MEMO TO DEPT. OF HOMELAND SECURITY: MAYBE YOU SHOULD STAKE OUT THE WHITE HOUSE
By Don Feder
In 1993, a terrorist cell detonated a 1,500-lb car bomb below New York’s World Trade Center (six dead, more than 1,000 wounded) The perps were:
1. Operation Rescue activists
2. The NRA’s Board of Directors
3. Members of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps
4. Muslim fanatics lusting for infidel blood and dedicated to jihad.
In 2001, two hijacked planes were flown into the Twin Towers, an attack in which 3,000 Americans died. The killers were:
1. A black-ops unit of Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum
2. Constitutionalists committed to preserving federalism
3. Members of the Boy Scouts of America
4. Muslim fanatics lusting for infidel blood and dedicated to jihad
In 2002, the “Beltway sniper” and his confederate killed 10 people in the Washington, D.C.-area. The deadly duo were:
1. On their way to a VFW convention
2. Rehearsing with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir
3. Sidewalk counselors at abortion clinics
4. Muslim fanatics lusting for infidel blood and dedicated to jihad
In 2007, five terrorists plotted to massacre soldiers at Ft. Dix. The would-be assassins were:
1. Disgruntled U.S. servicemen returning from Iraq
2. Students at Liberty University
3. Aides to Congressman Tom Tancredo
4. Muslim fanatics lusting for infidel blood and dedicated to jihad
Just a bit of background to help you appreciate the absurdity of The Department of Homeland Security’s Report – “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment,” released on April 7.
DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano has done herself proud.
While her president is busy closing Guantanamo, touting the joys of Islam, promising that the U.S. will never again defend itself without the express permission of the cheese-eaters and beer-drinkers, and considering prosecuting Bush officials who put national security ahead of an obsession with the civil rights of terrorists, Napolitano, who prefers the expression “man-made disasters” (like Obama’s budget?) to terrorism, has discerned the real clear and present danger – “threats from white supremacist and violent anti-government groups” recruiting individuals susceptible to their appeals.
The 9-page report, about as well-documented as Michelle Obama’s senior thesis, refers to unidentified “white supremacist and violent anti-government groups.” While admitting that their activities “have been largely rhetorical and have not indicated plans to carry out violent attacks,” the report claims they are a potent threat to the republic.
The document alleges that these rightwing extremists are busy expanding their base, and – if you fall into one or more of the following groups – you are ripe for recruitment. They include Americans who are:
• Concerned about “the possible passage of new restrictions on firearms”
• Returning military veterans “facing significant challenges reintegrating” into their community
• Malcontents who “focus on the economy (and) the perceived loss of U.S. jobs in manufacturing and construction sectors and home foreclosures”
• Critical of “free trade agreements”
• Prone to “reject federal authority in favor of state or local authority” – otherwise known as Constitutionalists
• Convinced that “illegal immigrants” are “taking away American jobs”
• Involved with conservative causes such as opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage.
Napolitano’s agency has cast a broad net.
A majority of Americans fall into one or more of these categories, including: the 73% who believe there’s a constitutional right to private gun ownership – among them 5 Supreme Court justices (2008, USA Today/Gallup Poll); the 61% who say they are fearful that they or a friend will lose their jobs due to U.S. companies moving overseas (2004 Gallup Poll); and the 79% who want to send the U.S. military to the border to stem the tide of illegal immigrants (2009, Rasmussen Poll).
Still, Napolitano’s Barney Fife Office of Intelligence and Analysis insists the real threat to America comes not from the 35 jihadist training camps in the U.S. (according to a 2006 Department of Justice report) and terrorism-friendly American mosques, but from Christians, conservatives, gun owners and right-to-lifers.
BTW, we’ve heard this before.
Angry lesbian Rosie O’Donnell on ABC’s “The View” (October 2006), in response to a co-host’s comments that militant Islam poses a threat to free people everywhere, exploded, “Just a minute. Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America, where we have separation of Church and State.” Wall Builders, which documents America’s Christian heritage, is probably plotting to hijack a plane as you read these words.
On MSNBC’s “Countdown” with Keith Olbermann, Janeane Garofalo called the million or so Americans who attended Tax Day Tea Parties – “a bunch of tea-bagging rednecks.” Garofalo: “This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up.” (The DHS report also warned that right-wing extremism would be fueled by resentment over “the historical election of an African American president and the prospect of policy changes.”) The media somehow missed all of the crosses burning at April 15 protests.
On MSNBC’s Hardball in March, host Christopher Matthews fretted that Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Governor Kathleen Sebelius (who once threw a private party for a late-term abortionist), would end up the target of “the terrorism of anti-abortion people.” He later explained that he was talking about “verbal terrorism,” and not implying that the Family Research Council was going to plant a car-bomb in the Governor’s vehicle.
It was a year ago this month that candidate Barack Obama told well-heeled Democrats at a San Francisco fundraiser (where normalcy is always suspect) that those in small-town America hard hit by job loss are “bitter” and “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment.”
While the future president didn’t say exactly what these gun-toting bigots, religious fundamentalists and xenophobes would do to relieve their bitterness, Commissar of Homeland Security Napolitano has made it clear – join the army of racists and “right-wing extremists” plotting unspecified acts of violence against unnamed individuals.
This focus on potential terrorism from the ranks of law-abiding gun owners and immigration-control advocates is like looking for a serial killer at a librarians’ convention.
While Obama’s Inspector Clouseau is investigating the right, over the past 200 years, most political violence has come from the left – starting with the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, where enemies of the regime were guillotined, drowned, shot and clubbed to death. The Vendee was the model for the Holocaust.
From the Bolshevik Revolution to Stalin to Mao to the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge, communists claimed at least 100 million victims in the 20th Century.
Properly understood, Nazism (National Socialism) was a phenomenon of the left which rejected tradition and Judeo-Christian morality in favor of a racial utopia. Instead of the “proletariat,” its collective centered on race. Until Hitler sent his armies rolling across the Russian border, the browns were comfortably allied with the reds.
In America, the left has had a near-monopoly on political violence, starting with anarchist bombings following World War I. John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, who spent two years in the Soviet Union. Two other U.S. Presidents were assassinated by anarchists.
The urban riots that swept America in the 1960s were spurred on by radicals like H. Rap Brown. (“If America don’t come around, we gonna burn it down!”)
I can still recall student “protests” in Boston in the late ‘60s. Believe it or not, it wasn’t College Republicans who were throwing nail-studded golf balls at the cops. From violence at the 1969 Democratic National Convention to the Weathermen’s “Days of Rage” to the Weather Underground, which staged bank robberies and bombed government buildings, Sixties violence was almost exclusively a leftist phenomenon.
The Unibomber was an environmentalist whack-job – Al Gore with a chemistry set. Those who stormed the streets of Minneapolis-St Paul during the 2008 GOP convention weren’t demanding lower taxes and less government, ditto the Luddites who rioted at the 1999 WTO meeting in Seattle. Earth First and the Animal Liberation Front are unlikely to be mistaken for the RNC.
It’s leftist students who harass and, in some cases, physically assault conservative speakers on college campuses. The violence in the aftermath of passage of California’s Proposition 8, including attacks on churches, was the product of rage by homosexual militants.
Of course, there’s always Timothy McVeigh, leftwing poster boy for rightwing violence – who, with his partner Terry McNichols, caused 168 deaths in the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City’s Murrah Federal Building.
In defending her department’s Fearless Fosdick report, Napolitano confessed that the topic of right-wing extremism “struck a nerve (with her) as someone personally involved in the Timothy McVeigh prosecution.”
Federal investigators never followed the trail of evidence linking jihadists to the “man-made disaster.”
Nichols made several trips to the Philippines before the Oklahoma City bombing. According to Clinton counter-terrorism official Richard Clarke, McVeigh’s accomplice was in Cebu at the same time as Ramzi Yousef, convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
In “Against All Enemies” (page 127), Clarke writes: “We know that Nichols’ bombs did not work before his Philippine stay and were deadly when he returned.”
Why is the left so susceptible to political violence and the right largely immune from it?
We believe in the Constitution and the rule of law, they don’t – ergo their efforts to save Bill Clinton, who was manifestly guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors (including perjury). They believe in flaunting the law when it suits their purposes – witness their support for illegal immigration and an activist judiciary that’s usurped legislative powers.
We believe in the First Amendment, they don’t. Besides the campus storm troopers practicing Marcusian repressive tolerance, Obama and his minions are determined to put conservative talk radio out of business by resurrecting the Fairness Doctrine.
We love America, including the principles on which it was conceived: liberty, tolerance, equality before the law and Judeo-Christian morality. For them, the Founding Fathers are dead, white males and the American saga consists of slavery, Wounded Knee, lynchings, the exploitation of immigrant labor, World War II internment of Japanese-Americans, McCarthyism, and “imperialism.”
We’re patriots.
From Jane Fonda (doing propaganda broadcasts for the North Vietnamese) to Sean Penn posing with a Saddam Hussein poster in Baghdad, to Ward Churchill and Columbia Professor Nicholas De Genova, they make common cause with America’s enemies. De Genova told a 2001 teach-in: “The only real heroes are those who find ways to defeat the U.S. military. Personally, I would like to see a million Mogadishus” — in reference to the 1993 deaths of U.S. servicemen in Somalia.
We believe in the God who commanded “Thou shalt not kill.” They believe in evolutionary theory, moral relativism, embryonic stem–cell research, Jack Kevorkian and the judge who ordered the starvation/dehydration death of Terri Schiavo. .
In Turkey, the Community Organizer in Chief pledged “The United States is not and never will be at war with Islam” (never mind that Islam is at war with us) – perhaps that’s because his administration was planning to declare war on the American people – including veterans, gun owners and pro-lifers.
The DHS report on “right-wing extremism” is just the opening salvo. Sent to police and sheriff’s departments across the land, it calls for domestic spying to gather information on this vast right-wing conspiracy – an operation euphemistically described as Washington “working with its state and local partners over the next several months” to collect information on extremist activity (everything to the right of John McCain).
Speaking of terrorist profiling, imagine a hypothetical individual whose friends included an unrepentant ex-terrorist who took pride in the fact that the group he led blew things up in an attempt to overthrow the government.
Imagine further that this fringe figure was associated with a group involved in organized law-breaking, including harassment and trespass.
Then imagine that this “person of interest” spent 19 years listening to a lunatic pastor who preached anti-Americanism, made excuses for the 9/11 terrorists and concocted off-the-wall conspiracy theories (the government created the AIDS virus as an act of genocide). He also attended or helped organize the 1995 DC rally of another notorious demagogue who has consorted with America’s enemies and has called for our annihilation.
Our hypothetical terrorist-in-waiting isn’t the head of the Aryan Nation, the Michigan Militia or the Ku Klux Klan. He is President Barack Hussein Obama, whose extremist ties include Bill Ayers, ACORN, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright and Louis Farrakhan. If you see the president acting suspiciously in an airport, please advise law-enforcement personnel.
Instead of smearing Obama’s opponents, perhaps the Department of Homeland Security should be staking out the White House.
Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer who is now a political/communications consultant. He also maintains his own website, DonFeder.com.
