What defines a terrorist? In the wake of the Boston tragedy.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. ~ Martin Luther King Jr

 

So I’ve been disturbed in the last few days, another horrific crime has occurred in America, another senseless act of violence.  Once again someone has made the decision to kill innocent people.  That is disturbing enough, but what has disturbed and confused me more is the reaction to this particular event.

The conversation has revolved around whether or not a “terrorist” who is a US citizen, should be allowed to have his constitutional rights.  I would remind people that the ideas of liberty and freedom are messy.  A system that presumes innocence will sometimes let a guilty man go free and convict an innocent man.  But it is to try to provide the utmost protection possible to the wrongly accused man that these rights were created in the first place.  Not an avenue to exonerate monsters, but a system that strives to and will hopefully exonerate you should you erroneously be accused of being a monster.

Let’s take a recent act of horrific violence, the Aurora, CO theater shootings.  On July 20, 2012 James Eagan Holmes is alleged to have killed 12 people and injured 58 in a mass shooting during a midnight showing of the movie The Dark Knight.  Basically, a young Caucasian male used firearms to kill a large number of people and planted booby-trapped explosives in his apartment that he luckily confessed about saving further carnage.  People were upset, they wanted to string him up but I didn’t hear the word terrorism thrown around, nor did I hear anyone upset that Mr. Holmes was being afforded his constitutionally guaranteed rights as a US citizen.

Fast forward to last week and the horrific violence in Boston, MA.  Two brothers set off pressure cooker bombs at the Boston Marathon killing 3 people and wounding nearly 150 others.  They were well armed and were reported have thrown explosives at and to have fired repeatedly on law enforcement personnel.   People are of course upset , they want to string the surviving brother up but this time, the suspect is labeled a “terrorist” and many people want to deny him his constitutionally guaranteed rights as a US citizen.

So what has been eating at me is what is the difference between these two acts that makes one terrorism and the other a crime.  First what is similar, both men used firearms and explosives to inflict injury and terror on Americans.  Both men were young Caucasian American citizens.

 

So what is different between these two men:

 

1.  One used guns as a primary form of killing the other used bombs, but both were prepared to use both.

 

2.  One was born a US Citizen, one was a naturalized citizen.

 

3.  One was not a Muslim, one was a Muslim.

 

So which of these differences makes one a terrorist and not the other, is terrorism defined by your weapon of choice?  I doubt many people would make that distinction and quite frankly I never heard anyone screaming terrorist at Eric Rudolph or demanding his rights be removed.

 

Does being born a US citizen make you immune to being called a terrorist?

 

Does being a Muslim make you a terrorist?

 

When you look at the objective facts I think what determines your view that one of these men is a terrorist and the other isn’t, if you share that view, might be a bit disturbing.  I know, most of you who hold that view will dismiss this as some liberal rant, but let’s remember I’m defending the idea that both of these men should be given all of their legal rights guaranteed under the constitution to all US citizens.  Up until this week that was the rallying cry of conservatives, they supposedly believed in liberty, freedom and were the defenders of the constitution.  But not this week, why?

I think the most hypocritical idea is this.  When the shootings in Sandy Hook occurred, conservatives rallied around the idea that as much of a tragedy as the shooting was, a single tragedy shouldn’t allow the government to infringe on any American’s constitutional rights.  Now however, conservatives are rallying around the idea that a single tragedy, because it has been labeled terrorism, should be used to deny an America citizen his constitutional rights.

The funny thing is that conservatives are arguing that President Obama sucks because he will give this “terrorist” his rights.  So thought about another way, conservatives are arguing that what they want is for President Obama and his administration to have the power to name someone an enemy combatant and deny them their rights even if they are US citizens living in America.   Really, is that what conservatives want?  Do they really want the guy they call names and threaten in comment sections to have the power to snatch them up and make them disappear?  The same folks who call him a fascist, want him to have fascist powers, at least when it’s convenient, in the news and when white people are being killed by someone who prays to Allah instead of Jesus Christ and that is one of the least Christian ideas I’ve ever encountered.

 

Conservative Hypocrites support Sharia Law

Conservative Hypocrites support Sharia Law

Conservatives in America are always screaming about how they are trying to stop the Obama administration from allowing Muslims to institute Shariah Law in the United States.  They claim it would be wrong to impose Islamic religious laws on the citizens of a secular nation.  However these very same conservatives are willing to support religious law as long as it’s their religion being imposed on everyone else.  They are willing to impose their religious views no matter how bigoted they are in regards to preventing gay marriage or the use of insurance to pay for contraceptives or by finding ways to strong-arm organizations like the Susan G Komen for the cure to hold up breast cancer screenings because they happen at Planned Parenthood.

So you might think this idea of Christian Shariah Law is hyperbole but Rick Santorum, recent winner of three Republican Party primaries for the President of the United States very much supports this idea.  Santorum is also ironically the chosen candidate of the religious right and one of the biggest supporters of this idea.

It never ceases to amaze me how little the conservative and religious right, who spend so much time screaming about American Exceptionalism, freedom and the constitution are the ones most often supporting bigotry, lack of freedom and the loss of civil rights.

 

 

 

Why society needs religion

We all know him, the idiot who comes into work each day does a half-assed job, never quite does anything to get himself fired, just does a mediocre job.  Never seems to suffer anything ill for doing almost nothing.  We know of course the reward for working hard and doing an excellent job, they give you more work and more responsibility and very rarely the recognition or salary that should accompany it. 

I think the best illustration of this I have seen in my life was when I was a doctoral student.  Our written and oral exam process was a bear.  Several days, up to a week, of written exams lasting from 4 hours to all day.  Then an oral exam to cover the material you didn’t do so well on, basically a several hour intellectual smack down that typically left you doubting your very ability to think at all.  Of course, as graduate students will do, we would wait as a group and take the person who was suffering out for some drinks.  In our program there was a fragile girl, by far not the smartest of our group, and equally the most fragile.  So on the day she was taking her oral exam we waited for her and she came back way too early.  We all thought, there it is, they booted her out, but she looked happy.

We asked her how it went and she said,” it was easy, they were really nice to me.”  Of course the world rewards the competent with more shit and takes care of the fragile ones because they can’t handle it.  This is why religion exists, because the competent are forever asking the question, why should I?  Why should I continue to bust my ass, to be honest, why shouldn’t I use my skills and talents to take what I want and need, to take advantage of those I easily could.  A genius figured out a long time ago, and answered those questions thus, you will be rewarded in the next life, if you take advantage you will burn in hell.

There is no accident or surprise that all of the major religions have a hell, or a step back on the reincarnation scale, be bad and you come back as a worm!  Paradise, heaven and hell what a beautiful system, absolute genius.

Now my religious friends, before you jump my ass for challenging your beliefs remember this, this is America.  The beauty of our country is a person can choose their own beliefs without fear of persecution, I have mine and you have yours.  And before you think me weak-minded or twisted think about this, what does it take a man like me to be good and honest and kind when he does not believe he’ll be punished for being bad, or rewarded for being good.

Terry Jones, a burning Koran in Florida, Karzai’s gambit and Death in Afghanistan

This is not the first time I’ve written about Pastor Terry Jones in Florida, a man who calls himself a Christian Pastor but is in fact nothing but a hate monger and a media whore, my last post was so entitled and the link is below:

http://zdeaconblue.wordpress.com/2010/09/08/pastor-terry-jones-is-nothing-but-a-christian-media-whore/

Recently Mr. Jones put the Koran on trial, judged it guilty and burned it in his church in front of his massive 30 person ministry.  You can read more about the sickening details below:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/under-god/post/un-workers-killed-during-protest-of-terry-jones-koran-burning/2011/04/01/AFLOqKIC_blog.html

Happily, as you will notice by the date of the piece I linked to, the US media basically ignored this act, finally treating Jones with the level of disdain he deserved.  In fact I had also planned on ignoring him in this blog as well.  However, and unfortunately, this past week in retaliation to this blatant act of disrespect, Mullahs in Afghanistan fired up their congregations and in fact violence and deaths ensued.  The news however was not ignored by the media in fact it has been a lead story everywhere.  In condemnation of what Jones did, the media became an equal criminal by playing up how Muslims took to the streets and in an attempt to kills Americans instead attacked and killed UN workers.

However, this morning on CNN and also in several news outlets I found there was much more to the story.  In fact, this was not Muslims running wild and being unreasonable and violent as many people and much of the media want to portray it.  In fact, what fired up the Mullahs in Afghanistan was a speech by President Hamid Karzai in which he called for Terry Jones’ arrest, which in fact Karzai knew could not happen under American Law.   A political gambit by President Karzai that has back fired as Taliban elements in Afghanistan incited the violence that led to 20 deaths.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/263719/karzais-incitement-andrew-stuttaford

So at the end of the day, Jones, Karzai, the Taliban and the American media are all to blame for the misrepresentations of Islam and the deaths of innocent people.

Republican Peter King is a bigot and a hypocrite

Recently in this blog we wrote about Republican Peter King’s hearings on the radicalization of American Muslims.  We called it like we saw it, as state sponsored bigotry.  You can read the previous piece below:

http://zdeaconblue.wordpress.com/2011/03/11/muslim-radicalization-hearings-or-state-sponsored-bigotry/

However it turns out not only is it states sponsored bigotry, but the ringmaster, Peter King is also a hypocrite as he is on record supporting the Irish Republican Army, a group that used explosives and killed civilians.  Below are two links, the second a straight up news treatment of the story, but the first is how Jon Stewart took this issue on the Daily Show.

http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Jon-Stewart-attacks-Congressman-Peter-King-over-his-support-for-the-IRA—VIDEO-117818444.html

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2011/03/09/peter-kings-ira-support-resurfaces-as-lawmaker-probes-muslim-ra/

Muslim radicalization hearings or state sponsored bigotry?

Republican Peter King of New York, and today I’m ashamed of the New Yorkers who voted him into office,  in a bit of political grand standing, meant I’m sure to solidify his “conservative” credentials, is holding hearings on the radicalization of American Muslims. 

Now let’s look at those two words, American Muslims, so Americans are being investigated for their religious beliefs.  I believe they tried this in Spain once, it was called the inquisition.  By what right does our government have to investigate a whole religion of people based upon the acts of several individuals?  And I don’t want to hear the nonsense some conservatives spout about how Islam is a violent religion, read the Christian Bible then read the Koran, there is a lot of overlap and a whole lot of violence in both books.  As a matter of fact if you made a movie using the literal stories in the Christian Bible it would have to be rated NC-17 due to violence, sexual situations and rape.  Yet Christianity is considered by conservatives to be the peaceful and “right” religion and Islam is violent and wrong. 

There are radicals in every religion; I’ll bet Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski and Eric Rudolph were all Christians, so why aren’t we having hearings on the radicalization of Christianity.  Hell American Muslims haven’t actually killed anyone but these white Christians did?  Oh that’s right, they are white Christians so they can act as individuals, but brown people who are Muslims are incapable of individual thought, at least that is what these hearings suggest.

Peter King you should be ashamed of yourself and your state sponsored bigotry.

BS Moment of Silence Part 2: Arizona Legislature off the rails and the most hateful Christians in America

 I want to start this post by introducing you to the equivalent of radical Islam living right here in the United States.  The world appropriately looks down on Al Qaeda and radical clerics because they take a beautiful peaceful religion and turn it into a brutal, hateful mechanism of pain.  I have heard people who denigrate Muslims paint the entire religion of Islam with a broad brush due to the actions of this minority.  I wonder if those same folks paint Christianity the same way when they hear about the actions of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas.  These are the people who proclaim in the name of the lord to hate homosexuals and to show their hate, they picket the funerals of homosexuals or any funeral or event they can somehow link to homosexuality.   Here is a link to the Wikipedia site about the group:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westboro_Baptist_Church

This group is nuts but also in my opinion wholly insincere, what this group is really about is getting attention for this group.  They regularly picket that bastion of homosexual lifestyle, Kansas City Chiefs home games, the NFL is a lot of things positive and negative but a big gay pride festival it is not.  This group claims to have an annual travel budget of $200,000 and that money must come from donations and I say shame on anyone contributing to this hate group.

So the Westboro Baptist Church has announced it will protest at the funeral of the nine-year old girl who was shot in Tucson earlier this week that targeted Congresswoman Giffords.  In watching CNN today the network appropriately reached out to the church to get a statement from them, it is fair to hear both sides of the story.  In full character the church responded with a hateful rant including accusations about everyone including the little girl.  I think the Westboro Baptist Church is a collection of the most hateful Christians in America and if there is a Christian God, I’m quite sure he has a one-way ticket to Hell punched for these cretins. 

As someone with a Libertarian bent, and a strong believer in the freedom the constitution guarantees, I will wait and see what the Supreme Court says this spring about whether or not this type of speech can be banned.  It worries me on some level to ban any speech that does not cause direct physical injury, the cliché screaming fire in a crowded theater.  The infliction of emotional harm is a much stickier issue and the one that the Supreme Court is facing and it will be interesting to see what they say.  Regardless, you are scum if you picket the funeral of a nine-year old girl for any reason!

Happily, the people of Arizona are fighting back against the nut jobs like people have done on many other occasions.  People have conducted anti-protests against the Westboro church ever since the Matthew Shepard funeral in Wyoming in 1998.  The way they do this is to wear giant angel wings and use these to block the view of the protestors by the mourners.  The image below comes from the Portland Independent Media Center at:

http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/10/326599.shtml

Counter-protest Angels

Finally today I have a huge problem with what the nuts of the Arizona legislature are doing now.  They are rushing to pass a bill today to keep the protestors at some set distance away from any funeral.  They are waiving rules and are setting records in getting this law done and signed in one day.  Let’s be clear, their intent is to be commended, as I’ve said picketing a little girl’s funeral is despicable.  However, this church has been picketing military funerals for years and so once again today I ask the question why is congress so special?  Does the Arizona legislature only care about the mourning of families if they get killed standing nearby a congresswoman but not if they were killed in the line of duty in the military?  Or is it that they only care about their citizens when the media is watching?  I think the government of Arizona has shown in the last two years that it is completely off the rails.

Has Juan Williams fallen prey to Politically Correct America?

Wow do I hate to agree with Fox News and especially Bill O’Reilly the giant wind bag.  But I have to admit that I think NPR over reacted in firing Juan Williams for the comments he made.  I hear a lot of comparisons to CNN firing Rick Sanchez but I think there is a very big difference between the two events.  In the case of Rick Sanchez, he lit into a tirade about how another entertainer, Jon Stewart, was a bigot and then went on to suggest that all media was controlled by the Jews a very old and tired clichéd conspiracy theory.  Sanchez was attacking an individual and specifically calling him a bigot, not cool.

In Williams’ case Juan Williams admitted a thought that goes through most of our heads and probably even the heads of fellow Muslims.  Because the terrorists on 9/11 were Muslim, and because we have now painted the image of the boogey man in our society in the image of Osama Bin Laden seeing someone wearing Arabic clothing get on a plane makes everyone nervous.  Now, do any of us get up and run off the plane, of course not.  Why not?  Because deep down we all know that logically someone dressed like that draws extra attention in security and that the 9/11 terrorists did their best to blend in, as would any future terrorist.

Now, was what Juan Williams did smart?  Apparently not, he lost his job, and in a society where we are overly sensitive to issues related to the Islamic faith speaking that open and honestly was highly risky.  However that does not make what happened right.  In my opinion he should have been censured or suspended but being fired doesn’t seem to be an appropriate response.

America is just too damn sensitive these days, I would be very much in favor of firing Williams if he’d said half of the bigoted things Bill O’Reilly says.  So in the end, Juan Williams will end up full-time at Fox News where he can be completely bigoted and not worry about it.  In the end this just adds to the giant circus that is our current media.

So friends my question to you tonight is this, with a completely screwed up political process and a completely screwed up and biased media, how do the people of this country find out the truth about what’s going on?  Right now all we have to listen to is overly conservative biased, overly liberally biased or tabloid gossip news. 

I hate to leave a piece like this without any suggestions of solutions so I’ll tell you what I do to try an keep updated on what’s truly happening.  I read the NY TIMES, the Christian Science Monitor and look at the BBC News website.  Although the NY TIMES certainly is on the liberal side the information is generally good.  The Christian Science Monitor is a fantastic newspaper and the BBC is a great place to see what’s happening in America, the way other people see us.

The link below will take you to the details of the Juan Williams story:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/10/22/national/main6983495.shtml

The Ground Zero Mosque a new problem or is it?

I love this piece from the New York Times take a gander at the opening paragraph:

“Many New Yorkers were suspicious of the newcomers’ plans to build a house of worship in Manhattan. Some feared the project was being underwritten by foreigners. Others said the strangers’ beliefs were incompatible with democratic principles.

Concerned residents staged demonstrations, some of which turned bitter.

But cooler heads eventually prevailed; the project proceeded to completion. And this week, St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church in Lower Manhattan — the locus of all that controversy two centuries ago and now the oldest Catholic church in New York State — is celebrating the 225th anniversary of the laying of its cornerstone.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/08/nyregion/08zero.html?_r=1&hp

Now here’s the quiz, who was this been said about:

“Few of their children in the country learn English. … They will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages we have will not be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious.”

If you guessed Benjamin Franklin in 1751 about German immigrants you are correct.  Below is a link to a very interesting piece on American bigotry:

http://badgerherald.com/oped/2007/08/31/bigotry_americas_sha.php

These two pieces very much show the shameful side of America’s history of bigotry.  The anger around the supposed ground-zero mosque certainly has components of rightful anger related to 9/11, unfortunately I would love to be convinced that’s all it is.  However, as we have seen since the inception of our country new immigrants have suffered the same type of bigotry just for being new and just for being different.  America my friends is NOT a Judeo-Christian country, it is a country founded by primarily Judeo-Christian men.  Their predecessors came here to establish a country where the most important concept is, was and will hopefully always be freedom, not religion.  Freedom to believe as you please and to build anything you want, anywhere you want, as long as you do not violate the laws of the land.  At the end of the day that is what makes America great and why we should we truly be proud of our country.  What we should also be proud of is our progress.  When our founding fathers founded our country, it was a country found by and for men.  Since those days we have grown to recognize the rights of women to vote, of blacks to be full citizens with all of those rights including the right to vote (even if that did take almost 200 years), to allow same-sex partners to have partnership rights and even in some places to marry.  So my hope for America is that we can recognize our mistakes from history and maybe, just maybe speed up our progress to truly allow people in this country to be free, even with the costs that come with that freedom.

Violent Christians and Muslims and a bit of radical sanity from John Lennon

I hear a lot these days about how violent the religion of Islam is particularly in comparison to Christianity.  Christians and Conservatives are often heard saying that Christianity has matured into a peaceful religion while Islam has not and that’s why we can’t do things like build mosques near ground zero in New York City, because Islam is a religion of violence.  A terrible and horrible act on 9/11 has allowed bigots everywhere to decide all Muslims are terrorists, an idiotic lack of critical thinking that has spawned websites like the following:

http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/Pages/AboutSite.htm

Now I know a lot of you out there will say that Christians do not commit terrorists acts in the United States and I would remind you of Eric Rudolph, who bombed abortion clinics in the southeast, and  I would also refer you to the following link which documents over twenty-five acts of violence including, murder, attempted murder, anthrax attacks and bombings in America committed by Christian Terrorists.  If we use the logic that 9/11 condemns all Muslims, don’t these acts condemn all Christians?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-abortion_violence

I have also heard that Muslims are totally unreasonable, that death threats and riots came about for something as silly as threatening to artistically represent Mohammed.  Muslims found the cartoons offensive and this led to large-scale protests and some incidences of violence; you can read more at the link below:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controversy

Or for a much more enjoyable treatment get a hold of the South Park episodes on the same topic.

Of course Christians would never do anything like that, oh wait, maybe they would as this weekend a woman from Montana entered a Colorado museum today with a crow bar and destroyed a work of art on display because she did not like the way Christ was depicted, and you can read more below:

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/10/09/woman-charged-for-destroying-controversial-jesus-art-in-colorado/

So to me, I’m not sure there are any major differences between Islam and Christianity, both religions claim to be the only one, both of have bloody pasts, and both have recent blood on their collective hands in America.  Can’t we all just get along?  It is disturbing to me to be thinking about this topic particularly on this weekend, which would be the 70^th birthday of John Lennon had he not be mercilessly shot down in NYC in 1980.  So maybe take a few minutes, and in remembrance of Lennon just listen to his words and think about the meaning behind them, then hell, maybe we all could just get along. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b7qaSxuZUg