Why Norway Could Happen Here

For the last two days I've written about my concerns over the manner in which the unending inflammatory hate speech of the Christian Right and elements of the political far right creates an atmosphere where some unhinged individual or individuals could commit a heinous crime like that the struck Norway on Friday. Worse yet, the constant hate speech would make such individual(s) feel completely justified in the unleashing murder and destruction. I'm not the only one that had such thoughts. Peter Beinart at The Daily Beast has an article that looks at the same concerns. Here are some highlights:
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How would the American right have responded had Anders Behring Breivik been a Muslim? Luckily, we don’t have to guess. In the immediate aftermath of Friday’s terrorist attack in Norway, conservative Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin did us the favor of simply assuming that he was a Muslim. She then used the attack to denounce lawmakers who in the name of deficit reduction favor “huge cuts in defense” and to lambast President Obama for suggesting “that we can wrap up things in Afghanistan.”
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But had Breivik actually been a Muslim, I suspect Rubin’s efforts to tie the attack to the Afghan war and the defense budget would have quickly been overtaken by the search for his American counterparts: homegrown Muslim terrorists. . . .
The media’s primary question in the wake of the Breivik attack would have been, Can it happen here? And conservatives would have answered, Hell yes.
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So let’s ask that question about the real Breivik attack: Could an anti-Muslim bigot commit a large-scale terrorist attack in the U.S.? The answer is, Absolutely, because the same anti-Muslim bigotry that influenced Breivik in Europe is widespread here.
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There’s actually been a lot of right-wing, extremist Christian terrorism in the U.S. in recent years. The biggest terrorist attack in U.S. history prior to 9/11—the 1996 Oklahoma City bombing—was carried out by Timothy McVeigh, a white ex-Army officer with ties to the militia movement. That same year, Eric Rudolph bombed the Atlanta Olympics to protest abortion and international socialism. The only major WMD attack of the “war on terror” era—the 2001 anthrax mailings—apparently was the handiwork of a microbiologist angry that prominent Catholic politicians were pro-choice. In 2009, anti-abortion militants murdered Wichita doctor George Tiller.
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[W]hat makes a larger, Breivik-style attack possible is that terrorism usually stems from the intersection between militant ideology and mentally vulnerable people. That’s why people like McVeigh and Rudolph latched onto extremist militia and anti-abortion ideology in the 1990s. And it’s why their equivalent today might well be influenced by Islamophobia, the current obsession of America’s extreme right.
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Islamophobia is at least as prevalent on the political right today as militia-style, anti-government conspiracy-theorizing was in the 1990s. . . . . It’s painfully clear that in today’s Republican Party, the price of publicly opposing anti-Muslim bigotry is higher than the price of fueling it. And somewhere out there, someone like Anders Behring Breivik is watching.
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Words do have consequences and it is long past time that the demagogues of the Christian and political right be held accountable for the hate and violence they engender.