Recession and Obama election fueling right-wing extremism

by Elsewhere 11 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  Elsewhere

  For years I have thought the Far Right-Wing Fundamentalist Christians were no different than the Fundamentalist Islamists. The only reason the Fundie Christians are not killing people and blowing things up is because they haven't been pushed over that edge yet.... yet.

  -Else

  http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE53D5SH20090414?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&rpc=22&sp=true

  Recession fueling right-wing extremism, U.S. says

  Tue Apr 14, 2009 3:56pm EDT

  By Jane Sutton

  MIAMI (Reuters) - Right-wing extremists in the United States are gaining new recruits by exploiting fears about the economy and the election of the first black U.S. president, the Department of Homeland Security warned in a report to law enforcement officials.

  The April 7 report, which Reuters and other news media obtained on Tuesday, said such fears were driving a resurgence in "recruitment and radicalization activity" by white supremacist groups, antigovernment extremists and militia movements. It did not identify any by name.

  DHS had no specific information about pending violence and said threats had so far been "largely rhetorical."

  But it warned that home foreclosures, unemployment and other consequences of the economic recession "could create a fertile recruiting environment for right-wing extremists."

  "To the extent that these factors persist, right-wing extremism is likely to grow in strength," DHS said.

  The report warned that military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with combat skills could be recruitment targets, especially those having trouble finding jobs or fitting back into civilian society.

  The department "is concerned that right-wing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to boost their violent capabilities," the report said.

  DHS spokeswoman Sara Kuban said on Tuesday the report was one of an ongoing series of threat assessments aimed at "a greater understanding of violent radicalization in the U.S."

  A similar assessment of left-wing radicals completed in January was distributed to federal, state and local police agencies at that time.

  "These assessments are done all the time, this is nothing unusual," Kuban said.

  The Department of Homeland Security was formed in response to the September 11 attacks of 2001 and has focused largely on threats from Islamist extremists.

  The report said domestic right-wing terrorist groups grew during the economic recession of the early 1990s but subsided as the economy improved.

  Government scrutiny disrupted violent plots following the April 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City by Army veteran Timothy McVeigh which killed 168 people.

  LONE WOLVES

  "Despite similarities to the climate of the 1990s, the threat posed by lone wolves and small terrorist cells is more pronounced than in past years," the report said.

  The Internet has made it easier to locate specific targets, communicate with like-minded people and find information on bombs and weapons, it said.

  Extremist groups are preying on fears that President Barack Obama, the first African American U.S. president, would restrict gun ownership, boost immigration and expand social programs for minorities, the report said.

  It said such groups were also exploiting anti-Semitic sentiment with accusations that "a cabal of Jewish financial elites" had conspired to collapse the economy.

  "This trend is likely to accelerate if the economy is perceived to worsen," the report said.

  (Additional reporting by Randall Mikkelsen in Washington, editing by Jim Loney and Alan Elsner)
• 

  WTWizard

  There is a slight difference between Christian and Muslim fundamentalists. Muslims are ordered to execute the changes themselves, while Christians are urged to wait on God to do it for them. That doesn't mean that Christians are not capable of violence, or that they are not going to have elected officials pass laws that impose Christianity on the masses. That has already happened--and it plunged the world into the First Dark Ages.

  I think Christianity is more likely to get into the political scene to the point where the Unholy Bible (which lies) is legally "the truth". If science unmistakably proves the Bible wrong, despite repeated trials, they still have to go by the Unholy Bible or risk getting imprisoned or killed. That, plus the economy and Osama Obama trying to stoke inflation and enslave everyone, is the recipe for the Second Dark Ages.
• 

  beksbks

  WT, the only flaw in your logic (other than the fact that you are blind to what economic enslavement really is), is that fundamentalist xtians believe it is a god mandated imperative, that they control YOUR life and mine.
• 

  BizzyBee

  Ultimately, these far-right fundamentalists might have to be neutralized. For example, misguided tea-baggers would be arrested and tried for treason, their kneecaps busted with lead pipes or just shot through the temple on the spot. Perhaps their brain pans pummelled into mush til they finally admit their duplicity through their broken, bloodied teeth. I hope not.
• 

  BurnTheShips

  Michelle has it covered pretty well, but I looked at the DHS report on “right-wing extremism” myself, and it’s every bit as bad as she says, and as Roger Hedgecock and the Liberty Papers first reported. The DHS fails to provide any specifics at all, preferring instead to smear half of the country or more as kooks for criticizing the government’s handling of the economy. As Eli Lake reports, the DHS has all but declared war on federalism, which used to be the founding concept of our republic:

  The Department of Homeland Security is warning law enforcement officials about a rise in “rightwing extremist activity,” saying the economic recession, the election of America’s first black president and the return of a few disgruntled war veterans could swell the ranks of white-power militias.

  A footnote attached to the report by the Homeland Security Office of Intelligence and Analysis defines “rightwing extremism in the United States” as including not just racist or hate groups, but also groups that reject federal authority in favor of state or local authority.

  “It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single-issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration,” the warning says.

  The first question we should ask is whether the DHS is reacting to any specific threats at all? Er … no (emphasis mine):

  The DHS/Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) has no specific information that domestic rightwing* terrorists are currently planning acts of violence, but rightwing extremists may be gaining new recruits by playing on their fears about several emergent issues.

  This gets repeated over and over again during the report. They have no threat information. In fact, the report can’t even say definitively whether “extremists” are gaining “new recruits”. In order to find that, they’d have to identify the actual groups, note the recruiting patterns, and determine whether in fact they’re gaining recruits or losing members. Bottom line: DHS has no actual data. They’re pulling threats out of their collective arse and publishing them without any supporting research whatsoever.

  DHS acts as though white-supremacist groups and militias believing in Zionist world conspiracies stopped existing between 2000 and 2008. Of course they didn’t; George Bush’s strong support for Israel fed those nutcase groups for eight years. Are those groups growing in the last five months, after what DHS assumes is the trigger for all this hate — the election of Barack Obama? They provide absolutely no evidence at all for it, and in fact repeat over and over again that they don’t have that data in a hail of May Bes.

  So what’s triggered their antennae?

  The current economic and political climate has some similarities to the 1990s when rightwing extremism experienced a resurgence fueled largely by an economic recession, criticism about the outsourcing of jobs, and the perceived threat to U.S. power and sovereignty by other foreign powers.

  In the first place, the “outsourcing of jobs” outrage didn’t get stoked by the Right. That outrage got fed by the Democrats in the last two elections, and it’s a feature of the same anti-globalization loons of the hard Left that continually disrupt G-20 summits as they violently did in London. Barack Obama himself stoked a fair share of it during the presidential campaign with his NAFTA Dance.

  And should we not have some concern about the economic recession, debate about trade policy, and insist on maintaining American power and sovereignty? Since when did those topics indicate criminality and terrorism?

  DHS also manages to make several hysterical references to returning veterans. I’ll highlight the weasel words and provide the translation at the end:

  The possible passage of new restrictions on firearms and the return of military veterans facing significant challenges reintegrating into their communities could lead to the potential emergence of terrorist groups or lone wolf extremists capable of carrying out violent attacks.

  Gee, it could lead? What evidence does DHS have of this? Oh, yeah, Timothy McVeigh was a veteran … and that’s it. I’m not joking:

  After Operation Desert Shield/Storm in 1990-1991, some returning military veterans—including Timothy McVeigh—joined or associated with rightwing extremist groups.

  So let’s be terrified of veterans! Let’s treat them all like potential suspects, even though we don’t have one iota of evidence of any wrongdoing at all. Yeah, that’s the American way.

  Imagine, if you will, what the Left would say if we took this entire document and replaced all references to “military veterans” with “Muslims”, and all references to “abortion” with “universal health care”, and then predated this DHS report to 2008, during the Bush administration. They’d be screaming about being smeared as traitors for their political beliefs, and they’d be right to do so. That’s exactly what the Obama administration and Janet Napolitano has done here.

  This is a disgrace. Congress should demand Napolitano’s resignation immediately, and the White House should apologize for this attack on normal political dissent.

  Update: A few say that the DHS has to track threats and give these kinds of assessments. Read the report again. DHS can’t find any threats, nor do they provide even a hint that they have any evidence that extremism on the Right has increased. They don’t claim to see increases in fringe-group memberships from last year, or even last decade. This report is filled with nothing but completely unsupported conjecture about what might happen if people get upset about the economy or a retreat on American sovereignty. It’s not an honest national-security threat assessment at all. It’s a political hit piece aimed at this administration’s critics in order to cast them as extremists.

  Update II: My friend Jazz Shaw files this under “fauxrage”, which makes a nice companion set with Obamteurisms. Read the whole thing, but I’ll challenge my pal to identify one actual threat cited by DHS, or one set of actual data in the entire report. Oh, and the veteran thing? I’m not the one who took offense to that. Talk to the American Legion, which is extremely unhappy with DHS at the moment.
• 

  BurnTheShips

  A report titled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment,"which seems to have been inspired by, or timed to coincide with, the the national tax-day tea party tomorrow.

  Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.

  The Obama Administration doesn't seem particularly cautious about defining an entire political party, representing somewhere between 46% and 52% of the country, as "rightwing extremist." While they take pains to understand the Iranian Mullahs, they seem to take no such pains understanding half the country.

  Preferring instead to simply call them potential terrorists.

  Gee, I wonder where these people are getting the idea that their liberties are in jeopardy.

  Before David Frum goes over the rails with yet another attack on Glenn Beck, he makes some good points.

  1) It's disturbing that an administration that is busily downgrading and euphemizing the threat from Islamic extremist terrorism (sorry: "man-made disasters" to use the now preferred term) would redirect its energies from a global threat to national security to a handful of creeps, weirdos, and malcontents skulking in the mountains.

  2) On the evidence of the past decade, violence by maladjusted immigrants represents a much greater threat to innocent life than nativist violence against immigrants, as incidents like the Los Angeles Airport gun attack.
  the Virginia Tech massacre, the Santa Clara mass family killing, the Binghamton NY rampage. and many others remind us.

  3) After eight years of listening to Democrats complain about the Bush administration’s alleged exploitation of actual terrorism for political purposes, it is grimly ironic to see the Obama administration preparing to exploit hypothetical terrorism. In this, it is taking a leaf from the bad example of the Clinton administration, which cynically attempted to link congressional Republicans to the Oklahoma City bombing in its 1996 re-election strategy.

  He pretty much takes those points back by saying "I'd like to say those things, but I can't, because Glenn Beck is a clear and present danger to the Constitution." Or words to that effect.

  But I don't care what he might take back or not. They're good points.

  Thanks to JackM. for the Frum-bait, and Instapundit for the link to Legal Insurrection.

  Just Checking: Are the various black-masked anarchists who periodically shut down cities and throw heavy rocks at police "leftwing extremists"?

  No?

  Funny how the inconvenient members of the left are never included in the ranks of the left. They're just "nuts," apparently, without any general political sympathies towards one more-respectable branch of political thinking.

  Unlike skinheads and survival fantasists, who are definitely "rightwing."
• 

  BurnTheShips

  Ultimately, these far-right fundamentalists might have to be neutralized. For example, misguided tea-baggers would be arrested and tried for treason, their kneecaps busted with lead pipes or just shot through the temple on the spot. Perhaps their brain pans pummelled into mush til they finally admit their duplicity through their broken, bloodied teeth. I hope not.

  Fantasizing again BB?

  BTS
• 

  jeeprube

  preferring instead to smear half of the country or more as kooks for criticizing the government’s handling of the economy

  I don't think half the country can be counted in the right wing extremist movement. Polls seem to put the number at 24-26%. I also suspect that it is not the government this movement is critical of but Obama. 75% of the country approves of the Obama administrations handling of the economy. Coupled with the fact that the same amount of people blame Bush and the Republican party for causing the mess, and you have a recipe for a permanent Democratic majority for the foreseeable future. A fact which destroys the secret agenda of the right wing, namely outlawing abortion, and mandating that we all be Christian.

  It is disingenuous of right wing fundies to mask their true agenda behind some righteous outrage at "Socialism" and the evils of "Big Government." The right wing LOVES big government as long as they are in control of it.

  All the hysteria from the right is merely the noise associated with a dying political movement. Can we really expect extremists to go quietly into the night?
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  BurnTheShips

  It is disingenuous of right wing fundies to mask their true agenda behind some righteous outrage at "Socialism" and the evils of "Big Government." The right wing LOVES big government as long as they are in control of it.

  Don't confuse the people with the politicians. Also, to call the Tea Party movement "fundie" is disingenuous. Everything seems to be "fundie" to you. It is relatively libertarian and constitutionalist.

  BTS
• 

  leavingwt

  I don't think half the country can be counted in the right wing extremist movement. Polls seem to put the number at 24-26%.

  Dude, if one in four Americans are Extremists, we're toast.

  How about less than 1%?