We dismiss it at our peril
Published 4:48 pm Tuesday, March 30, 2010
It’s a sad irony that in this post-9/11, full-body-scanner world, the biggest threat to American life and liberty is posed by our fellow Americans.
While the threat from foreign terrorists remains real — as illustrated by the would-be Christmas day bomber — it was a home-grown terrorist who flew his plane into the IRS building in Austin, Texas, last month, killing himself and Vernon Hunter, 68, a husband and father and Vietnam veteran who worked as an IRS employee for more than two decades.
(Sometimes the threats do overlap, as in the case of Colleen LaRose, aka Jihad Jane, the American woman accused of conspiring with fighters overseas and pledging to commit murder in the name of a Muslim holy war.)
When people took to the Web to praise the Austin pilot, Andrew Joseph Stack III, 53, for his act of domestic terrorism, saying they could relate to his rantings against the government, big business and particularly the tax system, it was tempting, but wrong, to simply dismiss them as the lunatic fringe. As residents of Snohomish County know, and those in other places where militia groups have sprung up over the years: Ignore these people at your peril. Combining the vast bully pulpit of the Internet and anti-government sentiment has created a perfect mix of hysteria and hate that has emboldened militia types.
Over the weekend, the FBI arrested nine people in Michigan, Indiana and Ohio who are accused of plotting to kill police officers as a way to instigate a violent uprising against the government.
Members had been undergoing paramilitary training, including learning how to make bombs, since 2008, according to an indictment.
Like the Shoe Bomber, the Christmas Bomber, Jihad Jane, Andrew Joseph Stack III, James W. von Brunn (the late white supremacist who left a note saying the Jews had created Obama before he shot and killed Stephen Tyrone Johns, 39, a guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum), the two white supremacists convicted of threatening to kill Obama during a planned “killing spree” of some 100 African-Americans, and the three Colorado men who had a similar plan — this latest militia group is indeed the lunatic fringe. Which is why we can’t just dismiss them. Crazy talks turns into crazy action.
While crazy free speech is 100 percent legitimate, it just might encourage others to act out. That’s the price of a free society.
A free society, however, also requires a loud refrain from the rest of us that killing fellow citizens is not how we express outrage, or affect change.
