It's scarey to think that many Believers claim that we are made in the image of God. Can there really be a Madman at the helm of this Ship of Fools?
Curious Carl (made in the image of Clyde and Elsie Jarvis)
----- Original Message -----
The September 11 suicide attack you probably never heard about ...
By Joshua Holland
AlterNet,Posted on October 28, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/joshua/43616/
If you read the right-wing blogs -and you have my sincere sympathies if you
do -you know that the hot story right now is about a free speech trial in
france. The war-bloggers are a little too excited about it to give their
readers much background, but it's got something to do with the controversial
killing of Mohammed al Durah by Israeli troops (or not) that helped fire up
the second Palestinian Intifada. (I'd link you to the Wikipedia article but,
unsurprisingly, its neutrality and factual accuracy are
disputed -Israel/Palestine is the ultimate postmodern conflict, where no
reality exists that's not subject to passionate dispute.)
A common theme of the right's breathless "coverage" of the trial -also
unsurprisingly -is that the biased liberal media just refuse to give this
momentous case the attention that it's due, despite the obvious fact that
libel trials in France have long been a source of fascination for Americans
of all backgrounds. Beer, boobs, football, French libel trials -you know
what captures our imaginations.
Anyway, while waiting to do a radio show (which you can catch tomorrow, if
you care to, at 5:30, 7:30 and 9:30 pm EST on one of these fine stations),
there was a story that I had completely missed about an attempted suicide
bombing right here in the US of A on September 11 of all days.
What? I had missed an attempted suicide bombing -a car bombing, no less -on
September 11? How could that have happened?
It became clear after a little Googling turned up this piece by Jennifer
Pozner, which appeared almost a month after the fact in New York Newsday:
On Sept. 11, 2006, the fifth anniversary of the terror attacks that
devastated our nation, a man crashed his car into a building in Davenport,
Iowa, hoping to blow it up and kill himself in the fire.
No national newspaper, magazine or network newscast reported this attempted
suicide bombing, though an AP wire story was available. Cable news (save for
MSNBC's Keith Olbermann) was silent about this latest act of terrorism in
America.
Had the criminal, David McMenemy, been Arab or Muslim, this would have been
headline news for weeks. But since his target was the Edgerton Women's
Health Center, rather than, say, a bank or a police station, media have not
called this terrorism even after three decades of extreme violence by
anti-abortion fanatics, mostly fundamentalist Christians who believe they're
fighting a holy war. [...]
Abortion providers and activists received 77 letters threatening anthrax
attacks before 9/11, yet the media never considered anthrax threats as
terrorism until after 9/11, when such letters were delivered to journalists'
offices and members of Congress.
After 9/11, Planned Parenthood and other abortion rights groups received 554
envelopes containing white powder and messages like, "You have been exposed
to anthrax.... We are going to kill all of you." They were signed by the
Army of God, a group that hosts Scripture-filled Web pages for
"Anti-Abortion Heroes of the Faith ... "
If a Muslim sneezes and someone catches cold, the war-blogs scream
"bioterrorism!" Again and again they've embarrassed themselves by jumping
all over a story about some asshole that committed some act of violence and
declaring him part of their imagined, all-consuming Islamic Jihad against
the West, only to have to retract when the facts came in. But this attempted
suicide bombing ... well, it apparently wasn't nearly as interesting as,
say, your typical French libel trial -even, apparently, to the liberal
media.
That, despite the fact that it's part of a pattern; as Pozner adds, there
also hasn't been much attention in the media to the fact that "just last
year, nearly one in five abortion clinics experienced gunfire, arson,
bombings, chemical attacks, assaults, stalking, death threats and blockades,
according to the 2005 National Clinic Violence Survey."
Anyway, it turns out that McMenemy was as stupid as he is crazy; the clinic
he attacked doesn't offer abortions, it "provides mostly low-income patients
with pap smears, ob-gyn care, testing for sexually transmitted diseases,
birth control, and nutrition and immunization programs for women and
children."
PS: I remember when this was peaking in the 1990s. As Wikipedia reminds us:
Rev. Paul Jennings Hill ... was an excommunicated Presbyterian minister and
anti-abortion activist connected to the Army of God, who was convicted of
the murders of Dr. John Britton and his armed escort James Barrett outside a
Pensacola, Florida abortion clinic on July 29, 1994. In addition to the two
murders, Hill wounded June Barrett, the wife of James Barrett. Sentenced to
the death penalty under Florida law, Hill died by lethal injection, making
him the first person to be executed in the U.S. for killing a physician who
provided abortions.
In a statement before his execution, Hill said that he felt no remorse for
his actions, and that he expected "a great reward in Heaven."
At the time of Hill's death, Michael F. Griffin was serving a life sentence
for the murder of a doctor, David Gunn, in Pensacola, Florida in 1993, and
James Kopp was in prison for the killing of a physician in Buffalo, New
York. Eric Rudolph was awaiting trial for a 1998 bombing that killed a
police officer at an Alabama abortion clinic. John Salvi had committed
suicide in prison two years after killing two receptionists at a clinic in
1994 in Massachusetts.
Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to
The Gadflyer
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