Leonard Pitts Jr.
Can we finally say the thing we have not said so far?
Recently, a white supremacist shot up a Sikh temple near
The juxtaposition of those two events is emphatically not meant to suggest Bachmann somehow "caused" the
In the almost 20 years since the first attack by Muslim extremists on the
The bombing of a federal building in
These incidents and dozens more comprise a list maintained by the
America is under attack by right-wing terrorists.
And here, again, it is necessary to say what the point is not. Namely, it is not that conservatism equals terrorism. These criminals are fanatics, and fanaticism is restricted to no particular ideology. Ironically, that's an argument to which conservatives often turn deaf ears when it is made on behalf of Muslims, but that doesn't make it any less true -- or applicable here.
That said, what's telling is that we won't even call this what it is. When the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Weather Underground were committing violence in the 1970s, we were not slow in decrying left-wing terrorism and requiring progressives to disown it. When al-Qaida kills and maims, we are not shy about branding it Islamic terrorism and requiring moderate Muslims to disown it.
For some reason, though, we are reluctant to call right-wing terror by name. And you can forget requiring conservatives to distance themselves from it.
Rather than see a pattern that grows more glaring every day, we see a series of discrete events -- this individual tragedy here, that one there, regrettable certainly, but surely not suggestive of any larger picture.
Maybe this is because the perpetrators of these crimes are overwhelmingly white Christian men and thus, invisible in a nation where danger is routinely defined as Them, not Us. Maybe it's because media have become cowed and self-censoring, reflexively flinching from that which might bring accusations of anti-conservative bias.
Either way, one wonders how we can confront what we won't even name. These plots hatched in the fetid backwaters of conservative paranoia ought to be called what they are. The blood of victims demands an honest accounting.
We have given them a dishonest silence instead.
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