Posted on 02/28/2010 5:36:12 PM PST by presidio9
When most Americans think of terrorism, certain images come to mind: airplanes flying into the World Trade Center. Muslim men with long beards in Afghanistan. Dark-skinned people trying to set off bombs on airplanes.
But is Islamic-based terrorism a primary threat? Maybe the face of terrorism is more diverse than that. Perhaps it is also a middle-aged white man. Perhaps it looks like Joe Stack. On February 18, Stack, an Austin, Texas man with tax problems, flew his personal airplane into the Internal Revenue Office Building in Austin. He killed one IRS employee and himself. His manifesto explained that the IRS forced him to violence after a tax code switch in the 1980s ruined his life. Stack’s violent attack on a federal institution is only the latest example of right-wing terrorism to afflict the United States in recent years.
Some have questioned Stack’s right-wing credentials. They point out a reference to communism in his manifesto. This is possible. Parsing the political leanings of an unhinged and suicidal man can be tricky and counterproductive. However, his anti-government leanings and attack on the Internal Revenue Service comes straight from the right-wing playbook.
Regardless, conservatives have taken up Stack’s mantle. Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, a likely candidate for the 2012 Republican nomination, told the Conservative Political Action Conference last weekend that conservatives needed to “smash the windows out of big government.”
Iowa Republican Congressman Steve King went a step further, expressing sympathy for Stack’s actions. He told a CPAC crowd that they also needed to “implode” IRS offices. Stack’s own daughter has portrayed him as hero. Samantha Bell told Good Morning America that her father’s noble death should serve as a wake-up call to people to stand up against government agents she considers “pompous political thugs and their mindless minions.”
The man Stack killed, Vernon Hunter, served two tours of duty in the Vietnam War. Yet the hero is apparently his murderer.
Stack is the latest in a long string of violent right-wing attacks in recent years. On May 31, 2009, Dr. George Tiller, one of the nation’s few late-term abortion providers, was shot and killed in his church by the anti-abortion activist Scott Roeder. On June 27, 2008, an unemployed truck driver named Jim Adkisson walked into the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee and opened fire, killing two. He attacked the Unitarian church for its acceptance of gays and support of abortion rights, and claimed he wanted to kill every Democrat in the House and Senate.
The right-wing Tea Party movement has employed violent rhetoric as well, including a speaker at a Washington state rally claiming she wanted to hang Washington Democratic Senator Patty Murray. Some have called Stack the first Tea Party terrorist. While Stack doesn’t seem to have had explicit connections to organized right-wing activism, his actions come from the same conservative anger at the federal government and liberalism.
The most famous example of right-wing terrorism occurred in April 1995, when Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, two men with long-connections to right-wing militias, blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. 168 people died that day.
These rural-based militias preach anti-government extremism, often mixed with white supremacy, and constitute a real threat, as McVeigh and Nichols proved. Yet the United States has yet to have a serious public dialogue about increasingly frequent right-wing terrorism.
We have three major public spaces to remember victims of terrorism and to think about terrorism’s impact upon national identity. The first is the former World Trade Center site in New York. The second is where Flight 93 crashed in rural Pennsylvania. And the third is the Oklahoma City Memorial.
At the first two, visitors can visualize the bad guys, but the Oklahoma City Memorial does a remarkably poor job at contextualizing the attacks. The site is tremendously heartbreaking, but you get no sense that McVeigh and Nichols had right-wing connections. They read like isolated crazy people who just wanted to kill innocent women and children. You see the McVeigh and Nichols as two evil men, not as representatives of a larger terrorist movement.
Politics do enter the Oklahoma City Memorial. The exhibits have several references to so-called “eco-terrorism.” The museum paints eco-terrorism as a serious threat to American national security. Examples of this horror include groups like the Earth Liberation Front setting fire to SUVs in car lots and the 2008 arson of a luxury home development in a Seattle suburb.
While I’m not excusing such actions, they aren’t terrorism. They aren’t attacks upon government institutions, they are not designed to inspire terror in the American population. They are stupid acts of outrage over the destruction of the environment.
When environmentalists start killing CEO’s of chemical companies or blowing up Exxon-Mobil office buildings, then we can make legitimate comparisons between radical environmentalists and right-wing terrorists. Discussing this dubious threat at the Oklahoma City Memorial obscures McVeigh and Nichols’ political leanings.
Of course, conservatives don’t want you to make these connections. They worked hard to ensure an apolitical Oklahoma City Memorial. Say what they will, but events like Oklahoma City, Knoxville, and Austin serve conservative purposes.
Talk-radio and the internet spew an endless expectoration of hate. Republicans might publicly distance themselves from this, but Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, et al have created a powerful conservative movement with the potential for violence. Jim Adkisson explicitly cited right-wing radio as having influenced his actions.
The threat of right-wing domestic terrorism provides at least as great a threat to the nation as Islamic terrorism. And it’s far past time we started talking about this. How many Americans have to die before we take right-wing terrorism seriously?
It takes some serious stupid to label someone who quotes Marx as a “right-winger.”
Whenever the left publishes these little lists of white guys who are terrorists they conveniently forget that this guy's motive was to destroy capitalism.
Also, I am an Irish Catholic who has worked for the past ten years with a charity that brings Protestant and Catholic children to the states to live together for a summer. I hate all terrorism, and I hate the IRA. But I get annoyed when the left equate's the IRA with al Qaeda. Virtually all the deaths that occured during the troubles where from gunfire, and occasionally grenades. When the IRA DID plant a bomb (in Belfast or the UK) they had a longstanding policy of calling it in, so the building could be evacuated, and no innocents were injured. I am certainly not excusing them, but does this sound like something an Islamic terrorist would do?
Loomis might want to start doing a little more research before he opens his big mouth.
Liberalism has been terrorizing and killing people for at least fifty years. A great deal of the rise in violence and murders in the last fifty years can be placed squarely on liberals who were soft on crime. And every time some mother kills her kids because they’re a “burden”, you can thank a liberal.
Bill Ayres.
Progressives are active users of Orwell's New Speak.
I would not call him a right winger. Right wingers are not anti-capitalist.
Was Stack registered as a Republican or a Democrat?
Stack was a Bush hating anarchist.
Loomis apparently didn’t read Stack’s statement...stack was not a fan of capitalism, or America. Conservatives are fans of both things.
Excuse me .. but the premise is: Joe Stack is right wing.
I reject that premise .. and call it what it is: A BIG FAT LIE.
The left is so paranoid they are trying to convince people that Joe Stack is right wing .. when I believe the general public already knows he was NOT!!
I could not find a voting record, so either he was unregistered and hadn’t voted since moving to Texas or that someone scrubbed the record.
If I had a nickle for every leftwing crazy, and subtracted a nickle for every rightwing crazy, I’d still be a rich man.
someone didnt take their medicine today..
This is nothing to make light of as this is what the media puts out and the sheeple read. We have got to find a way to go on the attack ourselves, instead of joking about it. I wish there was a way to sue them(class action) or ridicule them.
Time to take these taxpayer stalking “writers” as supporting government and political party based terror cells seriously.
He looks like he would get along well with Elton John, or to put it another way, he probably needs diving weights in his loafers so he doesn’t float away.
You socialist professor and media types are doing this guy joe stack a real disservice.
Leftists want to be known for their activism. The absolute worst thing that could happen to any leftist is a post mortem false accusation robbing them of their rights to what they’ve always lived for—immortality in the media as a leftist activist.
Just sent this to Mr. Loomis:
First off, communists are anti-government when it comes to governments that don’t support their views. Just look at Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao Zedong to name a few; all three led revolutions against goverments.
And what is your idea of “taking right-wing terrorism seriously”, Mr. Loomis? Should the government use force of law to silence “right-wing” radio programs that speak out against government action (isn’t there something called the First Amendment forbidding that)? Should they arrest anyone who protests against government actions (what were your feelings when the left wing was calling for Bush’es assassination?) or who suggest that we are approaching the point where armed revolt is our only option because our government ignores our votes and our protests and continues to grow in power and authority far beyond what the Constitution allows (doesn’t said Constitution state that when government becomes a threat to the people’s freedom, it is the people’s right to dissolve such a government?) Wouldn’t such government action in fact vindicate the very people you claim are the threat, as such actions are the very thing they are warning us about?
Ever ask yourself why some people are advocating these things? Can you honestly look me in the eye and say that our current government is following the Constitution that they all swore to uphold when they took office? The question that should be asked is “Who will take an overreaching government serioulsy?” because right now, I can promise you that that is a bigger threat than a few extremists.
As for the boogeyman “militia” term that your side is so fond of throwing at anyone who holds views of the government you don’t like:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGYR7_PII7w
I’m surprised somebody had sex with her at least four times
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