{"id":16804,"date":"2015-06-22T09:51:17","date_gmt":"2015-06-22T16:51:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=16804"},"modified":"2015-06-22T11:25:35","modified_gmt":"2015-06-22T18:25:35","slug":"terrorism-hate-crimes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=16804","title":{"rendered":"Terrorism & Hate Crimes"},"content":{"rendered":"

James Comey, the director of the FBI, says the murder of nine African-American churchgoers at a prayer meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, is not terrorism<\/a>. His reasoning?<\/p>\n

Terrorism is act of violence done or threatens to in order to try to influence a public body or citizenry so it\u2019s more of a political act and again based on what I know so more I don\u2019t see it as a political act.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ahem. Didn’t the killer tell investigators he wanted to start a race war<\/a>? Is\u00a0that not an attempt to influence the public? Is that not a political act?<\/p>\n

When it comes to Al Qaeda, haven’t we been told,\u00a0over and over,\u00a0that the political purpose behind\u00a0their terrorism is\u00a0to provoke the West\u00a0into a\u00a0religious war where the ultimate winner would be Islam?<\/p>\n

My guess\u00a0as to\u00a0what the Charleston killer meant\u00a0when he said he wanted to start a race war\u00a0was that\u00a0by killing those black churchgoers he hoped to provoke African-Americans into arming and defending themselves, perhaps even to seek vengeance against racist whites, thereby creating an\u00a0armed conflict between blacks and whites, a race war\u00a0which ultimately would be won by whites.<\/p>\n

How is that different from\u00a0Al Qaeda? How is that not political?<\/p>\n

I would have expected the FBI director to say something more along the lines of “Well, the killer acted alone and wasn’t part of any terrorist group; therefore what he did was a hate crime, not terrorism.”<\/p>\n

Yeah, but\u00a0… if an ISIS- or Al Qaeda-inspired “lone wolf” shot some of our countrymen dead,\u00a0we’d absolutely\u00a0call it terrorism. The\u00a0killer might\u00a0not be a card-carrying member of a terrorist group, might\u00a0never have had contact with members of a\u00a0terrorist group; nevertheless, we’d say\u00a0he’d been radicalized\u00a0by that terrorist group and had carried out the\u00a0attack in their name.<\/p>\n

The Charleston killer, we’re now hearing, was radicalized by white racist groups with clear political objectives<\/a>, in particular the Council of Conservative Citizens, the successor to the White Citizens Councils that fought integration\u00a0across the South during the civil rights battles of the 1960s. The CCC is dead-ass racist and segregationist, and many deep-South politicians are members or supporters. It’s not a stretch to say the CCC is the KKK minus the robes and burning crosses.<\/p>\n

I’m left with the inescapable conclusion that, as far as conservative political leaders and even the “liberal” media are concerned,\u00a0it’s not terrorism if a white American\u00a0does it.<\/p>\n

This would be a good place to insert Martin Luther King’s remark about the arc of the moral universe<\/a>. You know, to counter these\u00a0dark thoughts\u00a0about the intractable nature of racism in the USA. Instead, I’m going to insert some remarks from President’s Obama’s speech<\/a> marking the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery freedom marches:<\/p>\n

We do a disservice to the cause of justice by intimating that bias and discrimination are immutable, that racial division is inherent to America. If you think nothing\u2019s changed in the past 50 years, ask somebody who lived through the Selma or Chicago or Los Angeles of the 1950s. Ask the female CEO who once might have been assigned to the secretarial pool if nothing\u2019s changed. Ask your gay friend if it\u2019s easier to be out and proud in America now than it was thirty years ago. To deny this progress, this hard-won progress \u2014 our progress \u2014 would be to rob us of our own agency, our own capacity, our responsibility to do what we can to make America better.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yes, things are better. A lot better. But the CCC and KKK are still with us, and there are plenty of radicalized young white supremacists … potential terrorists all … out there. So yeah, celebrate the two steps forward, but don’t gloss over\u00a0the inevitable one step back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Comey, the director of the FBI, says the murder of nine African-American churchgoers at a prayer meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, is not terrorism. His reasoning? Terrorism is act of violence done or threatens to in order to try to influence a public body or citizenry so it\u2019s more of a political act and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[250,10,189,64,16,8,22],"tags":[1893,1891,1894,1892],"class_list":["post-16804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-wars","category-current-events","category-extremism","category-history","category-media","category-politics","category-terrorism","tag-ccc","tag-charleston-shooting","tag-kkk","tag-race-war"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16804"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16804\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16818,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16804\/revisions\/16818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}