[M]aybe it is time to start wire tapping all the white, Christian, angry, republican, government haters. Yesterdays event was another Timothy McVeigh attack on government workers, this time fueled by the teabagger movement and the extreme radical right of the republican party. As with Congress, there are no moderates left in the republican party. There is no common sense. There is no middle ground. There is no "working together" with these people. They have been taken over by the worst of the right fueled by ignorance and hatred towards the United States, the President, and our government. It's the new face of terror.
One of the things I found so compelling about Joseph Andrew Stack's airplane attack on an IRS office in Austin, TX, was how quickly law enforcement and the media ruled out terrorism. Oh, sure, there was no doubt that it was a "criminal act"...Stack's White; what else could it be? I found myself wondering what the general reaction would have been had the plane's pilot been a bearded, swarthy Muslim chanting lines from the Koran as he flew the plane into the office building next to the MoPac freeway. In the eyes of government and the media, Stack wasn't a terrorist, merely a man with a long history of grievances against the IRS. Of course, no one was about to condone what Stack did, but it's not like he was some sort of Islamofascist terrorist, after all. How could he be? He's a White Christian...and as everyone knows, White Folks by definition can't be terrorists.
Right??
I fail to understand how we can ever really hope to truly be safe and secure if we're unwilling to be honest about what the face of terrorism really looks like. Sure, it may make us feel better to delude ourselves into thinking that terrorists are swarthy, bearded, wild-eyed, America-hating Islamofascists. The truth, however, is not nearly so clear. We conveniently forget (or choose to misremember) that the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was bombed by Timothy McVeigh with an assist from Terry Nichols. Both of these terrorists were White and Christian. Scott Roeder, another White Christian, walking into a church in Wichita and executed Dr. George Tiller. Then there's Paul Hill, Eric Rudolph, Ted Kaczynski...and the list goes on, but hopefully you can see my point.
Terrorism is not the exclusive domain of the "OTHER". Terrorism is not a function of religion or skin color. It's a function of hatred, ignorance, and intolerance wrapped around self-righteous desperation and a disregard for human life...other than those who believe as the terrorist does, of course. The arrogance inherent in declaring that Joseph Andrew Stack was not a terrorist only proves how little we understand of the threat terrorism represents. If Americans are willing to acquiesce to racial profiling in airports, they may delude themselves into feeling safer and more secure. Unfortunately, in so doing they may well miss the threat that could be directly behind them in line.
It's not an equation as simple as Brown = Terrorist, White = Patriot. As anyone with any military experience can tell you, ignoring threats on the battlefield can get you and those around you killed. When you realize that we now live on the battlefield, that truth is no less real. If only we could deal with reality as it is, instead of relying on what we want it to be.
