Christian terrorism

Washington Post | 06/02/03 | Gary Bauer

[Believer 1]

To: Friends

From: Gary L. Bauer President American Values

Date: Monday, June 2, 2003

Christian Terrorism?

It took the Washington Post less than 48 hours to link accused Olympic bomber Eric Rudolph with Christianity. This is the same Washington Post that downplays the growing evidence that the Washington, D.C. snipers were driven by their Islamic faith. An article on page 3 of the Post this morning, under the headline, "Is Terrorism Tied to Christian Sect?" heavily quotes Professor James Aho of Idaho State University. Professor Aho tells the Post that if Christians take umbrage at the juxtaposition of the words "Christian" and "terrorist," "that may give them some idea of how Muslims feel when they constantly hear the term 'Islamic terrorism.'" Professor Aho goes on to assure us that "every major world religion has people who have appropriated the label of their religion in order to legitimize their violence."

Is the professor really this ignorant? Assuming Eric Rudolph committed these crimes, he cannot find one word in the teachings of Christ to justify them. Nor will he find any theological leader of any branch of Christianity willing to defend his criminal conduct. No Christian neighborhoods burst into celebration at the news of the bombings. Nor are Christian children being taught that if Rudolph had died in his attacks he would be a "martyr" welcomed into heaven.

The contrast with radical Islamic teachings couldn't be more stark. Each terrorist act against Christians and Jews by those acting in the name of Islam is excused by countless Islamic leaders, theologians, imams, and philosophers. Schools are named after jihad bombers. And there are plenty of verses in the Koran cited to justify the murderous attacks of Islamic "warriors." Do you see the difference, Professor Aho?

[CyberCowboy777]

Do you take the Bible out of context? If so, I think your a liar and a hate monger.

I did not say you did that though, you were making an example of what some say. At least that is how I responded to the statement.

The Bible never tells Christians to kill gays or abortion doctors; anyone (including this killer) who says it does is a liar and a hate monger.

I am unwilling to have a civil conversation? How so?

[OREALLY]

I never believed Jewel was guilty. Do you think Rudolph is innocent? I don't know I just do not like murder and christian connected. I think anti-christians will use this story as propaganda against Christians.

[CyberCowboy777]

I understand your point and it has to do with man, not G_d.

I still believe a terrorist can be a Muslim and while he/she cannot be a Christian. That from my reading of the Koran, works and sermons from leading clerics and likewise for the Christian faith.

I do not hate Muslims nor do I wish ill will. I also believe they should be treated with respect. My opinions have more to do with understanding the religion so that the Middle East issue can be dealt with. The culture must change if any peace is to be introduced and successful.

That is not an case for a predominantly Christian society and I believe the reasons are obvious.

[CyberCowboy777]

He latched onto the beliefs of the CI movement in the 9th grade.

While his direct affiliation with the group may be thin, his maniacal hold on the tenets are undeniable.

Is it possible that a break away would happen as to minimize scrutiny of the group?

[nyconse]

I am sick of being tolerant of Islam. Islam seems more like a adolescent fantasy than a real faith. Heaven consists of virgins and nonstop sex? Violence is defended by many Islamicists. They send their children out to become human bombs. Women are stoned to death or murdered by their husbands or other family members. The latest polls show that Arabs (mostly Islamic) hate American and are hoping we are the victims of more terrorist bombings. Not one Arab country has ever expressed regret for the murdered Israelis children. They would kill all Israelis if they could. This is not the belief of a radical few. This is the belief of the mainstream Arabs-according to polls. I saw Palestinians dancing in the streets on 9-11- happy that Americans were murdered. I don't see anyone writing messages of support for Rudolf's bombing of abortion clinics in this forum. The Christian and Muslim faith is not comparable. The new testament talks about love. It does not call any Christian to kill in Christ's name. The same can not be said of the Koran which does promote the killing of infidels.

[rattrap]

"I don't see anyone writing messages of support for Rudolf's bombing of abortion clinics in this forum."

go look at a few of the rudolph threads

[Constitutionalist Conservative]

White supremacist had ties
to Christian Identity movement

By Peter Ephross

NEW YORK, June 2 (JTA) — Eric Rudolph, the U.S. white supremacist arrested over the weekend for four bombings, including an attack at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, was apparently motivated by an anti-Semitic ideology known as Christian Identity.

Rudolph, 36, also wrote a paper espousing Holocaust denial while in high school.

Although it is unknown whether Rudolph considers himself a formal follower of the group, in 1984 his family spent four months at a Christian Identity camp in Missouri and the family was friendly with Christian Identity preachers.

In addition, his belief system seems to coincide with what Identity followers espouse, according to experts on U.S. hate groups.

Christian Identity has its origins in Great Britain in the 1800s. During that time, an ideology known as British Israelism developed: Its followers believed that the British were descended from the ancient Israelites.

But only when Christian Identity migrated to North America at the end of the 19th and the early 20th centuries — where it found a home in New England, the Midwest and West — did the ideology take on anti-Semitic and racist overtones.

Adherents to Christian Identity on this continent believe that non-Jewish “white Europeans and their descendants elsewhere are descended from the lost tribes of Israel. Therefore, they’re God’s chosen people,” said Mark Pitcavage, director of fact-finding for the Anti-Defamation League.

Others, including Jews, Asians and blacks, therefore, were inferior and sinister.

There are an estimated 25,000-50,000 Christian Identity followers in North America, according to Pitcavage.

Among these are members of the Aryan Nations, whose leader, Richard Butler, ran a 20-acre compound in Idaho until it was taken away from the group following a 1998 incident in which a teen-ager and his mother were beaten there.

Buford Furrow Jr., who is serving a life sentence in jail for killing a Filipino American postman and wounding five people at a Jewish community center in a 1999 shooting spree in Los Angeles, was a member of the Aryan Nations.

Some of the more theologically inclined Christian Identity followers believe that Jews are descended from a union between Eve and the biblical serpent that they say created Cain — and that Jews are descended from Cain, Pitcavage said.

They also believe in more than one biblical creation and that blacks and Asians — whom they call “mud people” — were created during “practice” creations.

But for all Christian Identity followers, anti-Semitism “is absolutely critical. Everything about Christian Identity is that Jews are Satanic and need to be eradicated,” said Heidi Beirich, a spokeswoman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, a watchdog group.

Rudolph was arrested Saturday in western North Carolina after a five-year search by investigators. In total, he is believed to be responsible for four bombings, in which two people were killed and 150 people injured.

This week, he agreed to be transferred to Alabama to face charges in one of the attacks, a 1998 bombing at an abortion clinic in Birmingham in which an off-duty police officer was killed.

He also allegedly bombed a gay nightclub and another abortion clinic.

But Jews came in for particular hatred, said his former sister-in-law.

Rudolph “hated Jews more than probably any other race,” Deborah Rudolph, who is divorced from Rudolph’s brother, Joel, told ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

He “felt that, you know, they’ve been run out of every country they’ve ever been in. They’ve destroyed every country they’ve ever been in. They have too much control in our country,” she said.

He considered the TV “The Electronic Jew,” she said in an interview a few years ago.

“You could be watching a 30-minute sitcom and the credits would roll and there’d be Jewish names and, excuse my expression, but he would say, ‘You fucking Yids.’ Any little thing and he would start,” she said.

Rudolph’s formal introduction into white supremacism seems to have started in 1981, after his father died in South Florida from cancer.

Rudolph’s mother was upset that laetrile, a drug sometimes used to treat cancer, was made illegal.

Her anger helped transform her and her family into staunch anti-government ideologues — often a pathway into white supremacism.

With the help of Tom Branham, a sawmill owner arrested in 1984 for possessing illegal explosives, Pat Rudolph moved the family to western North Carolina.

There, as a ninth-grader, he wrote the paper denying the Holocaust. “Eric’s paper saying that the Holocaust never happened, this was Eric’s and Joel’s and the whole family’s deal,” Deborah Rudolph said in the interview.

[nyconse]

People who follow Christ can not support murder according to the new testament. People who follow Islam can support murder according to the Koran. People who support Rudolf are not acting according to Christian principles. The left merely wants to exploit the "Christianity" angle in order to scare the voters- thus preventing them from electing dangerous Republicans. The mainstream media is quick to label Rudolf a "Christian" terrorist. Yet, this media constantly find exucses for Islamic terrorists. The NYT said that the Egyptian who opened fire on an El Al ticket counter, was not a terrorists, but that he had other issues. Well, he was a terrorists. I don't think CNN or the NYT ever admitted as much.

[rattrap]

i do not disagree on the media being biased on who it calls a terrorist and who it doesn't. I also haven't seen a major media outlet refer to rudolph as a terrorist since his capture (admittedly i havent been watching tv much lately, but the fact that he was not being refered to as a terrorist was a topic of discussion on boortz' show this morning), also i was pointing out to you that while i haven't seen an out and out hoorah for the bombings at the clinics and the gay club, the thinly veiled happiness on some of the rudolph threads is disturbing to say the least. a terrorist is a terrorist is a terrorist. If ERR said he was doing it in the name of allah no one here would hesitate for one second to call him an islamic terrorist, when he (or anyone) commits terrorist acts in the name of god or christ or whatever, everyone jumps on how he can't be a christian terrorist because of some circular logic to where it's somehow impossible to commit terrorist acts in their own interpretation of christianity.

[Wallace T.]

It may be true that Rudolph is perceived by many as a Christian, but perception is not always reality. Many perceived Timothy McVeigh as a Christian for even less reason. McVeigh did not even subscribe to the Identity cult, as does Rudolph, but was an atheist who came to his white supremacist views through a psuedo-Darwinian "survival of the fittest" determinism akin to that of the Nazis. But McVeigh, like Rudolph, was a white American of northern European descent, who received several of the sacraments of the Catholic Church as a child.

It may be true that the Identity Movement cites the Bible as its source, but it denies the hermenutical principle of studying Scripture within its linguistic, grammatical, and historic content, as well as in light of other Scriptural passages. It also denies the interpretation of certain passages, such as those concerning the effectual nature of Christ's sacrifice for members of all nations, that has been held by the historic Christian faith: Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant.

The Identity cult is derived from the heretical doctrine called Christian Israelism, which claimed, based on specious historical evidence, that the peoples of the British Isles and Northern Europe were the descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. In the 20th Century, some Christian Israel adherents came to support the pseudo-Darwinist and pagan assumptions of a master race and inferior races advocated by the Nazis and others. They tried to baptize these assumptions by concocting such doctrines as "Satan's seed" and the survival of the Nephilim in the post-Flood world. These were novations, unsupportable in either Biblical exegesis or historical Christian theology. This was the genesis of the Identity cult.

The bottom line is that the Identity cult denites those elements of the Biblical faith that contradict those concepts of white supremacy that they derived from the pagan, naturalist Nazis. Identity members cannot be defined as Christians without doing violence to the meaning of language. Public perception is irrelevant, as are the delusions of Identity adherents that they are Christians. Whether the Wahabi group, the Sunnis, or any other subdivision of Islam are true adherents to the Koran is irrelevant. One's belief as to whether all Muslims are evil is also irrelevant. (It is self-evident that most Muslims are not engaged in a jihad against the Christian faith or the Western democracies, but only wish, as do most of us, to live their lives in peace.)

The sooner we spend our time focusing on reality and disabusing others of false perceptions, such as the fallacy that Identity members are (a) Christians and (b) reflective of the Christian faith, or at least its fundmentalist section, the better off we will all be.

[CyberCowboy777]

Their own interpretation of Christianity?

There in lies the rub. Any interpretation that contradict Christ is Anti-Christ, not Christian. As is the case with Rudolph.

It is not an interpretation that the highjack on 9/11 used, it was actual, factual, agreed upon tenets of Islam. All major clerics agree that the passages exists and what the meaning is.

You do NOT have to kill Jews to be a Muslim, this is FACT.

You CAN kill Jews and be a Muslim, this is FACT. (It is not a sin to kill non Muslims and is actually rewarded, no punishment is required or called for civilly or spiritually).

You cannot bomb a abortion clinic and be a Christian, this is FACT. (Though you can be saved before or afterwards it is a sin that G_d calls for civil and spiritual punishment for. No Biblical passage can be used to justify, if you try you are a heretic.)

[MattAMiller]

He believes in the divinity of Jesus appearently. And at the very least he calls himself a Christian. Nobody here is suggesting that Chistians are bunch of dangerous lunatics. Why not extend the same courtesy to Muslims.

[rattrap]

you are refering to the interpretation of a text that is hundreds of years old in both cases, let's be a little less liberal with the word 'fact'.

the perception/interpretation is all that matters in this case. some who call themselves muslims agree with the ideology of the terrorists who commit acts in the name of allah. some who call themselves christians agree with the ideology behind the killings at abortion clinics all over the country, some followers of each denounce anyone who commits terrorist acts in the name of their religion as one who does not follow the true religion. how can islamic/muslim terrorist be bandied about so lightly, yet christian terrorist is just not possible?

[CyberCowboy777]

Satan believes in the divinity of Jesus and calls himself a god.

Jesus asked His followers to share the Good News, not kill.

Muhammad asked his followers to kill those that did not convert and even practiced what he preached.

The fact remains that the Terrorist on 9/11 were within the factual tenets of Islam.

Rudolph was not within the factual tenets of Christianity; no loop hole, straight forward fact as laid down by Christ himself.

We can respect Muslims as people and still disagree with them and still factually look at the realities of the religion as it applies to our lives. We must understand the culture based upon this religion for the sake of world stability.

Comparing our condemnation of the factual tenets of Islam as it pertains to non-Muslims is nothing like the non-factual claim that another 'white Christian fundamentalist' has killed.

[CyberCowboy777]

The question to you is: why you think two different religions must hold to the same standards? LOL

Your bias is showing!

You do NOT have to kill Jews to be a Muslim, this is FACT.

You CAN kill Jews and be a Muslim, this is FACT. (It is not a sin to kill non Muslims and is actually rewarded, no punishment is required or called for civilly or spiritually. This is clear and undisputed by all major clerics).

You cannot bomb a abortion clinic and be a Christian, this is FACT. (Though you can be saved before or afterwards it is a sin that G_d calls for civil and spiritual punishment for. No Biblical passage can be used to justify, if you try you are a heretic.)

There are differances, no matter how much you wish otherwise.

[CyberCowboy777]

What I find truly sad is that in America today we have generations that do not understand the most basic principles and tenets of the 3 major religions.

Multi culturalism, political correctness and moral relativity has replaced fact, history and absolutes.

[Wallace T.]

Please refer to my post number 40. To be a Christian is to be an adherent to the teachings of Christ and of Scripture, as is evidenced by the first use of the term "Christian" in Acts 11. Being a Christian does not consist of believing in one aspect of Biblical teaching, such as the divinity of Christ, but denying others, such as the sufficiency of Christ's substitutionary atonement for men and women of all nations. Nor is it being baptized by a priest or minister, responding to an altar call, or being raised in a Christian family or in a Christian majority nation. Labelling oneself a Christian does not make one a Christian any more than a man labelling himself a light pole makes him one.

Jesus addressed this issue in the Sermon on the Mount. "Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity." (Luke 7:21-23) Public profession and good works are not the measure of a follower of Christ. Rather, the first verse, Luke 7:21, defines a follower of Christ as one who does the will of the Father.

None of this has any bearing on the Islamic faith nor on the treatment of Muslims, which should be fair and equitable. The dangers that exist with the equation of Eric Rudolph as a "Christian fundamentalist" with Osama bin Laden as a "Muslim fundamentalist" are the treatment of Christianity and Islam as equivalent religions and the treatment of any religion that emphasizes divine revelation over human experience and philosophy as being inherently dangerous. People who advocate this equivalency and this treatment are also secular humanists, adhering to a philosophy that is neither Christian nor Muslim. Secular humanism is a religion, based as much on presuppositions as is Christianity or Islam, despite the denials of its adherents.

Ultimately, your argument has nothing to do with the fair treatment of Muslims, but with the promotion of secular humanism as a dominant worldview.

[CyberCowboy777]

I am being absolutely conservative with the facts. No perception/interpretation is needed.

Christ was clear

Muhammad was clear

Only apologists muddy it up, usually ones with some 'liberal' interpretation or updating of one religion or another.