Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Turning U.S. crackpots into terrorists


By PAT MURPHY
Express Staff Writer

Had 53-year-old Andrew Stack had an Arabic name, diving his small aircraft into the Internal Revenue Service's Austin, Texas, office would've been denounced in a wave of national rage as an act of foreign terrorism. Instead, Stack's fiery suicidal end is being honored in some extremist quarters and by a few politicians and wacky commentators as a heroic protest against U.S. government taxing powers.

Rubbish. Stack is as much a terrorist as Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber who protested the federal government and took out 168 lives, and surely as much of a terrorist as al-Qaida suicide bombers. A terrorist is not defined by ethnic origin, only by acts: "an advocate or practitioner of terror as a means of coercion" (Webster).

Stack also was a crackpot, one of a growing and frightening new rabble of radicals harboring and promoting oddball beliefs that can trigger, as in Stack's and McVeigh's case, violent acts against fellow Americans as vengeance against imagined wrongs of the government. That's called insanity.

This deranged thought process is no longer confined to conventional loonies. Elites have gone balmy.

Republican U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann and Fox's batty Glenn Beck believe concentration camps are being prepared for dissident Americans, Bachmann insisting Census forms will be used to seize citizens, Beck claiming FEMA is constructing camps. Radio commentator Rush Limbaugh sees health care reform as a way to strip whites of wealth to repay black-American descendants of 1800s slaves.

Sarah Palin and others have their "death panel" theories about health care reform, and the Tea Party nurtures the notion that Obama is foreign born and a "socialist" or "fascist," apparently unable to discern the difference.

A new study by the Southern Poverty Law Center should give thinking Americans genuine pause: So-called "patriot" groups spreading conspiracy theories about government martial law, seizing personal firearms, opening America's doors to illegal immigrants and other daffy plots have grown rapidly—some 363 new groups formed last year alone.

Extremists are appearing at public meetings wearing guns and carrying signs about watering the tree of liberty with blood. Two black Americans were shot and killed in Massachusetts by a man who told police he'd read on a right-wing Web site that genocide to wipe out whites was under way.

In addition, plots to assassinate President Obama have been uncovered.

Thanks to politicians and TV talk show opportunists who want to control thinking of simple-minded followers, it's only a matter of time before bloodshed is triggered again in the guise of getting even with the U.S. government.




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