Things you won’t see in the American press about convicted terrorist murderer Eric Rudolph, from Juan Cole:
"Thomas Friedman will not write an op-ed for the New York Times about what is wrong with white southern Christian males that they keep producing these terrorists. He will also not ask why Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson are not denouncing Eric Rudolph every day at the top of their lungs.
"Daniel Pipes will not write a column for the New York Post suggesting that white southern Christians be put in internment camps until it can be determined why they keep producing terrorists and antisemites.
"Frank Gaffney will not write a column for the Washington Post castigating the Republican Party for appeasement in surrendering to the terrorist threats of radical Christians, by now opposing reproductive rights.
"Pat Buchanan will not write a column blasting King George III for having promoted the illegal immigration into the American south of criminal elements, whose maladjusted descendants are still making trouble."
Juan Cole?! Ha ha ha. Surely you can do better than quote this insane fool.
Something else you’ll find him saying is that Osama Bin Ladin engineered 9/11 in response to the (now known to be fabricated) Jenin massacre. Miraculessly, according to Juan Cole, OBL foresaw the events of March and April 2002 and got his retaliation in six months early.
Pete, are you suggesting that juan Cole is wrong, and that these things *will* happen?
But you will not hear any of those things asked, or demanded of white Americans, will you?
Even if Cole had said stupid and patently untrue things in the past (I suspect you’re probably lying; people who are making that kind of claim and who aren’t lying tend to back it up with evidence), this would have absolutely no bearing on the quotes, which stand on their own merits.
If you wished to address the issue of why right-wingers and Decent Leftists consider Muslims to be dangerous bastards because some of them are terrorists, but barely notice the conviction of a self-proclaimed Christian terrorist, that might be more constructive.
Two seconds, you git.
Pete, next you’ll be saying that Bush and Blair engineered the war in Iraq in response to the (now known to be fabricated) weapons of mass destruction. Or perhaps you won’t.
john b
Suspect me of lying no more, Tim Blair has the evidence here:
http://timblair.net/ee/index.php/weblog/correction_2/
Ah, I almost forgot.
If Eric Rudolph wants to be known as a Christian terrorist then let’s oblige him.
Can we get on with understanding the root causes now?
To be fair, I think body counts matter. How many people have Islamic terrorists killed in the last twenty or so years around the world versus how many have been killed by Christian terrorists? There’s not much of a comparison (anyways, as far as I know, Rudolph is a follower of Christian Identity, which isn’t really Christian at all).
Look, I think that LGF style freakouts over every single Muslim on earth are pointless, hysterical, and stupid, but it’s a bit silly to pretend that, at this particular junction of the space-time continuum, the fringes of Islam don’t have pretty much every other extremist movement on earth beat for sheer nutty violence.
I’d say Christian Identity was pretty much exactly as Christian as Qutbists are Muslim.
Come on John, surely you don’t believe that?
Qutb was an Islamic scholar working within a school of orthodox Sunni Islamic thinking with deep roots, and his followers have a copious amount of Islamic thinking to draw on to justify their position. It may not be mainstream, but theologically they are within the broad spectrum of Islamic orthodoxy. Think of them as the Wee Frees with semtex.
CI, on the other hand, is explicitly anti-Orthodoxy, explicitly heretical, and they place themselves purposefully outside the orthodox Protestant tradition (the ‘tribes of Europe’ as the lost tribes of Israel? Weird shit). A better comparison in Islamic terms is probably to strange, not-exactly-halal groups like the Alawites that have grafted mysterious other stuff onto Islamic orthodoxy (except CI is smaller and a lot crazier).
"CI, on the other hand, is explicitly anti-Orthodoxy, explicitly heretical, and they place themselves purposefully outside the orthodox Protestant tradition (the ‘tribes of Europe’ as the lost tribes of Israel? Weird shit)."
Mmmm…but the fifth monarchists, who I believe were the first people to come out with the lost tribes of Israel stuff were around at the time of the English Civil War, later morphing into the British Israelites. They’re part of a protestant tradition that rejects centralised orthodoxy, like the Baptists, pentecostalists, primitive methodists and so on. There’s a very strong US tradition of dissident churches, each purer in doctrinal matters than the last and CI does seem to fit into that tradition. H L Mencken’s good on this subject.
Anyway, the salient question is whether people like Rudolph and his co-thinkers are getting ideas from the example of the jihadis. Think religious open source warfare.
The point with such Protestant splinters is that they aren’t doctrinally pure (in the way that, say, Calvinism is), in the way that Qutbism is doctrinally pure. CI was set up as a way of giving white supremacists a way of wiggling around the unfortunate fact that the Christian heritage they liked to shout about was, when all is said and done, the result of a Jew. It’s a syncretic sect.
Anyway, the salient question is whether people like Rudolph and his co-thinkers are getting ideas from the example of the jihadis. Think religious open source warfare.
Nah, I don’t think so, at least in Rudolph’s case. Abortion bombings and assassinations began in the 1980’s, well before most Americans had (probably) even heard the word jihad. Who knows now, though? After all, suicide bombing spread from Hezbollah to the Tamil Tigers, whose innovation (the suicide vest) then made its way back to the Arab world.
"The point with such Protestant splinters is that they aren’t doctrinally pure (in the way that, say, Calvinism is), in the way that Qutbism is doctrinally pure."
Fair enough but being an atheist I tend to feel that this is a distinction without a difference; ultimately it’s all some bollocks someone made up and everyone thinks that the particular bollock in their hand is the one, true, authentic bollock.
Mind you, the force of purity itself as a motivating factor is interesting – it chimes in with the Russian Nihilists and the frenzies of traditional Chinese peasant revolts like the white lotus and the Taipings: annihilation of the self and others in order to establish "purity" in one form or other.
I can’t tell who’s taking the piss on this topic, but on body-counts it’s worth mentioning the Christian terrorist massacre at Sabra & Chatillah, if that’s their names & I’ve got anywhere near the spelling. 20 000 dead in Lebanon, in fairly terror-inducing fashion. And afaik they got away with it completely.
Dave, there were between about 800 and 2000 dead at Sabra and Chatila, and as for ‘getting away with it’, well, shit, that was Lebanon’s civil war for you. The Palestinians ‘got away’ with massacring the Maronite Christian village of Damour a couple years before that.