Welcome, RWP Readers! (All Three Of You!)
Posted by Phoenix Woman on August 15, 2007
For your reading pleasure:
When is a terrorist not a terrorist? When he’s a white supremacist male, of course!
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — The Southern Poverty Law Center, which filed suit against the nation’s second-largest Ku Klux Klan group, has increased security following threats from white supremacists to blow up its building.
The Montgomery-based center filed suit July 25 against the Imperial Klans of America in Kentucky’s Meade County Circuit Court over the beating of a 16-year-old boy of Panamanian descent.
“The latest case against the IKA promises to be as dangerous as anything we’ve faced,” SPLC co-founder Morris Dees stated in an e-mail Monday. “We won’t back down from these threats, but we’ll have to increase our security to ensure the safety of our staff.”
And this won’t get anywhere near the press coverage that the bogus ‘terror cell‘ in Miami got. [UPDATE: Joe in the comments section points out a similar situation in the UK with Robert Cottage, the right-wing racist nutjob that none dare call a terrorist and who our US press ignored even as they would later freak out over some would-be car bombers in Glasgow.]
Joe said
Exactly the same thing has been happening in the UK – Robert Cottage, an English member of the neo-fascist British National Party was discovered to be hoarding explosives supposedly in anticipation of a coming race war; he got 2 1/2 years in prison, but will be out in months because of the time he’s spent awaiting conviction and sentence. Worse, an evangelical terrorist named Robert Torto recently mudered two Muslims in an arson attack, as part of a religiously motivated campaign of firebombing in south London – he was sent to a secure hospital.
Phoenix Woman said
That’s scary, Joe. What’s even scarier is that I never would have known about this if not for your telling us about it. But the US media will tell us all about idiot would-be car bombers in Glasgow for weeks on end.
MEC said
The New York Times (and a bunch of other newspapers) were all over a report from the NYPD about “Homegrown Terrorism”. Judging by the NYT article, the report was all about how Muslims become terrorists. There’s not a word in the article about white supremacists, anti-abortion extremists, anti-immigrant militias, and other “homegrown” perpetrators of violent acts with a political agenda.
Lexia said
The New York Times, back about 1983, ran a full page editorial with accompanying cartoon on Terrorism vs. Terrorism. The cartoon was simply a bomb, captioned Terrorist, side by side with another identical bomb, captioned Not a Terrorist. The editorial pointed out the hypocrisy in labeling and prosecuting a deranged person’s failed attack on the Washington monument as a serious act of terrorism, while ignoring the overt acts of terrorism directed at women’s health clinics, committed by nationally coordinated organizations with the explicit intention of forcing the clinics out of business.
Shortly after that was published, the NYT published the results of a poll that indicated that their readers, at least, were in favor of restrictions on women’s right to abortion. That editorial was the last piece I ever saw as much in favor of women’s rights as the Times continued to be for a long time in favor of any man’s.
Women being the harbingers they (we) are of curtailment of rights for everyone, it would be a couple of decades before the sheer lawlessness permitted to be visited on women spread to the rest of the population, but is certainly has. Too bad liberal men thought they could keep their in-house female underclass *and* their self-righteous peddling of oppression based on phenotype as an affront to the human race. Men who tolerate the first will invariably work against the second. It just takes time.
Charles said
Gender is more typically regarded as genotypical, rather than phenotypical, since one can predict the phenotypical trends based on genetic analysis. While this distinction is muddied by the fact that atypical chromosomal patterns can result in, for example, XX males, I believe that closer genetic analysis shows defects in one of the X chromosomes that is explanatory.
As for culpability in the bombing of abortion clinics and the forced imposition of traditional lifestyles on women, liberal men are not the first group that comes to mind. Like any social change, attitudes change more slowly than legal status.
It always comes down to particular human beings making accommodation to one another. One of the happiest marriages I know of was between a lifelong, feminist woman who had the highest achievements and a very, very traditional man. Caring for one another trumped everything else.