Our Morning Roundup: Domestic Terrorism
Good morning, City Desk readers, and welcome to another edition of the morning roundup before Freedom Friday's morning roundup. Jule Banville is researching how flamingos can bear to stand on one leg for so long, and yours truly is attempting to fill her tiny shoes.
Silverdocs, white supremacists and more, after the jump.
- It was only a matter of time: Already the Washington Post, not 24 hours after James W. von Brunn opened fire at the Holocaust Museum, is asking "Did that controversial Homeland Security report on right-wing extremists (pdf) get it right?" And sayeth the POLITICO's Josh Gerstein: "Civil rights activists say a string of recent attacks blamed on right-wing extremists, including Wednesday’s shooting at the Holocaust Museum, show that conservative critics were too quick to fault the Department of Homeland Security over an April report warning about the potential for such violence." My take: Conservatives, arguably, have a right to be upset. More often than not, "conservative" is a simpler term for a whole range of peaceful ideas and political decisions. Anti-semitism and racism are no more apart of conservatism than eco-terrorism is apart of liberalism. In testimony from 2002, the FBI divided domestic terrorism into three categories: right-wing, left-wing, and special interest. From the FBI: "Special interest terrorism differs from traditional right-wing and left-wing terrorism in that extremist special interest groups seek to resolve specific issues, rather than effect widespread political change. Special interest extremists continue to conduct acts of politically motivated violence to force segments of society, including the general public, to change attitudes about issues considered important to their causes. These groups occupy the extreme fringes of animal rights, pro-life, environmental, anti-nuclear, and other movements." So before the DHS decided to sow discord–and before the MSM decided to latch onto this new report for dear life–the FBI already had a term that managed to address the problem without associating conservatism with terrorism: "special interest extremists." Michael Moynihan has some smart (brief) thoughts on yesterday's shooting.
- Silverdocs is here. From Tricia Olszewski's (brutal) opening salvo: "Unlike last year’s fest—which boasted, among many other excellent films, future Oscar-winner Man on Wire and nominee Encounters at the End of the World—few of the 122 documentaries being presented are home runs. We were able to review nearly 70 of this year’s entries, approximately double our coverage of 2008’s festival, and not many of them left us drooling. An inevitability of numbers, or is Silverdocs stumbling? With celebrities gracing the screenings and the world watching, it likely doesn’t matter." As for me, I got pretty choked up watching The Way We Get By, and can't think of a single friend, family member, or down-on-his-luck stranger to whom I would not recommend this film. Absolutely stunning. And Trimpin opened my eyes to the joys of reviewing movies while high sound installations.
9:15 am
All of us in Maine are proud that The Way We Get By was produced in our state, by a native son of our state, and about the incredible seniors who have turned their lives over to greet the troops, at all hours of the day and night, as they come and go to and from Iraq and Afghanistan.
11:58 am
I think the Conservative movement needs to take some responsibility for this. Domestic terrorists and the Right have a long and cozy relationship. The notion that Von Brunn, Roeder, McVeigh, Rudolph and their ilk were "lone" wolves is complete bull. It's an open conspiracy on behalf of the Right to incite hate and violence through disinformation, alarmist jingoism and outright lies. They have their own propaganda broadcasts. They have their own newspapers. They have their own agendas and codewords. They even have a lobbying group that works to make sure they are well armed (hello, NRA). Right-wing terrorists are winning the victories that Right-wing politicians can't - closing abortion clinics, attacking minorities, and infringing on human rights and civil liberties. Their vision for this country mirrors the current state of Iran, and their current methods for achieving that is domestic terrorism. It's time mainstream Americans recognized how dangerour the Right and its followers are.
3:21 pm
The DHS has also published reports on domestic terror from the left http://fas.org/irp/eprint/leftwing.pdf so the right shouldn't feel it was focused on for political reasons. Right or left, the terms are meaningless when it comes to violent extremists. Is an anarchist right or left? They come from both political viewpoints. Eco-anarchy and green-anarchy are common terms. I think the government should remove the left/right label when talking about domestic terrorism.