Ugh
Click to viewhttp://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2009/11/conservative-christian-group-calls-no-more-muslims-military
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/11/10/robertson-muslim-fascist/
Words really fail. I can honestly only articulate two responces to what is, by and large, shock and rage at this response, that even the insane right of this country would jump immediately to the conculsion that we should be barring a religious group from certain fields based on the incident at Fort Hood. It's clear to me that the right wing really has embraced an extreme nativism and chilling racism that truly does verge on the fascism they so often accuse others of lately.
First: let's just clarify one thing about the "terrorism" word. See, it actually has a pretty specific legal meaning, and its overuse has generally contributed to the worst sensationalism and hysteria over the brown people in this country. So, to be clear: attacks against military? Technically not terrorism. Terrorist attacks are those carried out against civilian populations. This is an important definition for us as Americans, because there's no way to expand our definition of "terrorism" such that things like the USS Cole bombing would count, but our own drone attacks against Taliban leaders who are not presently engaged in combat activites, for example, would. To say nothing of the secret assassination squads we almost mobilized. And, even if we chose to ignore the legal definition at work, and use the colloquial overuse of the term, it's very clear from what's emerged thus far that Mjr. Hasan was acting alone, and that his story is far too complex to make it appropriate to jump to the prejudicial and sensationalistic "Terrorism!" conclusion. Criticism of Obama or the liberal establishment for being circumspect about use of the terrorism label is, to whit, dearly misplaced, and reveals a great deal more about the agenda of those critics than anyone else.
Second:
Where are the Southern Baptist suicide bombers? The Methodist market bombings?
Oh, they're right here:
James Wenneker von Brunn
Scott Roeder
Jim D. Adkisson
Richard Poplawski
Eric Rudolph
Leo Felton and Erica Chase
Timothy McVeigh
Robert Matthews, Bruce Pierce, David Lane
Paul Jennings Hill
Michael Bray
Michael F. Griffin
James Charles Kopp
John Salvi"
Shelley Shannon
And those are just the ones I could find with 15 minutes of research that a)committed unequivocal terrorist acts b) during my lifetime and c)were Americans acting on a American soil. For some reason, there's even more reticence when it comes to referring to the murder of doctors while in pursuit of a political end as terrorism. Obviously, if one counted things like all that terrorism by the IRA, that number would go up considerably. But really, the take-away lesson here is, why haven't we barred Christians from the military? Honestly, until we come up with some ironclad way of telling the Christians who are going to go out and commit terrorist acts from the ones that aren't...