups tend to be aligned with the target electoral demographic… who tend not to think about very much rationally as it is, when you think about it.
Funny that.