Terrorism and Coffee

I got up early because I was nervous about going into the office today and what I might find when I get there (ya never know in this job), so I started deleting and responding to (and then deleting) my emails. I've got my inbox down to a nice, calm level and I'm ready to go crank myself up on coffee and get to work.

In the meantime, I was browsing Salon.com and found an interesting opinion article. On December 10th, Salon ran an article (correctly) identifying three Christian, American, White, Conservative terrorists: Clay Waagner, Eric Rudolph, and James Koop. Waagner gained noteriety (and a spot on the FBI's 10-most-wanted list) by mailing white powder and letters threatening anthrax attacks to family planning clinics in the US. Eric Rudolph bombed the Olympic Park in Atlanta in 1996, and James Koop shot and wounded or killed a doctor, nurses, and patients outside of a family planning clinic. To this list of fine gentlemen, I would add Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 of my fellow Oklahomans because he believed that the big federal government was going to take away his right to own, well, giant truck bombs made of fertilizer. Why? Because the government, how dare it, was providing free of inexpensive health care to poor children.

The first three, identified in the Salon article, remind me of a 17-year-old kid who tossed a firebomb through the window of a Planned Parenthood office in Broken Arrow during my senior year of high school - the same Planned Parenthood office where my girlfriend got her inexpensive birth control, because her parents wouldn't have let her see the family doctor about that (birth control is evil!) When asked why, the kid, who had never attended a public school in his life and whose parents insisted on homeschooling him in the ways of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, said that he wanted to kill abortionist-murderers. And here's the kicker: Planned Parenthood of Oklahoma does not provide abortions, and has never provided abortions. Although no one was hurt in that attack, it certainly opened my eyes to the brainwashed, uneducated, illogical state of mind of these, well, terrorists. When you visit the Oklahoma City bombing memorial, it might surprise you to learn that of the more than 2000 terrorist attacks since 1985 on American soil, less than 1% of them were perpetuated by Muslim extremists. By the numbers, you stand a better chance of being sniped outside of an abortion clinic, dragged behind a KKK member's pickup truck, firebombed by an ingorant home-schooled Soldier of Christ, or blown up by a fertilizer bomb than you ever would of being killed by the Taliban or al Quaeda.

What do these attackers all have in common? They are conservative, white, Christian, and generally Republican males. Sometimes females, but not likely. I mention this only because me, a part-Lebanese, darker-skinned, darker-haired, liberal male has had his luggage searched more than five times in one summer (out of 7 trips), has had my website labelled "crime" by John Ashcroft (no, really!), and has been told by Ann Coulter that I'm a traitor and should be shot because I questioned our motivations for the war in Iraq.

But don't take my word for it. Still don't believe these clowns are dangerous? Take a look at this letter posted on the Army of God website. The Army of God is a self-proclaimed conservative, Christian terrorist movement. That's right, they call themselves terrorists, right there on the webpage? I wonder if John Ashcroft, who has said many of these things himself while campaigning (and losing) against a six-week-old corpse in Missouri, has labelled this website crime? Read it if you have the stomach for such things, and then tell me with a straight face that we liberals, who demand truth from our president (and woudln't mind the capture of Osama bin Laden someday) and inexpensive health care for babies, are scarier than these people.