01:04 Jun 11 2009
Times Read: 709
Regardless of where you stand on the issues, violence is not nor ever will be acceptable means of controling the dialogue of hot button issues. These people make me sick and should be charged for what they are- domestic terrorists.
June 11, 2009
Shooting at Holocaust Museum in D.C. Kills Guard
By DAVID STOUT
WASHINGTON — An 88-year-old white supremacist with a rifle walked into the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, one of the capital’s most visited sites, on Wednesday afternoon and began shooting, fatally wounding a security guard and sending tourists scrambling before he himself was shot, the authorities said.
The gunman was identified by law enforcement officials as James W. von Brunn, who embraces various conspiracy theories involving Jews, blacks and other minority groups and has at times waged a personal war with the federal government.
The gunman and the security guard were both taken to nearby George Washington University Hospital, with the gunman handcuffed to a gurney, witnesses said. The guard, Stephen T. Johns, died a short time later. Museum officials, who did not give Mr. Johns’ age, said he had worked there for six years.
Publicly, the authorities did not immediately identify Mr. von Brunn as the suspect, but several law enforcement officials named him, and there were reports that his vehicle was found not far from the museum. Washington Mayor Adrian M. Fenty said the gunman was in critical condition.The Washington police chief, Cathy Lanier, said the gunman walked into the museum’s main entrance shortly before 1 p.m. and began shooting without warning. Within moments, at least one security guard was returning fire, and a total of five or six shots are believed to have been fired.
Officials and others who track conspiracy theorists have long been familiar with Mr. von Brunn, whose latest address is believed to be in Eastern Maryland, in part because he maintains a Web site. He has claimed variously to be a member of Mensa, the high-I.Q. society; to have played varsity football at a Midwestern college, where he earned a degree in journalism; to have been a P.T. boat captain in World War II, and to be a painter and author.
Mr. von Brunn also claimed to have been victimized by a court system run by Jews and blacks. Before Wednesday, he was best known to law enforcement officials for walking into the Washington headquarters of the Federal Reserve System on Dec. 7, 1981, with a bag slung over the shoulder of his trench coat. A guard chased him to the second floor, where the Fed’s board was meeting, and found a revolver, a hunting knife and a sawed-off shotgun in the bag.Mr. von Brunn, who lived in Lebanon, N.H., at that time, told the police he wanted to take board members hostage to focus media attention on their responsibility for high interest rates and the nation’s economic difficulties. He was convicted in 1983 and served several years in prison for attempted kidnapping, burglary, assault and weapons charges.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama-based civil rights organization, said on Wednesday that Mr. von Brunn is a racist and anti-Semite who has “a long history of associations with prominent neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers.”
Rabbis Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and Abraham Cooper, an associate dean, said the attack at the museum “shows that the cancer of hatred, bigotry and anti-Semitism is alive and well in America.”
“It is deeply disturbing that one of America’s most powerful symbols of the memory of the Holocaust was selected as the site of the attack just days after President Obama accompanied Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel to the Buchenwald death camp,” they said.
Opened in 1993, the museum is situated near the National Mall and the Potomac River. Since its dedication, it has had nearly 30 million visitors, including more than 8 million school children and 85 heads of state, the museum says on its Web site.
On Wednesday evening, members of Congress and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. are to visit the Holocaust Museum for the debut of the play “Anne and Emmett” by Janet Langhard Cohen. The play is a fictional dialogue between Anne Frank, whose diary recounted her days in hiding during the Holocaust, and Emmett Till, a black teenager killed by white racists in 1955.
Like all public buildings in the capital, the museum has heavy security, with visitors required to pass through metal detectors. But someone determined to enter a building with a firearm can sometimes do so. In July 1998, a crazed gunman killed two police officers and wounded a tourist in the Capitol.
Museum officials issued a statement expressing shock and grief over Wednesday’s incident.
“Officer Johns, who died heroically in the line of duty, served on the Museum’s security staff for six years,” they said. “Our thoughts and prayers go out to Officer Johns’s family. We have made the decision to close the museum Thursday, June 11, in honor of Officer Johns and our flags will be flown at half mast in his memory.”
Brian Knowlton and Theo Emery contributed reporting. NY Times.
Doctor’s murder is domestic terrorism
Anti-abortion violence sparks debate
Gavin Mathis
The Daily Evergreen
Published: 06/08/2009
While distributing bulletins to congregants last Sunday at his church in Wichita, Kan., Dr. George Tiller, one of a few doctors in the United States that provided late-term abortions, was murdered.
Historically, acts of violence against physicians have hindered the pro-life movement and increased the rancor surrounding issues of women’s rights, but the cacophony of abortion arguments was softened by a far more terrifying phenomenon: the role of domestic terrorism.
Abortion remained surprisingly dormant during the 2008 election due to some tactful sidestepping by the candidates. However, the confluence of President Barack Obama’s commencement speech at the University of Notre Dame, the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and the brutal slaying of Tiller are exposing previously unreported fronts in America’s culture wars.
Even those who remain largely ambivalent about the issue of abortion can agree that any act of violence perpetrated against physicians to achieve a political goal is an act of terrorism. Intending to strike fear into the hearts of women and doctors that provide abortions, Tiller’s murder is a foreboding illustration of terrorism and how it dilutes civic discourse by enveloping a nation in fear.
Americans’ myopic view of terrorism, which was largely shaped by the “War on Terror,” fails to convey what politically motivated acts of violence really look like. Terrorism does not have a face. It is a tactic employed by morally and intellectually weak fundamentalists of all races, creeds, and faiths. The anti-abortionists who bomb health care clinics, the Jewish settlers who rampage through the West Bank and the Muslim fundamentalists who hijack planes rely on this tactic because it is effective. By simultaneously inflicting harm against one person and instilling fear in the populace, terrorism’s real victims are those who succumb to fear after an attack.
In all of its shapes and forms – from the attacks of 9/11 to the Oklahoma City bombing – terrorism should not be considered as merely an illegitimate means of accomplishing legitimate ends. They are acts of violence that surrender the moral high ground and are the last vestige of depraved idealogues.
Whatever Tiller’s murderer hoped to accomplish, it seems that understanding other viewpoints was not part of it. Extremists who commit acts of violence exist outside the realm of reason. It is impossible to argue with zealots who find logic in killing people to prove that killing is wrong.
Equating the events of 9/11 with terrorism is easy for Americans. No matter how amorphous the enemy, Americans can visualize a Middle Eastern mujahid. The same can not be said for cases of domestic terrorism because Americans do not want to believe their neighbor – the one with the perfectly manicured lawn who takes his children to school and worships at the local church – could possibly be a terrorist.
The perpetrators themselves are often little more than pawns in a greater political movement. Stoking the fires of extremism by calling Tiller a “baby killer,” conservative commentators might not have pulled the trigger, but – in essence – they loaded the gun. The right-wing’s hate-fueled rhetoric does not make them accomplices, yet it forces Americans to reconsider the responsibilities that come with the freedom of speech.
Standing in stark contrast to these venom-spewing provocations, President Obama offered a different perspective during his commencement speech at Notre Dame, where he challenged Americans on both sides of the abortion issue to change the tone of the debate and to build a mutual understanding.
Tiller’s death will not move the nation any closer to a compromise on abortion. At the very least, his death must become a symbol of how Americans will not be terrorized and will not allow violence to dictate their pursuit of common ground on one of the nation’s most pressing issues.
COMMENTS
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Elemental
04:36 Jun 11 2009
I could not agree more.