From Life News:
Obama Administration Calls Pro-Lifers Terrorists Again
Once again, the Obama administration [Pres. Obama is such an aggressive advocate for abortion that he even promoted actual infanticide.] has called “terrorists” the majority of Americans who support the pro-life view on abortion. A January 2012 Department of Homeland Security document is making the rounds on the Internet and it paints an unflattering picture of pro-life Americans.
The January, 31, 2012 document is titled, “Hot Spots of Terrorism and Other Crimes in the United States, 1970 to 2008? and was released by the Behavioral Sciences Division of the department.
“The authors of this report are Gary LaFree, director of START and professor of criminology at the University of Maryland, and Bianca Bersani, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts-Boston,” the document says. “This report is part of a series sponsored by the Human Factors/Behavioral Sciences Division, Science and Technology Directorate, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in support of the Counter-IED Prevent/Deter program. The goal of this program is to sponsor research that will aid the intelligence and law enforcement communities in identifying potential terrorist threats and support policymakers in developing prevention efforts.” [Our response to this document must be in the VOTING BOOTH!]
“This material is based upon work supported under Grant Award Number 2008ST061ST0003 from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security made to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland,” it adds.
Under a headline, “Terrorism” on page 9, the manual describes the frequency of terrorist attacks and details what it terms “category of ideological motivation” to describe groups it believes are more prone to acts of terrorism. One section includes pro-life advocates:
Single Issue: groups or individuals that obsessively focus on very specific or narrowly-defined causes (e.g., anti-abortion, anti-Catholic, [at least that is there] anti-nuclear, anti-Castro).
Later the document includes tables that graphically show the number of attacks and the manual, again, claims pro-life people are behind them.
“Table 6 shows the concentration of single issue terrorism for the four decades spanned by the data. Recall, single issue events include such attacks as anti-abortion, anti-Catholic, or anti-nuclear. Interestingly, among the types of terrorism examined here, single issue terrorism is probably the most temporally diverse, with substantial numbers of attacks occurring in all four decades,” the Obama administration paper says.
This isn’t the first time the Obama administration has referred to pro-lifers as terrorists.
In January 2010, President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the agency charged with keeping American travelers safe from terrorism said as much. A video showed Transportation Security Administration nominee Erroll Southers including pro-life advocates in a list of terrorist groups.
[…]
Read the rest there.
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I’m sorry, but if I’m honest it just seems to me that the Administration is referring to pro-life terrorists as terrorists, not pro-lifers in general. Do we deny that there has ever been domestic pro-life terrorism? Certainly there has, even if their importance has been dramatically oversold by both Hollywood and the abortion industry itself. I mean, as long as their numbers add up (dates, location of attacks, etc.), then I can’t see this as a big deal, at least not the part that’s been quoted here.
Gee, it appears to me that the administration is running afoul of it’s own policies. From the report, we’re told that they are worried about terrorists such as “groups or individuals that obsessively focus on very specific or narrowly-defined causes, e.g., …anti-Catholic…. “. Does the anti-Catholic regulatory regime at HHS qualify? Maybe Homeland Security should investigate Secretary Sebelius and President Obama?
Interpretations of what constitutes terrorism in America have been made very loose since 9/11. Even those considered libertarians and constitutionalists are deemed as potential threats. Actually, absolutely anyone could be deemed a potential terrorist given how broadly such definitions could apply.
Talk of ‘Terrorists” is cheap.
When I see Brad Pitts mom on a ‘No-Fly’ list I believe it.
http://www.catholicvote.org/discuss/index.php?p=32684
It must have been a slow day at LifeSite News whEn someone there wrote that.
The report is online at:
REPORT
I searched it and the word “abortion” appears only two times. Here they are:
“Single Issue: groups or individuals that obsessively focus on very specific or narrowly-defined causes (e.g., anti-abortion, anti-Catholic, anti-nuclear, anti-Castro). This category includes groups from all sides of the political spectrum.”
“Table 6 shows the concentration of single issue terrorism for the four decades spanned by the data. Recall, single issue events include such attacks as anti-abortion, anti-Catholic, or anti-nuclear. Interestingly, among the types of terrorism examined here, single issue terrorism is probably the most temporally diverse, with substantial numbers of attacks occurring in all four decades.”
The report covers the period from 1970 to 2008.
Wikipedia provides lists of murders, attempted murders, assaults and kidnappings against abortion providers during that time and another list of arson, bombing and property crime against abortion facilities.
I don’t think that being anti-abortion means that we need to defend terrorists who commit crimes like these – or pretend that they don’t exist.
As smmmclaug pointed out, reporting that some terrorists claim that their anti-abortion views motivated their evil acts is not the same as saying that people who oppose abortion are terrorists.
Here are the Wikipedia lists:
ANTI-ABORTION VIOLENCE
When I teach, I warn my students that any citation to Wikipedia is an automatic F. Don’t mind if you use it for research, because it’s a good starting point, but a more reliable source citation is required.
The site is riddled with far-left politics (the global warming deletion/revision scandal is an example), and I would particularly not trust anything as politically hot as abortion issues.
Not that anti-abortion violence doesn’t take place, but from Wiki I would expect misattribution, exaggeration, claims of association with reputable pro-life organizations, and even outright falsification in the interest of making the pro-life cause look bad.
AnAmericanMother is right. Anyone at all can write or edit a wiki article. While some of the sources cited might end up being useful, the articles themselves have no research value.
“The goal of this program is to sponsor research that will aid the intelligence and law enforcement communities in identifying potential terrorist threats and support policymakers in developing prevention efforts.”
I saw “For Greater Glory” this week. The parallels with the then president of Mexico and the Obama, the HHS and his administration are clear. The Church is dangerous and the “Federal Government ” is God.
obama endorses the massacre of the innocent unborn or even the born and pro lifers are terrorists? Is man really an idiot?
Note that on Wikipedia, a search for “anti-Catholic violence” yields nothing.
Searching for “anti-Jewish violence” turns up references to WWII.
When I teach, I warn my students that any citation to Wikipedia is an automatic F. Don’t mind if you use it for research, because it’s a good starting point, but a more reliable source citation is required.
If you will go to the Wikipedia page, you will find the citations to New York. Times, Washington Post etc., contemporary reports in footnotes at the bottom of the page.
There appears to be a space limit here. When I tried to post them to save you the trouble of going there, my post was rejected.
for instance, this 1988 paper from The American Journal of Political Science:
In the meantime, POTUS overlooks the hundreds of mosques teaching violence weekly. He is blind and deceives so many others in his choice of language, the twisted language of ideology.
New York. Times, Washington Post etc
need I say more?
need I say more?
Distinguishing between the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal would be important if it were a question of opinion or analysis, but for a factual question, such as whether Dr. George Tiller was murdered in May 2009 by a man who said he did it because Tiller was an abortionist, I will accept either paper as a secondary source.
If I were writing a book, I would check the court papers to verify the date and the exact words the killer used.
‘Southers explained, “Most of the domestic groups that we pay attention to here are white supremacist groups. They’re anti-government, in most cases anti-abortion, they are usually survivalist type in nature, identity oriented.”
“Those groups are groups that claim to be extremely anti-government and Christian identity oriented,” he continues.’
In fairness to Southers, the first quote states that most terrorists are anti-abortion and makes no claim regarding the probability that anyone who’s anti-abortion will also support or engage in terrorism; and the second says that terrorists claim to be about Christianity — which I’m sure they do (I mean, when’s the last time you heard someone call the Church the Whore of Babylon and didn’t expect them to be [dun-dun-dunnnn…] Southern Baptist?).
Elsewhere anti-abortion and anti-Catholic are listed as examples of things that can be terrorist ideologies when held obsessively and singularly, i.e. you only care about this one issue and not even civil peace and leaving justice to actual authority. That’s also true and has nothing to do with people who take a stance on those issues for broader reasons. That’s part why we call ourselves pro-life.
We’re not going to change the laws, change the culture and save lives as easily if we make ourselves look unnecessarily angry or foolish. False as it would be for anyone to associate us with vigilantes, the closest thing it has to a grain of truth occurs if and when we throw reason (by which I mean what has traditionally been meant by “reason”, not what has been more recently meant by “reasonable” or “rational”, i.e. watering down anything religious, traditional or offensive to progressives) and react based on assumptions about those who oppose justice. That people in our government oppose justice doesn’t excuse us from our duty to uphold justice to the truth and to them in addressing their evils; if it did, we might not object to being grouped with vigilantes!
And what about violence against pro-lifers?
http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/69-year-old-pro-life-personhood-petitioner-attacked-suffers-broken-hip
http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/personhood-founders-home-attacked-at-night-children-terrorized
And what about violence against pro-lifers?
Arrest them, too (the ones who attacked the pro-lifers)
New York. Times, Washington Post etc
need I say more?
the point is not that these “honorable” sources would mis-state the facts (which, frankly they do on occasion, and not about the date of an event), but that they will always report things in a biased fashion with regard which facts they choose to report, and which they exclude, and the conclusions they draw based on the facts.
The truth is the pro-life movement is the most peaceful mass movement that ever existed. Relative to the size of it, the number of violent acts occurring even among the fringe is minuscule compared to any other group, and is always roundly condemned by the broader leadership. That means that any attempt to point out pro-life (or anti-abortion) activists as “likely” terrorists is political correctness at best, and anti-Christian bias at worst. In no way can it considered to be a legitimate area of law enforcement attention.
The starting point in his discussion. (see the starting post by smmclaug) was whether LifeSite’s claim “Once again, the Obama administration has called “terrorists” the majority of Americans who support the pro-life view on abortion” is correct.
As i pointed out, there are only two mentions of the word “abortion” in the report (both quoted in my post). Neither says what LifeSite claims.
It is a fact that some terrorists have said they commited their violent acts because they oppose abortion.
Reporting that doesn’t amount to saying that “the majority of Americans who support the pro-life view on abortion” are terrorists.
Any more than reporting that some Muslims have commited violent acts means that all Muslims are terrorists.
I recommend rereading smmclaug’s post.