Letters to the Editor
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several points
1. Winning hearts and minds by losing them. The Malkin-sphere is oblivious to how their hate/fear-mongering can serve to radicalize our Islamic population (think a long the lines of the Nation of Islam or Black Panthers in the civil rights era)
2. 60% of Muslims don't believe Arabs were responsible for the attacks. I do find this disturbing. I would again cite the above point ... the fear-mongering combined with Bush's disastrous foreign policy and lawless treatment of "suspected terrorists" and overall secrecy ... has possibly contributed to this kind of reality denial, similar to how the "truth" movement believes that 9/11 was an inside job.
3. Read Al Gore's new book. He is so on point - Glenn cites the figures of Americans with ridiculous beliefs, a while ago I linked to a chart that showed how belief in global warming (a scientific fact) divided almost 50/50 along partisan lines in the country - what we've seen happen is, as Gore titles his book, an Assault on Reason. A large percentage of americans have been cut off from reality. As Gore writes:
American democracy is now in danger—not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what is called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas.
It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hoped it was an aberration when polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on Sept. 11. More than five years later, however, nearly half of the American public still believes Saddam was connected to the attack.
An excerpt of the book can be read here
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1622015,00.html
4. Someone (prunes?) linked to a post from Orcinus about a planned attack on Mexican immmigrants. There's also this
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/04/other-kind-of-terror.html
An arrest was made yesterday in the apparent attempt by an Austin man to terrorize a local abortion clinic by placing a nearly complete bomb outside its doors earlier this week:
A 27-year-old Austin man was arrested on Friday and charged with placing an unexploded bomb containing some 2,000 nails outside an abortion clinic in the state's capital.
The explosive device also included a propane tank and a mechanism "akin to a rocket," Austin Police Commander David Carter said.
The device was discovered on Wednesday in the parking lot of the Austin Women's Health Center, police said.
The Texas Joint Terrorism Task Force -- made up of federal, state and local law enforcement authorities -- arrested Paul Ross Evans, who authorities said was on parole for an unspecified crime.
As both zuzu at Feministe and Carpetbagger Report observe, this is a fairly clear-cut case of domestic terrorism. (Kevins Woodshed also has more.) Certainly, it's well within the tradition of domestic terrorists like Eric Rudolph and various other abortion-clinic bombers.
But remember: The FBI has de-emphasized right-wing extremist crimes and displaced them with an emphasis on "eco terror" as far as its chief domestic-terror concern. This is in no small part because this administration is being run by people who don't consider bombings and arson against abortion clinics to be terrorism.
Because of the nature of the ordnance in this case, there's also a connection to previous acts of terrorism -- particularly the appearance both of a nail bomb and a propane-tank device. These same devices appeared in the case of the Spokane-based "Phineas Priests" who believed they were avengers of God who engaged in a six-month spree of bank robberies in the Northwest in 1996.
Neiwert goes on to speculate that the bombing attempt might have had something to do with a recent speech by Tony Perkins of the Family Researc Council which referenced the Phineas biblical myth.
He also links to another case where some militia men were caught building bombs.