Vive la France!

France, we stand with you.

The week that was: Vive la France!

2015 is not off to a sterling start. Events in France this week confirmed for us once again that there are angry, misguided people in the world who feel persecuted by simply living in a society that protects and indeed encourages freedom of speech, even the most offensive speech. 

Goodness knows we have plenty of the thin-skinned in this country, people who take offense at any criticism. Usually, they just shoot off at the mouth (see Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Curt Schilling), but occasionally the more deluded of them take up arms (see Cliven Bundy, various open carry activists, the Boston Marathon bombers).

The most misguided of all imagine that by physically attacking and killing the purveyors of free speech, they can eradicate the speech which they find offensive. They are always wrong. It only causes such speech to metastasize. 

Vive la France!

Domestic terrorism, domestic politics

David Sirota of Salon.com has named yesterday's massacre in Colorado for what it is - terrorism. Our media would lead us to believe that terrorism is only the purview of dark-skinned Islamicists, but that is faulty thinking. The country is under siege and at the mercy of domestic terrorists like the Colorado murderer because we refuse to take responsibility for standing up to the NRA and passing and enforcing laws that will inhibit the gun traffic in this country. This will not change until we mature enough as a country to give up our adolescent obsession with guns and violence. Frankly, although it depresses me beyond measure to say it, I see no possibility of that happening.

Meanwhile, predictably, a certain segment of our society rushes to the microphones to say that if only there had been someone else in the audience with a gun to take the shooter down, all of this could have been avoided. Never mind that the shooter was wearing full body armor and that the hero would have had to shoot around the vast crowd that was in the audience and that was panicked by the assault and then have his bullet pierce the armor in order to take him down. All it would have taken is one Clint Eastwood type hero and he would have made the day for all of us, so goes their reasoning.

One of the proponents of that kind of thinking is our own Texas Republican Tea Party Representative and resident wackadoodle Louis Gohmert. He believes that the massacre was caused by "ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs" and that if only that hero gun toter could have been in the audience, all would have been well. Gohmert was last heard from last week when he signed on to Michele Bachmann's hate campaign against Islamic Americans. And he is one of our elected representatives! Do we wonder that the country is in such trouble when we continue to elect such idiots?

Terror

The terrible events in Norway yesterday remind us once again, if we needed reminding, that sociopaths with extreme and violent political views exist in all societies, even the most benign and advanced.  The early reporting of those events by news media in this country, as Glenn Greenwald points out in his column in Salon today, reminds us of just how low our journalistic standards have fallen.  The immediate reaction by news outlets here was to assume, without investigation, that Al Qaeda was responsible.  Their stories reflected that slant.  This was true not just of right-wingers but even, as Greenwald shows, of The New York Times, the supposed "newspaper of record."   Greenwald writes:

Al Qaeda is always to blame, even when it isn't, even when it's allegedly the work of a Nordic, Muslim-hating, right-wing European nationalist. Of course, before Al Qaeda, nobody ever thought to detonate bombs in government buildings or go on indiscriminate, politically motivated shooting rampages. The NYT speculates that amonium nitrate fertilizer may have been used to make the bomb because the suspect, Anders Behring Breivik, owned a farming-related business and thus could have access to that material; of course nobody would have ever thought of using that substance to make a massive bomb had it not been for Al Qaeda. So all this proves once again what a menacing threat radical Islam is.

...In other words, now that we know the alleged perpetrator is not Muslim, we know -- by definition -- that Terrorists are not responsible; conversely, when we thought Muslims were responsible, that meant -- also by definition -- that it was an act of Terrorism.

We have allowed our media to redefine the very word "terrorism" to mean only violent acts committed by Muslims in pursuit of a political goal which we hate.  So by this definition, the attack on Rep. Gabby Giffords and her constituents in Tucson in January was not terrorism.  And neither were the attacks in Norway yesterday.  Attacks by homegrown right-wing nuts can never be terroristic in nature.  They are simply violent acts by misguided, troubled souls who are disturbed about the direction of society.

The overuse and misuse of the word terror has caused it to lose all meaning.  It has become simply another political shibboleth to stigmatize a particular group of people.  The War on Terror never was, really.  It was always and still is a war on those, foreign and domestic, who disagree with the warrior's world view.  Muslims simply make a convenient scapegoat.    

Terrorism in the House

Rep. Peter King, R-NY, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee and former avid supporter of the Irish Republican Army, is very, very concerned about terrorism and the danger it poses to America. He is concerned that American citizens are being radicalized to commit violence against other American citizens and so he convened this investigative hearing of his committee today.

But he confined his hearing and his investigation to only Muslim Americans. If Rep. King is truly concerned about radicalization of Americans, I have a few suggestions for his investigations and hearings.

How about investigating the militia movement right across the country that is busily arming itself and advocating the violent overthrow of the United States government?

Or, in a similar vein, he could investigate all the white supremacist groups which periodically foment violence against Americans who do not meet their rigid racial specifications.

How about the evangelical Christian groups who encourage the killing of doctors who perform a legal medical procedure called an abortion, or who would force a 12-year-old incestual rape victim to bear a child that results from that rape, even if it puts her life in jeopardy?

For that matter, he might choose to investigate the radicalized state governments - all or mostly all male - that insist on passing draconian laws that demonize American citizens who seek abortions.

I would submit that terrorism is alive and well in America today and it is not at all hard to find, but most of it has nothing to do with mosques or Muslims. If King is truly concerned about stopping terrorism in America, then he should broaden his investigative hearings to cover all those places where it occurs, perhaps even including the terrorism that is being perpetrated in the House of Representatives with its singling out of the Muslim community.

The natural consequence of hate speech

Politicians and pundits are tripping over each other to pronounce themselves shocked, shocked over the attempted assassination of an elected Member of Congress and the killing and wounding of several of her constituents at a public event in Tucson yesterday. Why should they be shocked? This is just the natural consequence of the irrational hate speech that is the prevalent means of communication in a certain quarter of our political landscape these days. If you are in any doubt as to which quarter I am referring to, it is the far, far right - those people whose heroes are folks like Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and the multi-billionaires like the Koch brothers who finance and manipulate the tea partiers.

When these people constantly urge their followers "don't retreat, reload," or admonish them to take "Second Amendment remedies," or say things like, "If ballots don't work, bullets will!", what exactly did they expect to happen? Oh, no, no, it's just political rhetoric, hyperbole to fire up the base, they will say. But people in the public eye have a responsibility to remember that there are some extremely disturbed people out there, and since our culture so worships the gun that we refuse to put any regulations on its purchase and use, these crazy people have free access to semiautomatic weapons that can kill and maim tens of people in a matter of seconds. Including sitting Congresswomen who were freely elected by the people of their district.

The recent campaign which Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords won was, by all accounts, a particularly nasty one. Her Tea Party opponent, Jesse Kelly, urged his followers to "get on target for victory," to "shoot a fully automatic M16," and to "remove Gabrielle Giffords from office." Did her would-be assassin hear those words and heed them?

This is not the first time that violence had been perpetrated against this Congresswoman. After she courageously voted for the health care reform bill last year, a door was shattered at her headquarters. Before the vote, someone had dropped a gun at one of her constituent meetings in Arizona and recently a suspicious package (that is still being investigated) was received at her Tucson office. She constantly receives threats and hate mail, as do many in Congress, especially those on the Democratic side of the aisle.

For those who would say that such hate speech occurs equally on both sides - and some conservative pundits will - I would challenge them to provide examples of liberals advocating violence and urging their supporters to "reload" and "shoot a fully automatic M16," because if "ballots don't work" to remove your opponents from office, "bullets will."

It is time that the perpetrators of this kind of speech were held accountable. Free speech is one thing, but incitement to violence, to riot, and to the violent overthrow of the government is another. Decent people need to draw the line and show these haters that they will no longer be tolerated.

Can we do it? Yes. Will we do it? Doubtful. Probably the moment will pass and we will all go back to business as usual and Rush and Glenn and O'Reilly will continue to be allowed to spew their hatred over the airwaves.

By the way, of all the poignant and tragic circumstances of yesterday's event, perhaps the most ironic was this: A nine-year-old girl was one of the murdered ones. She was born on September 11, 2001. She died January 8, 2011, her short life bookended by terrorist attacks.

The underpants bomber speaks

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian who tried to blow up a plane in Detroit on Christmas Day, is only 23 years old. It seems unlikely that he has a very sophisticated view of the world. I can remember - barely - what I was like at 23, and much more recently, what my children were like at 23. While my children were a lot smarter and a lot more knowledgeable about the ways of the world than I was at that age, I think it is fair to say that none of us really understood the workings of the powers that ruled our world. I strongly suspect the same is true of the would-be underpants bomber.

He was susceptible to being led and misled and indications are that he was, particularly by an American-born Yemeni radical cleric named Anwar al-Awlaki. This man also allegedly had ties to the 9/11 attacks and to the soldier who shot up Fort Hood last November. Al-Awlaki is now supposedly somewhere in the mountains of Yemen. Abdulmutallab may have an idea as to where he is, and Abdulmutallab seems not at all reticent about telling authorities all he knows.

Abdulmutallab was captured, of course, during his attempted attack and has been in the custody of law enforcement since then. First, he was taken to the hospital and given medical treatment, because the only person he managed to injure was himself. Since then, he has been advised of his legal rights and, from all that we can tell, has been treated very humanely. Some of his family was flown from Nigeria to meet with him and talk to him. His uncle and his father, who had warned American authorities that his son had been radicalized and posed a threat, talked to the young man and persuaded him to cooperate with authorities and tell them what he knows. It seems that he is doing that. While the FBI has been pretty tight-lipped about the information he has given them, they have stated that he has provided "actionable intelligence."

All of this was accomplished without waterboarding or sleep deprivation or sexual humiliation or any of the other torture techniques employed by the previous administration. It was accomplished by respecting the individual's rights and our constitutional principles and by treating him and his family with dignity. Imagine.