I've been away for a while, and so had to catch up with the news. This bit from the Christian Science Monitor caught my eye:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0728/dailyUpdate.html
posted July 28, 2005 at 11:30 a.m.
"The 'rebranding' of the war on terror.
Bush team wants to play down military aspects and focus on the 'struggle against violent extremism.'"
I guess "war" isn't perceived as the best word now, almost 4 years after 9/11. I also guess changing the name won't brings our troops back home any sooner.
The "struggle against violent extremism" could be waged right here.
More below the fold.
The "struggle against violent extremism" could be waged right here.
Titles of essays from the Reverend Fred Phelps site, www.godhatesfags.com:
- Thank God for the bombing of London's subway
- Thank God for IEDs!
- All nations must immediately outlaw sodomy (homosexuality) & impose the death penalty!
Pleasant little "love thy neighbor" type, huh? He also pickets the funerals of service- men and -women killed in the line of duty.
From the Christian Gallery regarding Paul Hill, a former Presbyterian minister and leader in Defensive Action who killed a physician and bodyguard outside an abortion clinic; he wounded the wife of the bodyguard. He was sentenced to both life imprisonment on federal charges, and execution on state charges:
http://www.christiangallery.com/hill.html
"His public witness was one which not only testified to the humanity of the child in the womb and to the love we are to show our neighbors who are being delivered over to death; his deed was also a testimony against the judges of the land. Yes, he displayed the judgment which every prosecutor and judge ought to be processing against all the childkillers from Atlantic to Pacific."
"the love we are to show our neighbors"? Assassination as an expression of God's love for us all? That's a novel defense: "Jesus made me do it".
From a CBS News story about Eric Rudolph, bomber of the Atlanta Olympics and abortion clinics:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005...ain709777.shtml
"Eric Rudolph declared Monday that abortion must be fought with 'deadly force' as a judge sentenced him to life in prison for setting off a remote-controlled bomb at an abortion clinic that killed an off-duty police officer and maimed a nurse."
This self-righteous cop-killer managed to avoid the death penalty. I guess the prosecutors weren't so Christian as to want him executed.
The FBI collects numbers on hate crimes. There's a lot of those. . . look for "Uniform Crime Statistics".
Anyone with patience and Google can come up with lengthy lists of American "violent extremism" people and organizations. If this phrase isn't just a focus-grouped PR tactic by the Bush admininstration then it seems to me we have ample opportunity to deal with extremists right here at home.
Of course, if the real idea is to divert attention from how poorly we're doing in the "war on global terrorism", then it's merely another lie in a long series that began with "Weapons of Mass Destruction" and "Saddam Has Links to Al-Quaeda", and then moved onto "The Insurgency Is In Its Death Throes".
Either way, it's only a re-branding, not a re-thinking. We're still a long way from leaving Iraq a peaceful democracy, and we still haven't found Osama. Four years after the Twin Towers, the best Bush and Company seem able to come up with is another marketing campaign to stir up support for a military conquest that so far has cost over 1,800 American lives, and maybe 25,000 Iraqi civilian deaths.
Talk about "violent extremism".