It’s Not Terrorism If A White Guy Does It

I remember how, in the aftermath of the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, the conservatives and the mainstream media that they’d bought up, bought off and/or scared into submission were all for doing summary rough justice on the perps, who they assumed had to be Evil Ay-Rab Heathens or some suchness.

But when it was found that the perps were Aryan white-supremacist conservatives, suddenly the Cons did a 180-degree spin worthy of Jim Rockford.

Suddenly, the perps’ motives became very important for us to know and understand.

Suddenly, the same people who would never have countenanced the claim in a Middle Eastern bomber’s pre-death video that he was doing it to fight the horrific oppression of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip were solemnly explaining that poor widdle Timmy McVeigh killed 168 people, 19 of them children in the building’s day-care facility, because he had legitimate grievances. (Among these alleged grievances: Anger at the Clinton Administration for allegedly killing child molester and gun battler Vernon “David Koresh” Howell even though Howell was the one who ordered the burning of his compound and the shootings of himself and his followers — actions he’d been planning for some time even as he claimed good-faith negotiations with the Feds.)

We see this pattern repeat itself whenever white guys commit terrorist acts. The motives of Eric Rudolph, the guy who bombed Olympic Part in Atlanta, a gay nightclub and an abortion clinic, were treated as far more worthy of consideration than the motives of Richard Reid or would-be Fruit-of-the-Loom bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. (And no conservatives whined when Eric Rudolph was read his Miranda rights, the way they whined over Abdulmutallab’s being read his.) And we’re seeing it now, with the suicide plane bomber Joseph Stack, whose family fled his anger before he torched their house and then took his light plane and rammed it into an IRS building: Republican Senator Scott Brown — who was all for putting Abdulmutallab, a person who unlike Stack didn’t kill or even hurt anyone besides himself, in the military-justice system — got all touchy-feely concerned and understanding about that poor “frustrated” white guy Stack.

What’s even more astonishing is how often news of the crimes of white terrorists is effectively suppressed. The same GOP/Media Complex that dutifully transmits Republican talking points about Abdulmutallab has had comparatively very little to say about the following dangerous political terrorists:

— James G. Cummings, a white-supremacist nutjob whose father was a California real estate baron, was using his daddy’s money to try and build a “dirty bomb” using radioactive materials because he was ticked off that a black man won the 2008 election. The only reason we know about this is because he was killed by his wife Amber, who got fed up with his beating her up all the time and shot him before he could finish his bomb — and the whole bit about the bomb-making efforts didn’t come out until two months after she shot him

— William Krar, a guy from Noonday, Texas, who with his common-law-wife was making pipe bombs, suitcase bombs, cyanide bombs and other weapons of mass destruction and providing them to right-wing militia groups across the US. (He was caught when one of his shipments, to a New Jersey militia group, was misdelivered to a New York family who promptly turned the package and its contents over to law enforcement officials.)

— Shawna Forde and Jason Bush, white supremacists who broke into a Hispanic man’s home and brutally killed him and his nine-year-old daughter, for no other reason than sheer racial hatred.

— Dennis and Daniel Mahon, Illinois neo-Nazis (feel free to insert Blues Brothers joke here) who committed a 2004 mailbombing in Scottsdale, Arizona that seriously injured several persons.

Why didn’t these people become household names and bywords for terrorism, just like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab? Especially since they all had much more in the way of weapons of mass destruction than he did — and were able to do more with them than he did.

Why is it different for them?