The Norway bombing in all of its dimensions — the initial false assumption and reporting that it was Islamic terrorism; media [...]]]> I am coming late to the reporting and analysis of the Norway bombing, but allow me to connect current events with some of the themes I have been writing about in recent years.

The Norway bombing in all of its dimensions — the initial false assumption and reporting that it was Islamic terrorism; media reliance on experts with an anti-Islamic bias; the specifics and complexities of the ideology; the evolution of terms we have already used to describe the episode and the suspect — and how the assumptions that the terms we choose reflect on us, have surfaced rapidly since the bombing and mass murders in Norway.  

How we understand violence and underlying issues of ideology can be particularly fraught, particularly in heated political environments in which name calling and dubious forms of political “messaging” tend to predominate over well informed analysis and more considered uses of terms.

What follows is a brief, revised discussion of terms and issues related to religiously motivated violence, from last year.

Many challenges face those who think about, analyze and report on the Religious Right (let alone those who want to take appropriate political action.)  One problem is acquiring some foundational knowledge.  Another is finding generally agreed upon terms and definitions of those terms. These matters are running themes at Talk to Action — where we have taken the view from the beginning, that labeling, demonization and epithets are poor and often counterproductive substitutes for terms that allow for actual discussion and help us all to better understand the Religious Right in its many, and ever evolving, factions, leaders, ideologies and so on.

Chip Berlet and I posted essays at Religion Dispatches that delved into some of the questions of terminology raised by the 2010 arrest and indictment of the Michigan-based Hutaree Militia.

Our essays were titled, respectively, ‘Christian Warriors’:  Who Are The Hutaree Militia And Where Did They Come From?, and The Faith-Based Militia:  When is Terrorism `Christian’?

Here are excerpts:

Clarkson:

The arrest of the Michigan-based Hutaree Militia has drawn worldwide attention and in so doing, surfaced one of the knottiest issues we face as a culture to which religious freedom and free speech are so central: How do we think about and describe religiously motivated violence?

The Hutaree’s plans to murder a police officer and use IEDs to attack the funeral procession in order to catalyze an uprising against the federal government was shocking and made headlines around the world. Their action plan, while preposterous on its face, is not terribly surprising, and is in many respects a logical outgrowth of the eschatology of a wide swath of the Christian Right. But what has been most striking to me is the media’s high profile use of the term “Christian militia.” This suggests to me that a tectonic shift may be underway in our underlying culture and politics as we continue to struggle with how to acknowledge the realities of actual and threatened religiously-motivated violence in the U.S.

Until now, of course, the elephant in the room has been our double standard, at least since 9/11. We’ve had little difficulty acknowledging religious motivations when Muslims are involved, but it’s been rare to find the word “Christian” modifying terms like “militia” and “terrorism” in mainstream discourse.

In the 90s other terms were used to describe what we might now call Christian militias. The most famous militia group at the time, the Michigan Militia, had views similar to those of the Hutaree. It was founded and led by a Baptist minister named Norm Olsen and a deacon of his church and they’d made an indoctrination video of its chaplain addressing new recruits explaining that abortion necessitated the founding of the militia. Nevertheless, it was typically described as “anti-government.” And while that was certainly fair, (as it would be to describe the Hutaree militia as anti-government), it also tended to obscure the indisputable religious motivations of this and many other militia groups large and small. Reporting on these groups at the time also tended to downplay their religious eschatology.

The shorthand descriptions of such groups and individuals sometimes depends on the context. Some fall under the category of “hate groups,” and their acts as “hate crimes.” While these terms can be useful, they too can obscure religious motivations. For example, the once infamous Aryan Nations group referred to itself as the Church of Jesus Christ, Christian, and its leader was Rev. Richard Butler, a minister in one of the sects generally referred to as Christian Identity.

The uneven evolution of our thinking about these things, and the language we use to describe them, casts fresh light on how we use other shorthand terms in this complex and fraught dimension of public life. The term “faith-based,” for example, we use more or less synonymously with “religious” and as substitutes for such terms as “ecumenical” and “interfaith.” It has become a warm and fuzzy term used for glossing over religious differences, both for reasons of inclusiveness and to conceal exclusion. But we would never describe the Aryan Nations as a “faith-based” hate group or the Hutaree as a faith-based militia, or Clayton Waagner as a “faith-based terrorist.”

The rise of the term “faith-based” is probably closely related to our difficulty in ascribing religious motivations to hate and violence, unless of course it is the religion of foreigners with whom we are at odds or at war. Such characterizations can be taken as highly inflammatory. Terms like “Christian militia” or “Islamic terrorism” can suggest that terrorism and militias are more characteristic of these enormous and highly varied religious traditions than is the case. And there are certainly those who do not hesitate to exploit such opportunities. At the same time, the current use of the term “Christian militia” suggests to me at once a certain inevitability (since the Hutaree feature their religious identity on their web site) and a certain maturity in our collective ability to acknowledge the reality of the situation without hyperbole or inappropriate defensiveness with regard to the use of the term–Christianity–that fairly describes the majority of religious believers in the U.S., for all of their extraordinary diversity.

Finally, what terms we use depends on the occasion. While the media term of choice for the Hutaree was “Christian militia,” federal prosecutors have carefully avoided religious references. Assistant U.S. Attorney Ronald Waterstreet who summarized the case in court insisted that the charges “aren’t about a religion or the militia. It’s a group of like minded people who decided to oppose the authority of the United States by using weapons and force.” Similarly in the indictment he described the Hutaree as “an anti-government extremist organization” whose members wear a patch on their uniform that includes a cross and the initials CCR. The indictment did not explain that the name Hutaree meant “Christian warrior” and that CCR stands for “Colonial Christian Republic.”

“The Hutaree’s enemies,” the indictment continues, “include state and local law enforcement authorities deemed to be “foot soldiers” of… the new World Order.” Of course, foot soldiers for the New world Order does not help anyone understand that the Christian warriors of the Hutaree saw themselves as fighting an end times battle with the agents of the anti-Christ. For their purposes, they may not need to. But even as the feds sought to elide references to religion, they certainly opened the door to draw on the full palette of possibilities in their vision of end times religious war, since the indictment also said that the Hutaree’s enemies list includes “anyone who does not share their beliefs.”

Berlet:

The government has a legitimate law enforcement role in stopping domestic terrorism, though most dissidents on the political right and left are not breaking any laws and are protected by the First Amendment. The current and volatile right-wing populist movement spans from reform-oriented conservative black Republicans to recruiters for insurgent white supremacist groups, with the Tea Party activists and members of citizens militias falling somewhere between these ideological and methodological poles. It would be sloppy to lump all of these folks into one undifferentiated mass of potential terrorists.

The word “extremism,” which is tossed back and forth by both Republicans and Democrats, is a delegitimizing buzz word used by to demonize dissidents across the political spectrum. It was used in the 1960s, for example, to imply that the white segregationists and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were two sides of the same problem of “extremism.” King addressed being framed in this way in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Today the government uses the tem “extremism” to suggest dissident ideas on the right or left place people on a slippery slope toward terrorism. It’s time to stop using the term altogether.

The dynamic of widespread political demonization and scapegoating is not a problem for the police to solve. Religious, political, business, and labor leaders have to find a backbone and demand an end to the demonization of political opponents as traitors out to destroy America. Republicans need to distance themselves from conspiracist demagoguery and accept some moral responsibility for the nasty polarization in our society while Democrats must stop dismissing the angry right-wing populists in the Tea Party movement as ignorant and crazy. All of us need to stand up and call for a vigorous, thoughtful, and even raucous national debate over public policy while opposing all forms of demonization and scapegoating as toxic to democracy.

Authorities in suburban Philadelphia say a 70-year-old man was stoned to death with a rock stuffed in a sock by a younger friend who alleged the victim made unwanted sexual advances.

According to the criminal complaint, 28-year-old John Thomas of Lansdowne has told police he killed 70-year-old Murray Seidman because [...]]]>

Ugly story out of Pennsylvania:

Authorities in suburban Philadelphia say a 70-year-old man was stoned to death with a rock stuffed in a sock by a younger friend who alleged the victim made unwanted sexual advances.

According to the criminal complaint, 28-year-old John Thomas of Lansdowne has told police he killed 70-year-old Murray Seidman because the Old Testament refers to stoning homosexuals.

Delaware County authorities announced Friday that Thomas was arrested and charged with murder.

If the perpetrator were following the uglier dictates of another book of myths — say the Koran — then this would obviously reflect poorly on all his fellow adherents. As it stands … well, just a lone nutter.

The man arrested today in connection with the attempted Martin Luther King Day parade bombing in Spokane, Washington, appears to have longtime connections to the white supremacist movement.

Kevin William Harpham, 36, was charged with attempting to use a [...]]]>

March 09, 2011 6:59 pm ET by David Holthouse

PHOENIX, Ariz.–The endless carnage of the Mexican cartel wars may seem a world away from the climate control and free Starbucks within the Phoenix Convention Center, where leading border security experts gathered this month for the fifth annual Border Security Expo. Yet it’s only 150 miles from downtown Phoenix to the northernmost [...]]]>

By David Holthouse

PHOENIX, Ariz.–The endless carnage of the Mexican cartel wars may seem a world away from the climate control and free Starbucks within the Phoenix Convention Center, where leading border security experts gathered this month for the fifth annual Border Security Expo. Yet it’s only 150 miles from downtown Phoenix to the northernmost cartel war zone of Nogales, Sonora. Even closer are the badlands on the U.S. side of the border where last December a Border Patrol agent was killed in a firefight with Mexican drug smugglers. They were armed with AK-47s purchased legally from a gun store in Glendale, Arizona, less than a year before.

Weapons seized in March 2010 by Mexican military police from La Familia Michoacana Cartel, more commonly known as La Familia, a Mexican drug trafficking organization and criminal syndicate.

More than 73,000 firearms have been seized in drug raids or recovered from the scenes of cartel gun battles in Mexico since December 2006. According to law enforcement officials, “90 percent of the weapons that could be traced were determined to have originated from various sources within the U.S.” Weapons sold over-the-counter in the U.S., including thousands of cheap, military-style assault rifles, are being used in Mexico to commit horrific violence on a massive scale.

Conservative politicians routinely demand that the federal government to do more to secure the border — often championing nativist and draconian anti-immigrant policies. Yet they reflexively oppose even modest efforts by law enforcement to better track the flow of high-powered weaponry.

Meanwhile, the violence in Mexico continues to escalate. More than 34,000 people have died in the cartel wars since late 2006, many of them law enforcement officers, elected officials, or innocent civilians. On February 15, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent was shot and killed and his partner was seriously wounded while they were investigating cartel gunrunning in Mexico.

That same day marked the start of the Border Security Expo, a gathering of law enforcement and government officials from the U.S. and Mexico, as well as private security and defense contractors.

Standing at the Phoenix conference hall podium, U.S. border security expert Alonzo Peña, the former Deputy Director of ICE, called for America to own up to its responsibility for the bloodshed in Mexico.

“We are the consumers of the drugs and we are the suppliers of the weapons,” said Peña. “The drugs come to America, the money and the guns go back. U.S. weapons are giving these cartels the firepower they need. Much more needs to be done. There is a huge gap between what we are capable of doing to stop illegal gun trafficking to Mexico and what is actually being done.”

Last spring, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms proposed to narrow that gap with an emergency regulation that would require the roughly 8,500 federally licensed firearms dealers in the four border states to report the sale of multiple assault rifles to the same person in any five-day period.

This proposed new measure would neither prevent nor delay the purchase of any firearms. It’s designed to thwart the common practice among gunrunners of deploying “straw purchasers” to buy assault rifles in bulk. The proposed regulation mirrors a law on handguns that has been on the books since 1993, requiring gun stores to notify law enforcement authorities whenever a person buys two or more handguns in the same week.

High-powered assault rifles confiscated by Mexican soldiers in June 2009 from the Tijuana Cartel.

The recent indictment of 17 alleged gunrunners in Phoenix details the kind of buying patterns the proposed regulation targets. According to the indictment, Uriel Patino, a legal resident of the U.S., paid cash last Nov. 3 for two AK-47 rifles from Lone Wolf Trading Co., a Glendale, Ariz. strip mall gun store. A week later, he came back and bought 10 more AK-47s. Two days later, he purchased five more AKs. A month after that, he bought 20 more. In all, he bought 232 weapons — 42 handguns and 190 assault rifles — all from the same store, in 18 visits. With each purchase, Patino passed an instant background check and signed a form attesting the firearms were for his personal use.

His claims were no more ridiculous than the National Rifle Association and other gun lobby groups portraying the proposed anti-gunrunning measure as a serious attack on the second amendment rights of law-abiding citizens. But that is just what they did.

“This administration does not have the guts to build a wall, but they do have the audacity to blame and register gun owners for Mexico’s problems,” said Chris Cox, the chief lobbyist for the NRA.

Facing stiff opposition from the NRA and its allies, President Obama repeatedly delayed approval of the emergency regulation. Now it may be too late. Last Friday–three days after the ICE agent was murdered in Mexico–the House of Representatives voted 277 to 149 to block the Obama administration from implementing the anti-gunrunning regulation.

Two years ago, a Department of Defense study concluded that cartel violence had destabilized Mexico to a point that it was at risk of becoming a failed state, meaning a total collapse of its civilian government.

But when the U.S. law enforcement professionals who are tasked with securing the border ask for commonsense firearms regulations to stem the flow of high-powered weapons to Mexican drug cartels, right-wing forces put the interests of the firearms industry above those of national security and federal law enforcement officials in both nations.

“We are being outgunned,” said Luis Carlos Nujera, the State Secretary of the Department of Public Safety in the state of Jalisco, whose capital, Guadalajara, erupted in violence in early February after two cartel leaders were arrested.  ”The aim of the cartels is to destabilize and create panic. To do this they are using better and more modern firearms than many of our state and local police agencies possess.”

At the Border Security Expo, ATF officials made it clear that interdicting firearms bound for Mexico is a top enforcement priority for their agency. “We have ‘Project Gunrunner’ groups in Phoenix and Tucson that were created specifically to address the gun trafficking that directly impacts the level of violence in Mexico and the U.S. border region,” said James Needles, the Acting Special Agent in Charge of the Phoenix Field Division of the ATF.

Needles said that in May, the ATF will open a new anti-gunrunning office with seven agents in Sierra Vista, Ariz., just north of the border. “We’re going after the Arizona-based distribution cells,” said Needles. “The street agents know what’s needed. Our biggest hurdle is Washington.”

In the 48 hours after the House of Representatives voted to block the anti-gunrunning regulation, more than 40 people were killed in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, a border city about the size of San Antonio, Texas. Among the dead were four Mexican police officers, shot down with assault rifles.

Originally published at Media Matters for America at  http://mediamatters.org/blog/201102250023

David Holthouse is an investigative journalist with Media Matters for America who lives in Alaska. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, The Nation, American Prospect, and other publications.

But Georgia state Rep. Bobby Franklin, R-Marietta, has to be considered the top contender. He was the one who proposed a law that would require rape and sexual assault victims — but not the victims of [...]]]> With the rise of the Tea Partiers, there’s intense competition for the title of Craziest Wingnut Holding Public Office.

But Georgia state Rep. Bobby Franklin, R-Marietta, has to be considered the top contender. He was the one who proposed a law that would require rape and sexual assault victims — but not the victims of any other crimes — to be called “accusers” unless there was a conviction in their cases.

Then Franklin introduced a bill that would do away with drivers’ licenses, arguing that they “are a throw back to oppressive times.” As CBS reported:

In his bill, Franklin states, “free people have a common law and constitutional right to travel on the roads and highways that are provided by their government for that purpose. Licensing of drivers cannot be required of free people, because taking on the restrictions of a license requires the surrender of an inalienable right.”

(More details on both measures here.)

Now Lindsay Beyerstein brings us word of Franklin’s latest:

A Georgia Representative has introduced a bill to investigate all unsupervised miscarriages as crime scenes. Don’t believe me? Here’s the relevant language from HB 1, downloadable from legislature’s website:

When a spontaneous fetal death required to be reported by this Code section occurs without medical attendance at or immediately after the delivery or when inquiry is required by Article 2 of Chapter 16 of Title 45, the ‘Georgia Death Investigation Act,’ the proper investigating official shall investigate the cause of fetal death and shall prepare and file the report within 30 days[...]

Beyerstein adds that the bill “is radical even by the standards of people who think fertilized ova are people.” That’s an understatement — according to MoJo, ”Both miscarriages and abortions would be potentially punishable by death.”

One has to conclude that Bobby Franklin doesn’t need a challenger so much as a decent shrink.

Cross-posted at AlterNet and my butt-ugly personal blog.

The justifiable homicide concept burst into national consciousness in 1993. It was [...]]]> Now that the brouhaha over a proposed bill in the South Dakota legislature that would have redefined the murder of abortion providers as “justifiable homicide” is largely over, and the bill has been tabled, let’s consider the origins of the idea.

The justifiable homicide concept burst into national consciousness in 1993. It was contained in two “Defensive Action Statements” which were signed at various times by 33 people. The text of the first as authored by a well-known Gulf Coast antiabortion activist, Paul Hill in 1993 read:

“We, the undersigned, declare the justice of taking all godly action necessary to defend innocent human life including the use of force. We proclaim that whatever force is legitimate to defend the life of a born child is legitimate to defend the life of an unborn child. We assert that if Michael Griffin did in fact kill David Gunn, his use of lethal force was justifiable provided it was carried out for the purpose of defending the lives of unborn children. Therefore, he ought to be acquitted of the charges against him.”

The second, using similar language, was issued on behalf of Paul Hill who had murdered Dr. John Britton and his unarmed escort. Hill had previously also issued a 13 page manifesto about the need for “defensive war” and called for the formation of Christian militias to lead a revolution against the federal government. The Army of God in turn, is populated with people who adhere to similar ideas, many of whom see themselves as engaged in a long-term theocratic revolutionary struggle.

The idea was also introduced via a crude cartoon by far-right Catholic priest, David Trosch. The cartoon depicted a man holding a gun on a doctor performing an abortion and was titled: “justifiable homicide?”

Meanwhile, Operation Rescue activist Michael Hirsch a law student at Pat Robertson’s Regent University Law School, had developed a legal theory of the justifiable homicide of abortion providers which was the core of his 1993 Regent University Law School thesis. It had been prepared for publication in the school’s law review, but all 500 copies of the review were suppressed prior to publication because Paul Hill’s assassination of Dr. Britton suddenly made the article a PR nightmare. Hirsch has argued that the murder of Dr. David Gunn was “consistent with Biblical Truth” and under Florida law, justifiable if one “reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent the immediate death or great bodily harm to himself or another.” Hirsch wrote that the “presuppositions” he brings to any discussion “come from the Bible… it is impossible to fully consider the hypothetical defense of Michael Griffin without Scriptural support for the argument.”

Hirsch later sought to test his theory in an appeal of Hill’s murder conviction, but his theory was rejected by the courts, and Hill was executed by the state of Florida for his crimes.

The notion has evolved over time. In the 1980s, attorneys seeking to defend people accused of arson against abortion facilities, unsuccessfully sought to offer the “necessity defense.” In theological circles, the idea of vigilante action on behalf of what was thought to be “God’s laws” was variously called “Defensive action” and “interposition.” Whether approached via the law or via theology, the idea was to justify criminal acts against abortion providers on behalf of the unborn.

But over time the notion of justifiable homicide has stuck, although it has no legal basis whatsoever. The Army of God uses the term to justify the assassination of Dr. George Tiller by Scott Roeder, for example. Roeder, although he had discussed justifiable homicide in 1993 with Army of God leader Michael Bray, sought to use the necessity defense in court, but the judge denied this approach was applicable.

No court in the country to my knowledge has allowed any defense in which the crime is acknowledged but excused via a necessity defense or the argument that murder of an abortion provider constitutes justifiable homicide. That is why it would have been significant if the South Dakota legislators pushing the idea had prevailed in passing the bill. It would probably have been struck down by the courts, but it would have once again raised into national debate about whether the entire notion that the assassination of abortion providers was somehow moral and legal.

In 1993 the idea that even a few people thought that the murder of a doctor was justified was shocking. But as woolly-headed as it may seem to some, the idea lives on.

(For a more detailed discussion of the origins of the theory of the murder of abortion providers as justifiable homicide see my book Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy, Common Courage Press, 1997.)