Eric Rudolph was given two life sentences yesterday in the US for Blowing up an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama. Totally unrepentant, he carried on saying in court that the Abortionists were murderers and ‘needed to be fought with deadly force’.
Great, the American religious right has their own terrorists! They’ve been around for a while – attacks on Abortion clinics have been happening for decades – and the American people are generally fairly good at discerning between the beliefs of those on the right wing of the church who are anti-abortion but would never condone bombing a clinic, and those psychos with murderous intent. \
So, here’s the easy bit people, why not apply some of that logic to the situation with terrorists inspired by a violent murderous misinterpretation of their faith? Maybe what needs to happen is we need to get a couple of right-wing-but-not-bomb-expert American whackos – say, Pat Robertson and Oral Roberts, or Tim LaHaye – and get them to discuss the abortion clinic bombings, and then go through it and replace all the references to christianity with references to Islam, the justification of not agreeing with abortion with information about the bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then publish it as a statement to America’s religious right on how the actions of a murderer can be understood as separate from a) the actions of a wider faith community and b) the veracity of the politcal case they espouse.
It’d still make pretty horrible reading for the rest of us – I can’t imagine, Robertson, LaHaye or Roberts ever saying anything that I remotely agreed with, foul blight that they are – but might help those American Christian Jihadists in the PNAC-lovin’ south understand the less-than black ‘n’ white way that we need to engage with these kinds of event.
As it is, blowing up an abortion clinic to end murder is just about on par with sending hundreds of thousands of troops armed with depleted uranium shells into a country to bring about democracy…