Colorado NAACP Office Bombed

Lost in the coverage of the Paris massacre and the search for the lost AirAsia flight is the bombing of a NAACP office in Boulder, Colorado.  Fortunately, no one was killed or seriously injured, but the act shows the same kind of hate and contempt for others that underlie the Paris attack.  With white supremacists increasingly welcomed with open arms in today's Republican Party, one has to wonder if the person(s) behind the bombing felt emboldened.  Moreover, I cannot help but wonder if the perpetrator(s) claim to be "godly Christian(s)" like so many of the segregationists of the past.  Think Progress has details on the bombing.  Here are highlights:

In what appears to be an attack on a well-known civil rights organization, an “improvised explosive device” detonated on Tuesday at the headquarters of the Colorado Springs, Colorado NAACP, according to a statement by the FBI. No one was killed or injured in the explosion, and there was “only minimal surface charring to the exterior wall of the building,” which also includes a hair salon. 

The explosion could have been much worse, however, as the explosive device was placed next to a gasoline can in an apparent attempt to increase the force of the explosion. The gasoline did not ignite.

The FBI statement adds that a “potential person of interest in this investigation is a Caucasian male, approximately 40 years of age, and balding. He may be driving a 2000 or older model dirty, white pick-up truck with paneling, a dark colored bed liner, open tailgate, and a missing or covered license plate.”

Although the apparent bomber’s motives are not yet known, bombings were a common terrorist tactic during the Jim Crow era.

According to The Gazette, the chapter remains undeterred:

[Henry] Allen [president of the chapter] said he is hesitant to call the explosion a hate crime without further information from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies investigating but said the organization "will not be deterred."

The Dangers of Waiving Constitutional Rights Due to Prejudice

In general, George Will has increasingly become one of the angry old white men of the Republican Party.  But on occasion he still nails it and comes across with a logical and common sense op-ed that counters some of the ugliest inclinations of the GOP and is fellow conservatives.  One such column appears in the Washington Post in which Will argues against the waiving of constitutional rights favored by many of the anti-Muslim, foaming at the mouth members of the GOP and its racist and religious extremist base.  In doing so, he looks at one of America's less shining moments of the past: the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II which ultimately was fueled by plain racial prejudice.  Here are highlights which should be read by those seeking to waive constitutional rights in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings:

Two of the three most infamous Supreme Court decisions were erased by events. The Civil War and postwar constitutional amendments effectively overturned Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), which held that blacks could never have rights that whites must respect. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which upheld legally enforced segregation, was undone by court decisions and legislation.

The third, Korematsu v. United States (1944), which affirmed the president’s wartime power to sweep Americans of disfavored racial groups into concentration camps, elicited a 1988 congressional apology. Now Peter Irons, founder of the Earl Warren Bill of Rights Project at the University of California at San Diego, is campaigning for a Supreme Court “repudiation” of the Korematsu decision and other Japanese internment rulings. Such repudiation, if it occurred, would be unprecedented.

On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the military to “prescribe military areas . . . from which any or all persons may be excluded.” So some 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them born here, were sent to camps in desolate Western locations. Supposedly, this was a precaution against espionage and sabotage. Actually, it rested entirely on the racial animus of Gen. John DeWitt, head of the Western Defense Command.

Using government records, Irons has demonstrated that because senior officials, including Solicitor General Charles Fahy, committed “numerous and knowing acts of governmental misconduct,” the Supreme Court based its decision on “records and arguments that were fabricated and fraudulent.” Officials altered and destroyed evidence that would have revealed the racist motives for the internments.  

Also kept from the court was a report, prepared for the Chief of Naval Operations and made available to DeWitt, estimating potentially disloyal Japanese as just 3 percent of the Japanese American population and declaring that these were “already fairly well known to naval intelligence” and could be quickly apprehended, if necessary. The suppressed report’s conclusion: “The entire Japanese problem has been magnified out of its true proportion, largely because of the physical characteristics of the people (and) should be handled on the basis of the individual. . . and not on a racial basis.”

The Korematsu decision reflected perennial dangers: panic and excessive deference, judicial and other, to presidents or others who would suspend constitutional protections in the name of wartime exigencies.

It is less important that the decision be repudiated than that it be remembered. Especially by those currently clamoring, since Boston, for a U.S. citizen — arrested in America and concerning whom there is no evidence of a connection with al-Qaeda, the Taliban or other terror network — to be detained by the military as an “enemy combatant.” The Korematsu case is a reminder that waiving constitutional rights is rarely necessary and rarely ends well.

Very well said.  Not that logic and reason or even past mistakes mean anything to the Christofascist/Tea Party elements of the GOP.

GOP and Tea Party Heads Explode at Reality that the Tsarnaevs Are White

Click image to enlarge

One need not follow Christofascist, Tea Party and even GOP sites to figure out that racism is a strong theme that underlies much of the anti-immigrant, anti-minority and, of course, anti-black GOP agenda.  Stated another way, anyone non-white and perceived as non-Christian is suspect to these people (and many other whites) as underscored by the Washington Post chart set out above.   What often goes unstated in these views - and those towards Muslims in particular - is the assumption that all Muslims are non-white.  Enter the Tsarnaev brothers, both of whom are Caucasian.  That's right, they are white.  And this reality is driving the right wingers berserk.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the phenomenon.  Here are excerpts:

The day after last week’s attack in Boston, David Sirota wrote a column for Salon entitled “Let’s Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber Is a White American,” arguing that this would limit the resulting crackdown on civil liberties. At first, conservatives were appalled. Then, when police fingered the Tsarnaev brothers, they were triumphant.

But the bombers were white Americans. The Tsarnaev brothers had lived in the United States for more than a decade. Dzhokhar was a U.S. citizen. Tamerlan was a legal permanent resident in the process of applying for citizenship. And as countless commentators have noted, the Tsarnaevs hail from the Caucasus, and are therefore, literally, “Caucasian.” You can’t get whiter than that.

So why did conservatives mock Sirota for being wrong? Because in public conversation in America today, “Islam” is a racial term. Being Muslim doesn’t just mean not being Christian or Jewish. It means not being white.

Think about American history and you can understand why. For centuries, Americans were legally segregated by race. Thus, when newcomers from the Middle East came to our shores, Americans had to decide which side of the line they were on. And in the struggle to be classified as white, Middle Eastern Christians had an advantage: Jesus. In the 1915 case Dow v. United States, a Syrian Christian successfully argued that he was white because Jesus, the original Middle Eastern Christian, was too.

Today, Americans still often link Islam and dark skin. What’s changed is which category we consider more dangerous. For much of American history, the problem with being Muslim was that you weren’t considered white. Since 9/11, by contrast, one of the problems with not being considered white is that you might be mistaken for Muslim. Thus, four days after the Twin Towers fell, Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh gas-station attendant, was gunned down in Mesa, Arizona, by an assailant who had boasted of wanting to kill “ragheads.” Last December, a Hindu American named Sunando Sen was pushed into an oncoming subway train by a woman who explained, “I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001.” Sodhi and Sen, needless to say, weren’t Muslim. They just looked Muslim because they had dark skin.

Even the anti-Muslim epithets that have flourished since 9/11—for instance, “sand n----r”—have a racial connotation. And there’s evidence that Barack Obama’s dark skin is one (though not the only) reason so many Americans still think he’s a Muslim.

You can also glimpse this conflation of religion and race in the demand, which surfaces after every terrorist attack, to single out Muslims for special scrutiny at airports and the like. Often, the politicians and pundits most eager to profile Muslims are the same folks who in the 1980s and 1990s defended the “racial profiling” of blacks.

At base, the reason it’s so hard for people to accept that the Tsarnaevs are white is because, since America’s founding, being white has meant, both culturally and legally, being “one of us.” And since 9/11, in particular, being Muslim has meant the opposite. As a light-skinned Muslim, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev straddles that divide. But he straddles it in other ways, too. He was a pothead, a devotee of hip-hop, a lifeguard, a high-school wrestler, an aspiring dentist. And yet he became, it appears, a murderer on behalf of a fanatical species of Islam. He’s a type that has reappeared again and again in our history, from every faith and in every shade: an American at war with America, both intimately familiar and frighteningly alien at the same time.

Anti-Muslim bigotry isn't just about religious based bigotry.  It has a very pronounced and insidious strain of racism as well.  Would that some of these assholes knew some of my hardworking and decent Muslim clients.   These white bigots and racist are unable to see the common humanity of others if they look different or love differently than they themselves.  It sicken mes.

GOP and Far Right: Constitutional Rights for Only Some Americans

While Phyllis Schlafly was penning her batshitery, a Fox News commentator got to the heart of what the wing nuts and their political whores in the Republican Party really want: limiting full constitutional rights to only some citizens.  Yes, you guessed it.  Limit such rights to white conservative Christians who are "real Americans."  The rest of us, including gays who already have been deprived of equality under the civil laws in most states, would be given whatever scraps are thrown to us.   Media Matters looks at the segment on Fox News where Brian Kilmeade put this agenda on full display.   Fortunately, Fox News legal analyst Peter Johnson, Jr.,  gave much needed push back against this shredding of the U. S. Constitution.  Here are excerpts:

KILMEADE: Although many consider him an enemy, according to the White House, the remaining suspect, the remaining suspect, in the Boston Marathon attack will not be considered an enemy combatant. But will justice now be served anyway and how will the civil liberties be affected? He is now a American citizen. Fox News legal analyst Peter Johnson, Jr. here. Peter: when we talked yesterday, we didn't know what the administration was going to do. Now we know. Not an enemy combatant and he was already Mirandized so the whole public safety issue is out the window. Next thing you know, a high profile defense attorney will be waltzing in here, making a zillion dollars off of him.

KILMEADE: What do we do? We sit there -- F.B.I. Interrogators sit down with him for a week or two until they feel as though they got accurate information.

JOHNSON: Do you believe in indefinite detention of Americans? Because I don't. I don't believe we should detain -- No matter how loathsome, disgusting, vile, contemptible.
KILMEADE: Two different issues.

JOHNSON: No, it's the same issue, an American issue. No, no, no. Either we believe in the Constitution or we don't believe in the Constitution.

KILMEADE: Not everyone is worthy of the constitutional rights that we have.

JOHNSON: Senator Graham is an expert on military commission and on the law of war.

KILMEADE: Yes.

JOHNSON: But what he's saying is, let's suspend civil rights and constitutional law.

KILMEADE: For public safety.

JOHNSON: In this particular case and then later we'll reinstate it. Now, what if someone decides to do that to Brian Kilmeade, or maybe his family?

KILMEADE: What if? I'm not blowing up the subway! I'm not doing it -- neither is your family.

JOHNSON.: It's not the president's determination nor Senator Graham's nor anyone else other than a U.S. attorney to decide how someone will charged or will they be charged. I believe in the public safety exception. I believe in doing everything we can to get terrorists. But at the same time, I'm saying: don't let the terrorists trample our rights going forward.

Kathleen Parker - who will probably receive threats from the "real American" crowd - gives similar push back to this agenda in a column in the Washington Post.  Here are highlights:

Whom do we hate when the enemy is a composite of our own diverse ecosystem? When “them” is “us?”

Our Boston (alleged) mass murderers were foreign-born, but the younger brother is an U.S. citizen. (The older brother, who died in a police shootout, was a permanent resident.) Given that one in eight U.S. residents is foreign-born, according to the Census Bureau, it is difficult to infer that being born abroad makes one more likely to become an anti-American terrorist.

[T]his is not a comparative religion seminar but an examination of the difficulties ahead as we wrestle acquired biases into submission and resist the urge to demonize groups of people. Discrimination is a life-saving tool in the jungle — steer clear of the hyenas — but it has no place in American jurisprudence. A U.S. citizen gets the full slate of equal rights and responsibilities, including a presumption of innocence, no matter which God he invokes.

Thus, although it is tempting to declare the surviving Boston suspect an “enemy combatant,” as suggested by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), it is essentially a means to deny rights accorded any other citizen who commits a crime. The only justification now would be that the suspect is believed to be Muslim, which isn’t a crime, or that he and his brother may have found inspiration among others of like intent.

Once we begin to discriminate in the assignment of rights to citizens and legal residents based on their thoughts, religious affiliation, assemblage — or our own assumptions — we risk becoming our own worst enemy.

At this juncture, the light-skinned, foreign-born, Muslim-leaning brothers who are suspected of inflicting terror on Boston fit neatly into no category we can define with certainty other than evil, which is, sadly, the unique provenance of the human race. Rooting it out will require more than tighter security or better immigration laws.

Parker is correct.  That doesn't mean her views will sit well with the Christofascists and Tea Party crowd in the GOP base.

One Boston Bombing Suspect Believed to Be Dead

Chaos reigned last night and the early hours of this morning as police chased two men identified by the FBI as the possible bombers in the horrific Boston Marathon bombing earlier in the week.  By the time the chase ended, an MIT campus police officer was dead, a transit officer was seriously wounded, one suspect was dead and the other remained at large, triggering a virtual shut down of all mass transit in the Boston area.  One report indicates the the dead suspect had a suicide explosive pack strapped to himself and during the pursuit explosives were thrown from the vehicle stolen by the suspects.  One can only wonder what motivates individuals to seek to kill and maim those they do not even know.  Obviously, if the perpetrators of the horror turn out to have foreign connections, Teabagistan will go berserk.  Here are highlights from the Boston Globe coverage:

A night of chaos gripped a region already rattled by bombings Monday at the Boston Marathon. An MIT police officer was shot and killed about 10:30 p.m. Thursday, and, not long after, a Transit Police officer was seriously wounded in a firefight.

The other Boston Marathon bombing suspect, the man seen wearing a black hat in photos released Thursday evening, is dead after firing bullets and launching explosives at police.

“We believe these are the same individuals that were responsible for the bombing Monday at the Marathon,’’ State Police Colonel Timothy Alben said today. “We believe that they are responsible for the death of an MIT police officer and the shooting of an MBTA police officer. This is a very serious situation that we are dealing with.’’

Boston Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis this morning said the man now known as Marathon bombing Suspect #2 -- seen in photos released Thursday wearing a white baseball cap -- is the person being sought by a massive collection of federal, state, and municipal police. He is believed to be the suspect who actually dropped the bombs at the race finish line.  “We believe this to be a terrorist,’’ Davis told reporters about 4:30 a.m. today. “We believe this to be a man here to kill people.”

Police are warning residents in East Watertown to stay in their homes, and not to answer the door unless they see a uniformed police officer outside. They said drivers should not stop in the area roughly bounded by Dexter, Laurel, and Arsenal streets.

According to Alben, the night’s outbreak of violence began when police received reports of a robbery of a convenience store in Kendall Square near MIT. A few minutes later, an MIT police officer, who has not been identified, was shot multiple times while in his cruiser at Main and Vassar streets, near Building 32, better known as the renowned the Stata Center on the MIT campus. The officer was pronounced dead at Massachusetts General Hospital.

During the gunfight, the man known as Marathon suspect #1 was wounded and was taken into custody. This morning, Dr. Richard Wolfe said the man was brought to the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center emergency room around 1:10 a.m. with multiple traumatic injuries.  “It was more than gunshot wounds,’’ Wolfe told reporters around 5:30 a.m. today. “It was a combination of injuries. We believe a combination of of blasts, multiple gunshot wounds.’”  Wolfe said it looked like the man had been hurt by an “explosive device’’ and that the man was struck by “shrapnel.’’ The man was pronounced dead at 1:35 a.m. The hospital said they did not know his name.

At present, the surviving suspect remains at large.  We can only hope that he is captured without more people losing their lives.  Likewise, we can hope that we find out who else, if anyone, may have been involved.

"Anonymous" Tells Westboro Baptist Church: Picket Boston Marathon Funerals At Your Own Risk

Few domestic groups are more foul and down right vile than the hate merchants at the Westboro Baptist Church.  Common decency is an unknown concept for these folks and in the wake of yesterday's horrible attack on innocent civilians in Boston,  the always foul Westboro Baptist Church has been bleating and tweeting "THANK GOD FOR THE BOSTON MARATHON BOMBS!! Westboro Baptist Church to picket funerals of those killed."  It really doesn't get more foul, especially when one thinks of 8 year old Martin Richard (pictured at left) or his young sister who lost a leg in the blast, than this "Christians."  Thankfully, the group Anonymous has stepped up and warned the Westboro Church folks to picket the funerals at their own risk.  Here are highlights from Huffington Post:

First responders were still on the scene at Boston's devastated Copley Square when fringe hate group Westboro Baptist Church announced it would be picketing the funeral of Boston Marathon bombing victims.

In the message, the group states that "Massachusetts invited this special wrath from God Almighty when it was the first state to pass same-sex marriage on May 17, 2004."

However, hacktivist group Anonymous made it very clear that if the WBC tried anything in Boston, they would feel the full fury of the online community.
 
WBC, an anti-gay, anti-Semitic group, has made a name for itself as an ambassador of the offensive. Throughout the past few years, the Kansas-based group has threatened to picket everything, including the funerals of victims of the Tucson, Ariz., shooting, as well as those of American soldiers and the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre.

But in what could be described as an unintended consequence of the WBC's hatemongering, people across the country have come together to fight the group. In the process, the direct result of WBC protests is often more tolerance, more acceptance and a sense of community-wide solidarity.

After the group threatened to picket in Newtown, Conn., Anonymous launched a full-fledged attack on the WBC, publishing group members' personal information online, overtaking the group's main website and hacking the Twitter account of one if its representatives.

And when Anonymous announced plans to block the WBC from picketing Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz's funeral, the group backed down at the last minute.

Personally, I hope Anonymous unleashes a full fury against the Westboro folks.  They are vile and disgusting.  And they are helping to kill the Christian brand through their incessant displays of hate and bigotry.  They are revealing the true ugliness of Christianity, especially in its conservative, fundamentalists variants.