“Stubborn unbelievers.” Heretics. Worthy of nothing but swift death as ordered by God himself in his commandments, and later ratified by Deuteronomy.
There was, naturally, far more to Hitler and his particular brand of genocidal fanaticism, including his interest in mysticism and the occult. But even with all that he was also a Christian, and driven at least in part by his Christian beliefs to murder Jews.
Why yes, yes we can.
And there was, but of course, Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple, which was— wait for it— a Christian church.
One particular person who visited the Koresh compound during the heated standoff was a person by the name of Timothy McVeigh, who was asked about his religions beliefs by Time Magazine.
Time: Are you religious?
McVeigh: I was raised Catholic. I was confirmed Catholic (received the sacrament of confirmation). Through my military years, I sort of lost touch with the religion. I never really picked it up, however I do maintain core beliefs.
Time: Do you believe in God?
McVeigh: I do believe in a God, yes. But that's as far as I want to discuss. If I get too detailed on some things that are personal like that, it gives people an easier way [to] alienate themselves from me and that's all they are looking for now.
So that’s not so bad, or is it? Wait. It gets worse.
All this text discloses is that McVeigh distanced himself from Catholicism, not Christianity. It also reveals that he did not want to discuss his faith further because he knew most people would find it repulsive. What was repulsive about his faith? Was he an atheist? No. Was he a secular humanist? No. What do we know about his beliefs at the time he was bombing the federal building in Oklahoma City?
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There is no doubt that Timothy McVeigh was deeply influenced by the Christian Identity movement. Christian Identity is a profoundly racist and theocratic form of faith that developed in the late 1970s and spread like wildfire through rural communities throughout the U.S. in the 1980s
The primary source book for the ideals and perspective of the Christian Identity movement (which includes many neo-Nazis, the Aryan Nations, and skinheads) is The Turner Diaries, a fictional field journal of a soldier in a religious race war over the soul and control of America written by physicist William Pierce.
In his book "The Turner Diaries," Pierce describes a race war that ends with the government being overthrown. Pierce's book is more than fiction. The most radical elements of the movement view it as a vision or blueprint for action. In the book, the Aryan forces used armored car robberies to finance their revolution. In real life, the radical white supremacist group called "the Order" used Pierce's book as a guide to their armored car robberies in the Northwest. In the book, the revolutionaries blow up a federal building as part of their antigovernment war. In real life, the bombing of Oklahoma City's Alfred P. Murrah Building was almost a carbon copy of the incident in Pierce's book. As I mentioned earlier, Timothy McVeigh had photocopies of a portion of "The Turner Diaries" with him when he was arrested. McVeigh also sold copies of the book at gun shows around the country.
The real-life group “The Order” was also responsible for the murder of Denver talk radio show host Alan Berg in 1985, which also mirrored events in The Turner Diaries.
Berg, who was Jewish, gained a strong following in the early 1980s through talk radio, where his liberal views mixed with a combative and often-abrasive on-air persona. In the process, he ignited the anger of The Order, a splinter group of the Aryan Nation white nationalist movement that financed its anti-government goals with bank robberies in the Pacific Northwest — before turning to murder.
Berg's slaying marked an early signpost on the road that led to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala.
But Oklahoma City was not the final bombing perpetrated by a radical Christian terrorist. There was also the Atlanta Olympic Park bombing in 1996, which was not perpetrated by Richard Jewell. It was, in fact, committed by Eric Robert Rudolph.
MURPHY, N.C. - JUNE 2: Bombing suspect Eric Robert Rudolph (C) is escorted from the Cherokee County Jail for a hearing in federal court in Asheville June 2, 2003 in Murphy, North Carolina. Rudolph, who was captured Saturday after being on the run for five years, is a suspect in at least three bombings, including the July 27, 1996 Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta that killed one and injured 111.
Some of Rudolph’s other bombings targets were women’s clinics and gay nightclubs.
July 27, 1996 - A bomb explodes in Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park during the Summer Olympic Games, killing two.
January 16, 1997 - A bomb explodes at an abortion clinic in the Atlanta suburb of Sandy Springs. An hour later, a second bomb explodes. Seven people are injured.
February 21, 1997 - A bomb explodes at the Otherside Lounge, a lesbian nightclub in northeast Atlanta, injuring four people. Investigators find a second bomb before it detonates.
January 29, 1998 - A bomb hidden beneath a shrub explodes at the New Woman All Women Clinic in Birmingham, Alabama. Robert Sanderson, a 35-year-old off-duty police officer working as a security guard, is killed. Nurse Emily Lyons, 41, is seriously injured. In his 2005 plea agreement, Rudolph admits that he detonated the bomb by remote control, as Sanderson stood over it.
For these acts, Rudolph has joined the ranks of other radical Christian killers under the moniker the “Army of God,” a death cult operated by Rev. Donald Spitz. The group’s ranks include Paul Hill who killed an Dr. John Britton and his bodyguard with a shotgun in Pensacola, Florida; Michael Griffin, who murdered Dr. David Gunn also in Pensacola; James Kopp who murdered Dr. Barnett Slepian; Shelly Shannon who admits to having firebombed women’s health clinics and attempted to kill Dr. George Tiller; and Scott Roeder, who ultimately did kill Dr. TIller. They’ve also accomplished their aims with hoax anthrax letters and even published a manual on how to disrupt and bomb clinics.
Initially, the manual details a number ways of disrupting or closing down abortion clinics, from gluing locks and using butyric acid against clinic machinery to arson and bomb threats. The manual contains instructions for making bombs using plastic explosive. A November 1992 epilogue will advocate the murder of abortion providers. [Kushner, 2003, pp. 38]
Interview - The manual also contains an undated interview with an anonymous member of the Army of God, conducted by an interviewer calling himself “The Mad Gluer.” The person interviewed says their intention is to “[d]rive the abortion industry underground with or without the sanction of government law,” using “[e]xplosives, predominantly.” The bombs are designed to “disarm… the murder weapons,” referring to the equipment used in abortion clinics, and “by disarming the persons perpetrating the crimes by removing their hands, or at least their thumbs below the second digit.”
One of the more recent and incredible international mass murders prior to last week’s attack on Paris was the killing of dozens in Norway by just one man, Anders Breivik, in 2011.
(RNS) The mass murders in Oslo have raised a host of agonizing questions, but few have such an ancient lineage and contemporary resonance as whether Anders Behring Breivik, the right-wing extremist behind the attacks that killed 76 Norwegians last Friday (July 22), is a Christian.
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"At the age of 15 I chose to be baptised [sic] and confirmed in the Norwegian State Church," the 32-year-old Breivik wrote. "I consider myself to be 100 percent Christian."
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"Regarding my personal relationship with God, I guess I'm not an excessively religious man," he writes. "I am first and foremost a man of logic. However, I am a supporter of a monocultural Christian Europe."
Breivik fashions himself a "cultural Christian" and a modern-day crusader in a resurrected order of the medieval Knights Templar, riding out to do battle against squishy "multiculturalism" and the onslaught of "Islamization" -- and to suffer the glory of Christian martyrdom in the process.
And thus we come full circle with a self-styled “Christian Crusader” who fancies himself as a modern day member of the Knights Templar. He also was very much influenced by American right-wing anti-Islamists such as Frank Gaffney and Pamela Geller.
In fact some strains of the fundamentalist Christian movement have even found their way into our military,
including the Air Force Academy in Colorado.
There's a fundamentalist ministry operating at the Air Force Academy called Cadets For Christ. This ministry is part of the "shepherding" movement, using cult-like tactics by which the cadets recruited by ministry leaders Don and Anna Warrick are separated from their families and anything else that might interfere with their brainwashing. In the shepherding movement, the female is the "sheep" and the male is the "shepherd," and a woman's sole purpose in life is to be a good wife and mother, subordinating herself to her male shepherd.
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) has been contacted by a number of parents of Academy cadets who have fallen prey to the Warricks' ministry, and one of these families has been brave enough to go public with their story.
You can also see murderous radical Christian ties to groups like Erik Prince’s mercenary group Blackwater/XE.
A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company’s owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,” and that Prince’s companies “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.”
In their testimony, both men also allege that Blackwater was smuggling weapons into Iraq. One of the men alleges that Prince turned a profit by transporting “illegal” or “unlawful” weapons into the country on Prince’s private planes. They also charge that Prince and other Blackwater executives destroyed incriminating videos, emails and other documents and have intentionally deceived the US State Department and other federal agencies. The identities of the two individuals were sealed out of concerns for their safety.
Now some might argue that none of this matters or compares to modern Muslim terrorists. That either these examples are archaic, as the crusades and inquisition were centuries ago, or are only examples of minor lone, or semi-lone megalomaniacs— Hitler, Manson, Jones, Koresh, Brievik, Prince— who fail to compare to the sustained acts of violence, terror and mass murder by thousands of religiously motivated combatants that we’ve seen from Islamic groups for decades including the PLO, Hezbollah, al Qaeda and now Da’esh.
Those people would be wrong. There are two primary examples that prove this.
First there is the 30-year ethnic conflict via bombings, out-and-out terrorism and the use of paramilitary forces against civilians that resulted in 3,500 casualties and over 47,000 injured during the Troubles of Northern Ireland, a sustained conflict between the British loyalist and predominantly Protestant majority and the nationalist and independence-seeking Catholic minority.
"The Troubles" refers to the most recent installment of violence over three decades (1969–1997) between Irish nationalists (mainly self-identified as Irish and/or Roman Catholic) and unionists (mainly self-identified as British and/or Protestant). The term "the Troubles" was previously used to refer to the Irish revolutionary period; it was adopted to refer to the escalating violence in Northern Ireland after 1969. The conflict was the result of discrimination against the Irish nationalist/Catholic minority by the unionist/Protestant majority and the question of Northern Ireland's status within the United Kingdom. The violence was characterized by the armed campaigns of Irish republican and Ulster loyalist paramilitary groups and British state security forces—the British Army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). It thus became the focus for the longest major campaign in the history of the British Army.
So there’s that, and then there was also the Bosnian War which began in 1992 as a three-way ethnic conflict between the Bosnian Croats, who were predominantly Roman Catholic, the Bosnian Serbs who were predominantly Eastern Orthodox Christians, and the Bosniaks who were predominantly Muslim. During this conflict there were acts of genocide, mass murder, ethnic cleansing, systemic mass rape, and forced migration that resulted in 38,000 civilian casualties, 57,000 soldiers killed, and more than 2.6 million refugees and displaced persons. This conflict was typified by tragedies such as the Siege of Sarajevo.
After Bosnia and Herzegovina had declared independence from Yugoslavia, the Bosnian Serbs—whose strategic goal was to create a new Bosnian Serb state of Republika Srpska (RS) that would include parts of Bosnian territor—encircled Sarajevo with a siege force of 13,000[6][7] stationed in the surrounding hills. From there they assaulted the city with artillery, tanks and small arms From 2 May 1992, the Serbs blockaded the city. The Bosnian government defence forces (ARBiH) inside the besieged city, numbering some 70,000 troops, were poorly equipped and unable to break the siege.
A total of 13,952 people were killed during the siege, including 5,434 civilians. The ARBiH suffered 6,137 fatalities, while Bosnian Serb military casualties numbered 2,241 soldiers killed. The 1991 census indicates that before the siege the city and its surrounding areas had a population of 525,980. There are estimates that prior to the siege the population in the city proper was 435,000. The current estimates of the number of persons living in Sarajevo range from between 300,000 to 380,000.
And the Srebrenica massacre which resulted in the murder of over 8,000 Muslims.
The Srebrenica massacre, also known as the Srebrenica genocide killing, in July 1995, of more than 8,000 Muslim Bosniaks, mainly men and boys, in and around the town of Srebrenica during the Bosnian War.
The killings were perpetrated by units of the Bosnian Serb Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) under the command of General Ratko Mladić. The Scorpions, a paramilitary unit from Serbia, who had been part of the Serbian Interior Ministry until 1991, also participated in the massacre. In April 1993, the United Nations declared the besieged enclave of Srebrenica—in the Drina Valley of northeastern Bosnia—a "safe area" under UN protection. However, in July 1995, UNPROFOR's 370 Dutchbat soldiers in Srebrenica failed to prevent the town's capture by the VRS — and the subsequent massacre.
Here we have Serbian Orthodox [Christian] forces murdering 8,000 civilian Muslim men and boys simply because they’re Muslim, so it’s really difficult to argue that a predominantly Christian paramilitary force has never, or not even fairly recently, committed exactly the kind of mass murdering atrocities we’ve recently seen committed by the jihadi fighters of Da’esh in Syria or Iraq. Or Paris.
They have. Actually, they’ve done far, far worse.
This list is nowhere near comprehensive or complete, but just for the sake of discussion it needed to be said and laid out clearly that there are many vile acts that have been and continue to be perpetrated by those who claim to be doing so because of their deep religious conviction. Yes, even Christians. This is not to say that every Christian is responsible for the horrific actions of every other madman Christian—they are not. However, neither is every Muslim responsible for each crime committed by another person who happens to claim to be “Muslim.”
There are many radical extremist terrorist cults to go around. It’s not even close to true that all “terrorists are Islamic.” They. just. aren’t. Homegrown domestic terrorists, including some radical Christians, have killed more people in the U.S. since September 11, 2001 than foreign Islam-claiming terrorists.
WASHINGTON — In the 14 years since Al Qaeda carried out attacks on New York and the Pentagon, extremists have regularly executed smaller lethal assaults in the United States, explaining their motives in online manifestoes[sic] or social media rants.
But the breakdown of extremist ideologies behind those attacks may come as a surprise. Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims: 48 have been killed by extremists who are not Muslim, including the recent mass killing in Charleston, S.C., compared with 26 by self-proclaimed jihadists, according to a
count by New America, a Washington research center.
Today, even in the wake of the Paris and Beirut attacks, the fact is that far more Americans are at risk of killing each other by the thousands than are in danger of being attacked by a pack of punk cowards like Da’esh.
Admitting 10,000 Syrian refugees is not likely to change that. Putting up “No Syrians Allowed” signs all around states like Alabama, or admitting “Christians Only” not only wouldn’t work, it’s a direct and clear violation of the 14th Amendment’s clause to provide “equal protection under the law,” and it’s also a direct violation of the Civil Rights Act prohibition on discrimination based on national origin and religion.
The fact is that Christians never get asked to apologize for Breivik, or for murders of abortion doctors, the bombings of gay nightclubs, the bombing of the Olympics, the bombing in Oklahoma City, the children who burned to death in Mt. Carmel with David Koresh, for the murder of Alan Berg, for those who died in Jonestown, for inspiring Helter Skelter and the Tate/Labianca killings, for the Holocaust, for the terrorism of the KKK and Jim Crow,[almost never] for slavery, for the genocide of natives across the Americas, for the Inquisition, for the Crusades, the siege of Sarajevo or the Srebrenica massacre. We see most of these as the acts of war, of individuals. Of madmen.
No one usually bothers to link any of these acts to the belief system of the rank-and-file Christian faithful. No one thinks the little old lady sitting her pew reading Corinthians is responsible for any of that. No one thinks they need to answer for it, or justify it. Nor should we feel those who pray fives times a day in the direction of Mecca are somehow responsible for the acts of madmen, either.
We can see, clearly, that these religious wars and atrocities were performed by individuals and not by the faith itself, despite the specific commandments and Mosaic laws calling for the killing of “unbelievers.” Just like the proclamations not to eat shellfish or rabbit, and not to plant mixed seeds or wear mixed fabrics, hardly anyone ever follows those particular religious laws and feels they are “abominations worthy of death”.
They are archaic and irrelevant to the day-to-day lives of most Christians.
The same is true with the day-to-day lives of billions of Muslims. People can and will interpret the writings of any faith in all sorts of various ways, some beneficial and benevolent as we’ve seen with persons such as Mother Teresa, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Bishop Desmond Tutu, and Malala Yousafzai. Or not, as we see with much of the above. We can see that these acts were the result of choices made by genocidal murderers, and not the symptom of a genocidal mad-dog religion.
We can see that, right?
Right?
The truth is that all three primary Abrahamic religions are based on the same core foundation and the same writings, and all three worship the same God. The last people they should be killing for being “unbelievers,” as is called for in all three strains of the faith although I’m not advocating they kill anyone at all, are each other.
One last thing, just two weeks ago the FBI broke up a terrorist plot on U.S. soil. It was a plan to blow up black churches and synagogues in order to incite a race war by two suspects who at first glance do not appear to be Muslim. So there’s also that to think about.