"Culture of Life" - U R doing it rong

I cannot express in words the rage I am feeling right now.

Not just at the fact that Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider specializing in medically-necessary late-term abortions, was murdered today. No, I am enraged by those who whipped the hatred against this man, who did everything to encourage his murder, are suddenly pretending they had nothing to do with it.

Damn them all. All of them.

Randall Terry. SUZANNE. The Catholic Church. The Army of God.

All of them. They are the same. They purposely espouse violent rhetoric, celebrate past perpetrators of violence and murderers as 'martyrs' and try to create false moral equivalence with a medial procedure and a planned premeditated murder of a 67-year-old professional, father and grandfather.

These people purposely took a procedure that represents less that 0.02 % of abortions, and always for medical reasons, and turned it into their main argument, that somehow Dr. Tiller was killing healthy, viable 8-month-old babies en mass simply because their mother's decided they just didn't want to be pregnant any more.

Lies! Disgusting, purposeful lies by authoritarians bent on controlling everyone's body and mind.

And they have the gall to call themselves "Pro-Life" and "The Culture of Life".

Let see how these people respect human life, shall we?

Pro-choice victims of anti-abortion murder:

Dr. David Gunn
Dr. John Britton
James Barrett, clinic escort
Shannon Lowney, clinic receptionist
Lee Ann Nichols, clinic receptionist
Robert Sanderson, off-duty police officer working as a security guard
Dr. Barnett Slepian
Dr. George Tiller

Add to the list above the numerous bombings, harassment campaigns, vandalism, threats of death and other crimes in which no one was actually hurt. Add to that the actual assaults committed by "Operation Rescue" folks at clinics across the US.

Anti-choice victims of pro-choice murder:

.

The "best" the anti-choice side can come up with of pro-choice violence is the assault on Ed Snell, who was attacked by the boyfriend of a woman he was verbally harassing from the top of his car...a woman who was not seeking an abortion. Add to that, pushes and shoves in self-defense.

Who, then respects life?

People who say this? -

I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you... I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good... Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a biblical duty, we are called by God, to conquer this country. We don't want equal time. We don't want pluralism." Randall Terry, head of Operation Rescue, August 16, 1993.[emphasis mine]

"When I, or people like me, are running the country, you’d better flee, because we will find you, we will try you and we will execute you." Randall Terry, head of Operation Rescue 1995.[emphasis mine]

There is no debate with these people. There is no reasoning with them. These are the people that wish to grant legal personhood to a blastocyte, but will not do anything to help already born children in poverty. These are the people that condemn women who make the choice of abortion, yet refuse to condone birth control to prevent unwanted pregnancy in the first place.

These are the people who wish to control every woman's body, to force them to give birth to unwanted children so they can then abondon both, as a punishment for having sex and or not believing in their religious teaching.

And they are prepared to kill to make it happen.

These people are the enemies of freedom and liberty. They are pure fascists and totalitarians through and through. And they will stop at nothing to enslave us all (and make no mistake, if a person cannot control or own their own body, they are in fact, a slave).

It is time for self-defense. I am in favour of abortion doctors, clinic staff and volunteers either being armed themselves for self-protection or to hire armed security guards and personell. The government obviously can't or, as evidenced in Kansas, won't help. Sometimes it is agents of the state doing the harrassing.

Am I over reacting?

But Warren Hern, a Colorado physician and close friend of Tiller's who said he is now "the only doctor in the world" who performs very late-term abortions, said Tiller's death was predictable.

"I think it's the inevitable consequence of more than 35 years of constant anti-abortion terrorism, harassment and violence. George is the fifth American doctor to be assassinated. I get messages from these people saying, 'Don't bother wearing a bulletproof vest, we're going for a head shot.' "[emphasis mine]

No, I don't think so.

I will not let my daughter be enslaved in a world run by these thugs.

I'm pro-choice and I shoot back.

Pants pissing update (June 5 2009):

From Patrick Ross in the comments -

"And by the way, Mike, you very much can be a co-defendant in a libel suit if you really want to.

If that's what you want, I suggest you repeat the latter of these two statements again."

So there you have it. When he can't instigate me by his over the top behaviour and misrepresentation of what I said, he threatens me with legal action. Will his next comment complain tha I am trying to stiffle his free speech? Only time will tell...

Perspective

Lets say one day, I grab a young man off the streets, take him home and lock him in my basement. This young man isn't very nice and has been hanging out with the wrong crowd, so he isn't very well liked.

Lets say that I keep him locked up in a 6' x 6' room in my basement, with a metal cot and an open toilet. I wake him at the same time everyday, tell him when he can sleep, when he can eat, when he can talk.

Lets say further, that on an unpredictable yet regular basis, I steal what little possession I allow him to keep, I beat him, I feed him second rate food and occasionally rape him.

Lets say further that I allow my friends to come over and rape him when they feel like it too - in exchange for cigarettes, booze or food.

Lets say that I do this for 10 years or so, every day, before he finally escapes.

What would you think of me?

More importantly, what would you think of what happened to this young man. Is his treatment horrible? Evil? Will he be remotely normal after he escapes?

Would you say he had it easy?


Of course not.

I'm curious then why so many people seem to think doing this exact thing to Momin Khawaja is "letting him off easy". Check out the comments over at CBC.

I make no apologies for Khawaja, nor do I remotely support what he did or his causes. In reality, he has already been in prison for 5 years and was sentenced to an additional 10 1/2 years for his actions. That means his sentence is 15 1/2 years for his crimes and he will not be eligible for parole for another 5 years, until he has served 10 years. That doesn't mean he'll get it, it means simply he'll be allowed to ask, to simply make the request.

For a guy who never actually harmed another individual or caused any damage, that seems like a pretty stiff and fair sentence.

And yet everywhere you turn, you see so-called "law and order" conservative blowhards claiming that the sentence is "too light" or demonstrates that our legal system is too lenient.

Bullshit.

Those commenters at CBC and at the Blogging Tories are the same people that wouldn't last 45 minutes in a stuck elevator, yet claim 15 1/2 years in a prison is "too light". These are the same people that wouldn't last 10 days inside the dark pits of anal rape we call Milhaven or Kingston, yet seem to think 10 years in such a place is "getting off with a slap on the wrist".

Perhaps Khawaja should have gotten more - I don't know, because like right-wing howler monkeys, I haven't read the actual decision yet. But that doesn't mean 10+ years in one of our federal pens isn't punishment. It is. It is 10 years of horror and anyone who thinks differently is an utter and complete, ignorant fool whose mean-spirited and uninformed opinions should be utterly ignored or viciously ridiculed.

Khawaja got what he deserved and trust me, he'll pay for his crimes, whether the vengeful right thinks he will or not.

Just because the bigots and authoritarians could exact their sadistic revenge, doesn't mean justice hasn't been served. It has.

Terrorism doesn't work

Via Bruce Schneier, we find a convincing and well researched paper by Max Abrahms that concludes, based in empirical evidence, that terrorism does not work.

This study analyzes the political plights of twenty-eight terrorist groups -- the complete list of foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) as designated by the U.S. Department of State since 2001. The data yield two unexpected findings. First, the groups accomplished their forty-two policy objectives only 7 percent of the time. Second, although the groups achieved certain types of policy objectives more than others, the key variable for terrorist success was a tactical one: target selection. Groups whose attacks on civilian targets outnumbered attacks on military targets systematically failed to achieve their policy objectives, regardless of their nature.[emphasis mine]

Unlike people like Alan Dershowitz who think terrorism is successful, Abrahms actually studied the outcomes of many (often obscure) terrorist groups actions. His conclusions are based on empirical evidence rather than anecdotal observation. Even then, it is borne out by the observations of various documentary research into the subject, such as "The Power of Nightmares".

So why do I bring this up? The recent foiled attacks on London and the botched attack on Glasgow Airport are being touted, once again, by the fearmongers and reactionaries on the right as some kind of warning sign of culture war or proof that Islam itself is evil.

The reality is something completely different. These guys, like the "Toronto 17" or the JFK plotters, are ineffectual idiots. This so-called plot has been rightly ridiculed from many quarters, espcially by those who know security. This plot had no chance of doing anything beyond lighting cars on fire. Indeed, as Schneier points out, it actually shows that security at Glasgow worked perfectly - no one was hurt, there was no panic and the damage was contained.

It also lays bare the myth that suicide bombings are inherent to Islam, as the bombers fit the typical profile of a suicide bomber - middle class men, social isolated and politically motivated to fight against an occupation. This was the case in Japan at the end of WWII, in Sri Lanka in the 80's onward (modern suicide bombing was invented by the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist liberation movement) and Chechnya in the 90s.

In the UK case, we have two Iraqi doctors, socially isolated, quite possibly with dead or injured relatives in Iraq lashing out against a government and a people they see as the occupiers of their homeland. This does not excuse their behaviour or their intent, but merely explains it better than "teh muslims r evil" that we hear from the right-wing authoritarian set. Indeed, director of the Chicago Project on suicide terrorism and expert on suicide bombers Robert Pape (who ironically to the above, thinks terrorism is successful) points out that:

95% of suicide attacks in recent times have the same specific strategic goal: to cause an occupying state to withdraw forces from a disputed territory. Pape found the targeted countries were ones were the government was democratic and public opinion played a role in determining policy. Other characteristics Pape found were a difference in religion between the attackers.^[5] and the occupiers and grassroots support for the attacks.^[6] Characteristics thought to be correlated to suicide bombing and bombers Pape found lacking included: Islam, especially the influence of Salafi Islam;^[7] brutality and cruelty of the occupiers;^[8] competition among militant groups; and poverty, immaturity, poor education, past history of suicide attempts, or social maladjustment of the attackers.^[9]

This is the motivation for attacks by Palestinians, Chechens and even the 9-11 hijackers - one of Bin Laden's demands prior to 9-11 was the removal of US forces from Saudi Arabia.

In other words, terrorism is ineffective, especially attacks on ciovilians, and our response to it must take that into consideration. Most of the so-called terrorists themselves since 9-11 have been politically motivated idiots, not the maniacal religious zealots that the right would have us believe. Almost to a person and a plot, these people were incapable of carrying out the plots they intended.

Suicide bombing and terrorism are not an indictment of Islam, but an indictment of military occupations.

Remember that when someone tries to tell you this is a problem with Islam, or that we need to give up more of our rights to stay safe. They are lying to you. They are being useful idiots of the terrorists themselves.

More important, though, the London bombs failed because open, Western societies are more resilient than we sometimes think they are.