Those who rail against the Muslim world as a seat terror perpetrated by ‘Muslim fundamentalists’ not only besmirch nearly a billion observant, mainstream members of one of the three great monotheistic faiths, along with Judaism and Christianity; but adherents to that stereotype also seem to be blind to the Christian fundamentalist extremists among us.
If we needed a reminder of the virulent and violent hate that rages on the far right among extreme fundamentalist Christians, we surely received it June 10, when James W. von Brunn murdered Holocaust Museum guard Stephen G. Johns in a fit of anti-Semitic rage in Washington. [ Washington Post ]
Soon evidence appeared of von Brunn’s extremist writings. His website, MSNBC reported, "promotes a treatise, 'Tob Shebbe Goyim Harog!' -- which he says translates as 'Kill the Best Gentiles!' The book blames Jews, Marxists and ‘Negroes,’ among others, for ‘the millions of Aryan crosses covering the world’s battlefields.’" [ MSNBC ]
Are these the words of a Christian fundamentalist, using that faith to justify terror?
The pattern repeated itself the previous week, when Dr. George Tiller was assassinated by Scott Roeder, who "was once a subscriber and occasional contributor to a newsletter, Prayer and Action News, said Dave Leach, an anti-abortion activist from Des Moines who runs the newsletter. Mr. Leach said that he had met Mr. Roeder once, and that Mr. Roeder had described similar views to his own on abortion." [ New York Times ]
In Iowa, Dan Holman, of the anti-abortion group Missionaries to the Preborn, told CNN that Tiller's death was something to "cheer."
"I was cheered by it, because I knew he wouldn't be killing any more babies," Holman said. Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry told reporters in Washington that Tiller's killing was "wrong, period," ... But he added, "George Tiller was a mass murderer and horrifically, he reaped what he sowed.
"We in the pro-life movement must not shrink from our duty to continue to use words that are highly charged, to do protests, to expose these abortionists, and to work for the complete eradication of child killing," he said. [ CNN.com ]
Extremist rhetoric, laced with calls for morality, and tied in twisted thinking to a religion.
Anti-abortion activists Anthony Leake and Regina Dinwiddie told CNN that Roeder had strong beliefs. "He was a confessing Christian," Leake said. "He always had his Bible, which wasn't uncommon. He professed faith in Jesus Christ." [ CNN.com ]
Remember when the Oklahoma City bombing occurred? Alerts spread like wildfire that a search was on for a Middle Eastern man who had boarded a plane in Chicago. [ New York Times ]
Within hours we learned that the perpetrator of the horrific mass murder was a young white man, Timothy McVeigh; a former member of the U.S. armed forces who espoused the anti-government hatred common to Aryan-like ‘militias,’ some meetings of which he and co-conspirator Terry Nichols reportedly attended. [ BBC ]
According to the Anti-Defamation League, survivalists and white supremacists formed a variety of paramilitary groups in the 1980s, "ranging from the Christian Patriot-Defense League to the Texas Emergency Reserve to the White Patriot Party. ... ‘The Federal government and the press is [sic] fighting a war against independent thinking Christian patriots,’ Christian Identity adherent and militia supporter George Eaton wrote in 1993." [ Anti-Defamation League ]
Christian fundamentalist extremism? Terrorists?
Remember Eric Rudolph, whose bombs brought death and destruction to abortion clinics in Alabama and Georgia and at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta?
Not only was he a raised by his mother in the Christian Identity movement [ Anti-Defamation League ] -– " a movement of many extremely conservative Christian churches and religious organizations, extreme right wing political groups and survival groups." [ Religious Tolerance.org ] -- but he apparently had plenty of fellow ‘believers’ who aided him while on the run in the North Carolina mountains, where he eluded the police and FBI from 1998 to 2003. According to Time magazine, "Rudolph had become a local folk hero. In Murphy (N.C.), T shirts and coffee mugs appeared saying RUN RUDOLPH, RUN." [ Time ]
These acts of terror tied to religion here in the U.S. are often linked to hatred of African-Americans and Jews. In the early parts of the last century, a movement that preached hate and terror tied to a sick form of Christian identity -- the Ku Klux Klan -- had almost become mainstream in many parts of the nation.
At its peak in 1925, the KKK claimed 4 million members. These white-robed supporters of lynching terror, marched, chests emblazoned with bright red crosses, along Washington’s cherished Pennsylvania Avenue on August 18 of that year. [ Britannica.com ] They marched again in 1926. [ Learner.org ] And once more in 1928. [ IndyWeek.com ]
Judge for yourself: to which religion do terrorists adhere, and does that religion inspire hate so intense that a practitioner would commit an act of terror? Do you honestly believe Islam propagates terrorists? If so, might Christianity also create terrorists, given the history of terror carried out by Christian extreme fundamentalists in the United States of America?
Stereotyping is a dangerous practice. Stereotyping a faith, based on the actions of a group of deluded believers in that faith, is simply wrong.