Watching coverage of the shootings at the Colorado Springs, Co. Planned Parenthood this weekend, which followed the shooting of five Black Lives Matter protesters in Minneapolis, the beating of another BLM protestor by Trump supporters, the recently FBI foiled white supremacist plot to bomb black churches, investigation of facebook threats against Muslims , and an Irving, Texas Mosque being stalked and publicly outed by armed protesters there’s seems to be one thing the news media is afraid to say. Something that in the wake of the attack in Paris by mostly homegrown members of Daesh was on everyone’s lips, dripping with contempt as the spat out the word. But not so much now.
When an officer was shot and killed not long ago in Texas we heard this kind of outraged response from the local Sheriff.
"Our system of justice absolutely requires a law enforcement presence to protect our communities, so at any point where the rhetoric ramps up to the point where calculated cold-blooded assassination of police officers happen(s). This rhetoric has gotten out of control," Hickman said.
Right, at “any point”. “Out of control”. Check.
Yet somehow now when another Officer is killed long with two civilians in Colorado it seems they can hardly bring themselves to say that magic word or special phrase in this, or in any of these certain cases that they couldn't stop talking about in reference to Paris.
“Terrorism” just doesn’t seem to come to mind when the killers are white and/or Christian.
As my own diary just last Sunday essentially predicted this kind of radical right-wing — and largely Christian inspired — violence was not only around the corner, but was already taking place and by all indications is likely to escalate. We now see that predictable pattern of escalating terror and violence continues with the report of statements made by Robert Lewis Dear the accused Planned Parenthood shooter.
Dear told police “no more baby parts,” when taken into custody Friday night, an unnamed police source told NBC News. The statement seems linked to heavily-edited videos released earlier this year by the Center for Medical Progress, which were made to appear that the women’s healthcare provider was harvesting fetus body parts for sale.
Three people, including two civilians and a University of Colorado police officer, were killed in the hours-long shooting spree and stand-off. Nine people, including four police officers, were wounded.
Police have yet to publicly confirm any motive by Dear, or whether or not he suffers from the perennial mass shooting excuse of "mental illness” but there is the possibility that both elements, right-wing politics and emotional instability may be present at the same time. Or something else entirely. One option doesn’t necessarily preclude all others.
There is certainly much more to be potentially learned about Dear but one of his neighbors in North Carolina Colorado has contributed this tidbit.
“There’s like six of us that hang out around here, and we all talk to each other, and we all hang out and help each other - but they’re not a part of our clique,” said Post, whose first interaction with Dear was when his dogs got loose and Dear handed him anti-Obama flyers.
“We went and got the dogs, but we didn’t introduce names or anything like that,” he said. “(Dear) handed us some Obama flyers and said, ‘If you have time, look at this later.’ ‘Take a look at these,’ and that was about it,” he said
“Anti-Obama flyers.” Sure, not conclusive, but then there’s this.
NBC News reports Vicki Cowart, President and CEO of Planned Parenthood Rocky Mountains released a statement blaming the violence on “hateful rhetoric.”
“Today, we are learning that eyewitnesses confirm that the man who will be charged with the tragic and senseless shooting that resulted in the deaths of three people and injuries to nine others at Planned Parenthood’s health center in Colorado Springs was motivated by opposition to safe and legal abortion,” Cowart’s statement said. “This is an appalling act of violence targeting access to health care and terrorizing skilled and dedicated health care professionals.”
So they seem to think the link between those highly edited video and this shooting. And what about those videos again?
Of all the phony attacks and accusations made against Planned Parenthood by a new generation of anti-choice activists like James O’ Keefe and Lila Grace Rose, the videos created by former O’Keefe confederate David Daleiden raised the bar — or lowered it depending on how you view them — on over the top accusations intended to fire up Christian conservatives and embolden lawmakers to do all they can to destroy Planned Parenthood.
Images of fetal tissue being sorted by technicians became a bloody flag to be waved by people who seem to believe that medical procedures are magically free of the kind of things most people are unfamiliar with because they’re not medical professionals who are undeterred by the sight of body fluids, viscera and bones. Those who view abortions as a repellent medical procedure became even more appalled by seeing people who deal with such matters on a daily basis act like … people who deal with such matters on a daily basis.
Where Daleiden really hit one out of the park for the anti-choice crowd was when he accused Planned Parenthood of selling fetal tissue — used by researchers looking for cures for Alzheimer’s, among other things — and making a profit off of it.
The primary lie promoted by those videos was that Planned Parenthood was forcibly harvesting fetal body parts for medical research when in fact those body parts are donated and Planned Parenthood was formerly charging only for their storage. Five States have investigated these allegations and have discovered nothing.
But a little more than a month later, the five states that have completed their investigations have come to the same conclusion: Planned Parenthood acted strictly within the boundaries of the law. The initial hysteria has receded.
"Planned Parenthood follows all laws and has very high medical standards, and that's what all of these investigations are finding," the group's executive vice president, Dawn Laguens, said in a statement released Friday. "All of this stems from totally false claims made by anti-abortion extremists who are pursuing a political agenda that is far outside the mainstream."
Hmm… let’s review, shall we?
“so any point where the rhetoric ramps up to the point [of] calculated cold-blooded assassination”
I’m seriously thinking we’re quite a bit past that point, but certainly not at all in the way Sheriff Hickman intended, and that what just happened in Colorado is only the tip of a very large Titanic-berg on the horizon.
Sunday, Nov 29, 2015 · 11:23:13 PM +00:00 · Frank Vyan Walton
Despite the abject denials of Fiorina and Huckabee there are a great many direct and indirect links between anti-abortionist and terrorism, centering particularly to the Army of God.
Over the past six months, I have interviewed Scott Roeder more than a dozen times, met several times with his supporters at the Sedgwick County Courthouse in Wichita where he was tried and convicted, and permissibly recorded numerous three-way telephone conversations Roeder had me place to his friends. Using information gleaned from these sources, along with public records, it is possible to piece together the close, long-term and ongoing relationship between Roeder and other anti-abortion extremists who advocate murder and violent attacks on abortion providers.
…
In very short order, he affiliated himself with Christian anti-government groups such as the Freemen militia and eventually became involved with antiabortion groups such as Operation Rescue and the Army of God, the latter of which openly sanctions the use of violence to stop abortion.
Roeder told me that his first act as an anti-abortion activist was to protest outside a Kansas City women’s clinic. Among the protestors he came to know were Anthony Leake, a proponent of the “justifiable homicide” of abortion doctors, and Eugene Frye, the owner of a Kansas City construction company who, together with another antiabortion activist, had been arrested in 1990 for attempting to reinsert the feeding tube of a Missouri woman in a persistent vegetative state. Frye had also been arrested for blockading abortion clinics during the 1991 Summer of Mercy in Wichita, which was organized by Operation Rescue.
Here’s a diagram.