Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano warned us. And now Bob Herbert, the amazingly analytical columnist for the New York Times, is warning us too: that right-wing white supremacists are the real terrorists in America; that they constitute a serious danger to our country; that this danger is tied to the beginning of the Obama administration; and that we should focus on this terrorism before it's too late. Here is the latest on this subject from Herbert:Hate Groups a Threat We Can't Ignore
by Bob Herbert
Even with the murders that have already occurred, Americans are not paying enough attention to the frightening connection between the right-wing hate-mongers who continue to slither among us and the gun crazies who believe a well-aimed bullet is the ticket to all their dreams.
Bob Herbert
I hope I’m wrong, but I can’t help feeling as if the murder at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the assassination of the abortion doctor in Wichita, Kan., and the slaying of three police officers in Pittsburgh — all of them right-wing, hate-driven attacks — were just the beginning and that worse is to come.
As if the wackos weren’t dangerous enough to begin with, the fuel to further inflame them is available in the over-the-top rhetoric of the National Rifle Association, which has relentlessly pounded the bogus theme that Barack Obama is planning to take away people’s guns. The group’s anti-Obama Web site is called gunbanobama.com.
While the N.R.A. is not advocating violence, it shouldn’t take more than a glance at the newspapers to understand why this is a message that the country could do without. James von Brunn, the man accused of using a rifle to shoot a guard to death at the Holocaust museum last week, was described by relatives, associates and the police as a virulent racist and anti-Semite.
Investigators said they found a note that had been signed by von Brunn in the car that he double-parked outside the museum. The note said, “You want my weapons — this is how you’ll get them.”
Richard Poplawski, who, according to authorities, used a high-powered rifle to kill three Pittsburgh police officers in April, reportedly believed that Zionists were running the world and that, yes, Obama was planning to crack down on gun ownership. A friend said of Poplawski, he “feared the Obama gun ban that’s on the way.”
There is no Obama gun ban on the way. Gun control advocates are, frankly, disappointed in the president’s unwillingness to move ahead on even the mildest of gun control measures.
What’s important to grasp here is that this madness has nothing to do with hunting, which the politicians always claim to be defending, and everything to do with the use of firearms to resist policies and lawful government actions that some gun owners don’t like.
In a speech in February to the Conservative Political Action Conference, the executive vice president of the N.R.A., Wayne LaPierre, said: “Our founding fathers understood that the guys with the guns make the rules.”
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5 comments:
This piece by Bob Herbert is down right scarey! You, Mac Daddy, once wrote another piece on POVERTY as the root cause of VIOLENCE.......I believe that these incedences of VIOLENCE that were noted have RACISM as their root cause and I agree that this is connected to the beginning of the 'Obama Era.' I guess we should not be surprised that these Anti-Obama, racist 'crazies' will go to any lengths to cover up their own fears and their loathing of the revolutionary change that is happening whether they like it or not.....We need to PRAY for the courages as a people to stand up to this radical minority...There are so many good people; we need to mobilize in order to counteract this frightening trend....thanks you, bob Herbert, for having that kind of courage...you, too, MacDaddy!
I like Bob Herbert, and I love the way he presented this and put a face on the politics or the motivation for most of these clowns. The NRA spends beaucoup money in keeping their cause alive and they know how to stir the pot.
@ Rippa: You are so right, the NRA sure does know how to stir the pot.
And that's why regular folks need to speak up against this hate and violence committed in the name of "A certain group" of people. Let's put an end to the hate groups, and all the bullshit that seems to follow them everywhere they go
Nun: Thanks for the kind words and for facing what America has yet to face: that the violence of right-wingers is scary and will get worse unless we do something about it. Bless you.
Rippa: You're getting down to it. Behind the scaring of crazies about Obama personally coming to their house to take their guns is the NRA. They're doing for the money. But this greed, coupled with inflammatory rhetoric from talk radio fools like Limbaugh and Savage and Right-wing groups who want to foment chaos in government, things could get far worse. Ultimately, Rippa, we're talking about the unthinkable: the assassination of Obama. Remember: It's when Obama won the presidency that these crazies made a run gun shops all over the country. They're angry, they're sulking, thinking Hispanics and Blacks have overrun their country. Who knows what they'll do?
Somebody, you're right: we must fight against racist hatred and violence in the name of white America. This country will either be given back to Native Americans or be given to all of us. Sorry "lone wolves." Ain't no White America. Just America now.
James Carroll’s More than mere lunacy in the Globe.
.... For all of Hitler’s neo-paganism, the Holocaust did not spontaneously spring up out of the Teutonic forest. The District of Columbia may have been carved out of the heart of tidewater slave-holding, but that crime had roots beyond the American South. Indeed, what von Brunn’s act dramatizes is that race hatred in Western culture is elliptical, and has two foci: anti-Semitism and white supremacy. In ways that are rarely understood, the former generated the latter, which then curled back as anti-Jewish genocide. Aggression of one group toward others is built into the human condition, but we are speaking of something more deadly than that - an effervescent lethality that is peculiar to the culture that comes from Europe.
..... What we call “racism’’ can be traced to the 15th-century Iberian idea of “blood impurity,’’ a biological fault that set Jews apart from Christians. Jewish unworthiness was no longer in their religion, but in their physical makeup - an inherited inferiority. That idea combined at about the same time (1492 a marker) with assumptions of innate European superiority over the “savages’’ encountered in first-wave colonialism. The new European imperialism (unlike, say, the imperialism of ancient Rome) depended on the ideology of absolute ranking by race.
The pseudo-scientific idea that “inferior races,’’ like inferior species, were properly doomed by laws of nature (survival of the fittest) arrived in time to justify wanton genocide, from Congo to Colorado. Unkilled natives were enslaved. As the scholar Sven Lindquist observed, Hitler’s innovation was to apply within Europe, against Jews, the method that conquistadors and colonists had long used against aboriginals on four continents. One thing alone empowered Europeans to wreak such havoc wherever they went, and that was the gun - enabling murder from afar. The gun, in all its forms, was the epochal tool of white male supremacy, which is why it continues to have irrational appeal. As much as the jack-booted hate Jews and blacks, that much they love their guns.
(apologizing for the length of this contribution.
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