Letters to the Editor
ondelette
Published Letters: 1955 Editor's Choice: 19
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Eric Rudolph (cont)
[Read the article: The Islamic enemy within]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Now, bombing innocent civilians at the Olympics as a means of opposing abortion is clearly terrorism. Yet, there were many Christians who actually helped him evade arrest.
ScienceGuy
The whole deal with Eric Rudolph unfolded with a certain surreal quality to it from the night of the Ray Charles concert (we left early and missed the bombing). Three days later, people who normally wouldn't be caught dead at a Santana concert turned out to show that a terrorist couldn't scare "The City Too Busy to Hate". He also bombed a gay bar, and, as far as I could tell, invented the technique, later used in Iraq, of setting off one bomb, waiting for the crowd to collect, and then setting off another one. Then he bombed two abortion clinics, one in Georgia, one in Alabama, and it was the Alabama one that got him identified. Previous to that, he was only "The Army of God" (except for during Tom Brokaw's positive id of Richard Jewell). That would be Jaish-e-Allah for you anti-jihadi types.
He hung out in the Carolinas for several years, and was only caught because a rookie cop, who didn't know he was supposed to look the other way, fingered him to the feds. Darn right some Christians helped him. So did some anti-gummint anti-tax militia types in the hills who thought he should be helped because they hated "G-men". And he had a good sized following.
A Following!
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Then they can test the breast cancer theory
[Read the article: No more periods, period]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There is a longstanding theory that the reason that women who have children have lower incidence of breast cancer than women who have no children is because they have fewer lifetime periods. They ought to be able to test that theory, given that they have decided it would be safe to do so.
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Hard to know where to start
[Read the article: Large number of Americans favor violent attacks against civilians]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There is so much that gets lost when people fail to make distinctions. On soap box: Let's start with this:
A 1999 poll of Americans found that 34% answered "yes" -- 34% -- when asked: "If you honestly assessed yourself, would you say that you have at least some racist feelings?"
Who the f**k put that polling question together? Racist feelings? One has prejudiced feelings, feelings of hatred, but racism is institutionalized prejudice against one or more races, and therefore racist feelings isn't precise or accurate. Polls, of all things, shouldn't be based on "You know what I meant."
Next off, asking people if violence against civilians is sometimes justified is asking for as many confounding variables in the poll as you can possibly get. Bombing campaigns, terrorist attacks, high speed police chases, shooting serial killers -- these are all "violence against civilians". There is a reason that the U.N. study group tasked to come up with a definition of terrorism that could be used for formulating international law worked hard for five years and came up empty handed.
And finally, as unpopular as it may seem to mention this, groups like Muslims, Hispanics, Asians are not races. Were we to just go back and revisit the protected classes and categories in our civil rights laws, and make the proper distinctions between religious, ethnic, racial, and language speaking groups, and iron out what we really want to say, many of our most difficult problems would become clearer (though not necessarily easier to solve). For instance, it might become clearer that the people fleeing hardship in Mexico across our southern border might just be the victims of Mexican racism -- white city people descended from the Spanish institutionalizing their disdain for brown village people descended from the Aztecs and Maya. But since we persist in calling all speakers of Spanish Hispanic, and treating it like a racial category, we can't make that distinction, and we can't tell Mexico to stop it's silent ethnic cleansing.
We're never going to solve our relational problems with the Islamic world, either. Lumping everybody together, whether it is to decry prejudice against Muslims or to profile, harass and hate them, prevents us from decisions that need to be made on a case by case basis.
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Really?
[Read the article: Large number of Americans favor violent attacks against civilians]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Interestingly, Glenn's mitigating examples of Abortion clinic bombers and immigration militants, doesn't address religion. Just single issues. they may be related in some ways, but one does not cause the other in the same direct way Imams direct fatwas.
I fail to see the distinction between an abortion clinic bomber like Eric Rudolph, blowing up abortion clinics and gay bars in the name of the "Army of God", and any other religious fanatic or terrorist. I also fail to see the distinction between Christian groups that post lists of abortion clinic doctors they advocate taking out and radical imams who issue lethal fatwas.
I do, however, see a huge distinction between a friend of mine who keeps halal, attends mosque on Fridays, and fasts on Ramzan, and the people committing honor killings in Pakistan. He would never do such a thing. His wife has a career, he wants his daughter to get into a good school, he works 60 hours a week, he dislikes terrorism just as much as you do.
But he also didn't particularly like the way he was treated in 2001-2, doesn't like it that the government keeps an open file on him, and believes he understands what drove bin Laden and the 9/11 terrorists, although he doesn't agree with them, and he doesn't believe we've been told the whole story on that and many other terrorist incidents.
So what does that make him?
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dhimmi?
[Read the article: Large number of Americans favor violent attacks against civilians]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I don't get it. I thought dhimmis were infidels -- you know, the people that Jahangir on whom imposed the jizzia. They're explicitly fair game according to the takfiri. In what way do the expressions dhimmi and dhimmitude connote some kind of sympathizer?
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Confuse I do when talk I backwards...
[Read the article: Large number of Americans favor violent attacks against civilians]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I meant "the people on whom Jahangir imposed the jizzia." Tongue put in backwards today.