Christian Extremists? (Timothy McVeigh Edition)

A combination of a few posts from 2010
that had dead media or bad links
combined and reposted

This is a myth — that Timothy McVeigh was a Christian — that reverberates in the liberal community, never seeing the light of day. Here I will post what CNN’s Ali Velshi said back in August on 2010 via NEWSBUSTERS:

VELSHI: Did you know that, as an American citizen, you have two freedoms granted by the First Amendment of the Constitution, when it comes to religion? The first part is known as the Establishment Clause. The Establishment Clause essentially says the government can’t pass laws that will establish an official religion. This is commonly interpreted as the separation of church and state. The second one is the Free Exercise Clause, and it prevents the government from interfering with or controlling a person’s practice of his or her religion. Religious freedom is an absolute right in this country, and it includes the right to practice any religion, or no religion at all, for all Americans.

After briefly touching on how many of the early American colonists came to North America for religious freedom, the CNN anchor moved on to his morally relativistic argument:

VELSHI: Suppose our government leaders or New York state leaders do step in, in some capacity, whether official or non-official, and assist in moving the mosque elsewhere. Then what? What kind of precedent does that set? Timothy McVeigh was raised Catholic. Do we then entertain petitions of moving Catholic churches away from the Oklahoma bombing site? I’m sure you’re thinking it sounds ridiculous, but ask yourself, is it ridiculous because Catholicism is familiar to you, or, is your argument that what he did was different, or is your argument that Timothy McVeigh didn’t kill in the name in Allah?

Actually, the comparison is ridiculous, because, as his own network acknowledged the morning after McVeigh’s execution, that the murderer was “baptized in the Catholic Church as a boy, but had stopped practicing and recently described himself as agnostic.” Moreover, as the terrorist himself admitted, he bombed the Oklahoma City federal building as a “retaliatory strike; a counter attack, for the cumulative raids (and subsequent violence and damage) that federal agents had participated in over the preceding years (including, but not limited to, Waco).” McVeigh did not carry out the attack in the name of the Christian God or in the name of the Catholic Church. On the other hand, Al Qaeda issued a fatwa in 1998, which declared that killing “Americans and their allies…is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it…in accordance with the words of Almighty God.”

Velshi concluded his commentary by stating that it didn’t matter whether Americans were for or against the planned mosque: “If you’re an American citizen and choose to remain in this country, then whether you are against or you are for the Islamic center and mosque should be irrelevant. I say ‘should be,’ in an ideal world, because, as an American citizen- well, we should all be for the Constitution that so many have fought, lived, and died for, including the 2,976 souls who died on September 11th at Ground Zero, at the Pentagon, and in a field in western Pennsylvania.”…..

Michael Medved interviewed the Reverend Susan B. Thistlethwaite (PhD, is Professor of Theology Emerita and President Emerita at Chicago Theological Seminary) on his show back in May of 2010. The discussion was initially about Anders Behring Breivik, the racist in Norway that killed 85 people (almost all kids). The conversation then turns to Timothy McVeigh where the Reverend said he was a Christian — this is simply not true:

A Caller into the Michael Medved Show tries to compare Christians to terrorists by bringing up Timothy McVeigh. After that myth is shot down, the caller then tries the “Bush said God told him to go to war.” Another strike.

UPDATED REFERENCES

Human Events Shot This Down — again — many years ago in their article “Timothy McVeigh was not a ‘Christian’ terrorist,” (HUMAN EVENTS, May 6, 2002 by Lofton, John). But the Left likes to attack straw-men. That is they set up a false premise as if its true then they attack it… all the while their opponents are waiting on the sidelines for them to stop circular thinking and engage the world. Here are some of the past contributors to the Liberal Mantra:

  • Objecting to Muslims and Islam being blamed for terrorism, Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation Of Islam, has said, according to the, Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service (9/17/01): “Timothy McVeigh was from a Christian nation… and nobody said the Christian Timothy McVeigh, they said Timothy McVeigh.”
  • The Boston Herald (10/07/01) quotes convicted rapist/boxer Mike Tyson as saying: “Religion can’t be defined from one single person’s action. Timothy McVeigh was a Christian.”
  • The Providence Journal-Bulletin (9/18/01) quotes Reem Alkurdi, a Muslim, as saying, Timothy McVeigh was a Christian-American.” But, nobody is blaming “all the Christian-Americans.”
  • The St. Louis Post-Dispatch (9/18/01) quotes Suleiman Badwan, a Muslim, as saying: “Don’t target me. . .. Tim McVeigh was a Christian … and he still blew up a federal building.”
  • The Denver Post (9/16/01) quotes Imam Tali Eid of the Islamic Center of New England in Quincy, Mass., as saying, “‘[A]t the time of McVeigh I haven’t seen any minister or priest’ having to defend his faith because McVeigh was a Christian.”
  • The Manchester Union Leader (9/12/01) quotes Shuja U. Saleem, who’s on the board of the Islamic Society of Greater Manchester, as saying that even though McVeigh was a Christian, “nobody points a finger at Christianity.”
  • The Minnesota Daily student newspaper (9/25/01) quotes Sarah Schadegg as saying, “Timothy McVeigh was a Christian but we didn’t label him the Christian bomber.”
  • The Canadian newspaper The Record (9/24/01), in Kitchner-Waterloo, quotes the mayor of Kitchner, Carl Zehr, as saying, “We don’t condemn Christianity because Timothy McVeigh was a Christian.”
  • The Los Angeles New Times newspaper (9/20/01) quotes Naji Harden, president of the Islamic Center of Hawthorne’s board of trustees, as saying, “The bomber of the Oklahoma federal building was a Christian, but we didn’t hear people singling out Christians.”
  • An article in USA Today (11/7/01) says, of many Muslims interviewed, that “several mentioned Timothy McVeigh. The media, they say, did not call McVeigh a Christian terrorist, but simply a terrorist.”
  • Nationally syndicated editorial cartoonist Mike Peters, whose cartoons appear in many newspapers, drew one cartoon labeling Timothy McVeigh as a Christian.
  • And in Reason magazine (12/1/01), Abdulwahab Alkebsi, a Muslim from Yemen, is quoted as saying: “Let’s call bin Laden what he is: He is a terrorist. It has nothing to do with Islam-just as much as you don’t want to call Timothy McVeigh a Christian terrorist or a Christian killer.”

MORE

WINTERY KNIGHT: Actually, according to this CNN interview with a McVeigh biographer, McVeigh was an agnostic.
BREITBART: He told the authors of American Terrorist that he “did not believe in Hell.” If there’s one tenet that’s consistent with Christian religions, it’s a belief in Hell—and Heaven, for that matter.
THE GUARDIAN: In his letter, McVeigh said he was an agnostic but that he would “improvise, adapt and overcome”, if it turned out there was an afterlife. “If I’m going to hell,” he wrote, “I’m gonna have a lot of company.”
TOWNHALL: Reporting on his execution, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution described McVeigh as “an avowed agnostic” whose sudden last-minute decision to see a Catholic priest just before his execution surprised everyone who knew him. As recently as July 2001, even a lefty like Barbara Ehrenreich (writing in the Progressive) did not portray McVeigh as having religious motives. She called McVeigh a “homegrown neo-Nazi mass murderer,” yes; Christian fundamentalist, no.
RELIGIO-POLITICAL TALK: When in fact Timothy McVeigh was an atheist who renounced the Judeo-Christian God and said his “god” was science. So in reality, McVeigh’s motivations line up closer with John’s political (and some would say, religious… because “atheism” is a metaphysical viewpoint) views rather than the “religious-right.” And most of the violence has been committed by people who have left leaning political views.

Update on Norway Killer and the Medias Attack on Conservatives

I posted examples of the media jumping the gun with previous killers or attempted killers in a post entitled “Norway’s Oklahoma.” I also posted Michael Medved’s opening monologue as well as a call taken by him, HERE. Also, I have included the first two segments of Dennis Pragers dealing with the medias attack on people quoted in Breivik’s rant.

Libertarian Republican has done some fantastic footwork that I wish to share with my readers here (Breivik opposed laissez-faire; favored nationalizing industries).

More evidence surfacing that mass-murderer Anders Breivik was a populist opposed to free market capitalism.

Ezra Dulis at BigJournalism.com has dug through his massive on-line manifesto. Breivik was an environmentalist, ranting against “global pollution.” He even advocated a Chinese-style population model, to prevent “overconsumption, saving their forests ect.”

And then this nugget:

All globalist companies will be nationalised (a minimum of 50,1% ownership must be redistributed to EF governments hands (combined) at any given time, for their respective countries). Investors with majority control who refuse this re-nationalisation process will have their respective corporation expelled from the European Federation monetary zone (losing trading concessions). Ensuring state control is the only way to avoid that globalist capitalist political lobby groups continue to negatively influence European policies relation to immigration and multiculturalism.

I never thought I would actually argue against capitalism but the US model is an extreme variant, almost resembling a pure laissez faire model. 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are now in the hands of 1 percent of the people. 66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.

There’s more. He goes on to side with the far left in utter hatred for Fox owner Rupert Murdoch.

In the UK, News International (a company mostly owned by Rupert Murdoch) owns several newspapers (including The Times and The Sun), Sky Television (a major European satellite operator), Star Television (covering Asia) and publishers like Harper Collins.

In 1998, Rupert Murdoch owned 34% of the daily newspapers and 37% of the Sunday newspapers in the UK. Successive UK governments have allowed his empire to grow in return for his media’s support.

Cross-media ownership and the fact that a small number of people own so many of our means of obtaining information is a threat…

Finally, he makes an insane argument that the United States wants to keep troops in Europe to “preserve Europe as a stable market for their products.” He compares U.S. economic interests to “slavery.”

…(read more)…

Norways Oklahoma~What are some past examples that would cause one to question the Christian Fundamentalist Label in this case (92-Dead)~SEE UPDATES!

Deeper Thinking Here at RPT
“The progressive sees racism and other evils as stages to move beyond; they are national problems to be solved, not human problems to be guarded against and punished. In fact, these evils are often made possible by the odd progressive belief that man will stop being bad if he is no longer restricted from being bad.” Dale A. Berryhill, The Assault: Liberalism’s Attack on Religion, Freedom, and Democracy (Lafayette LA: Huntington House Publishers, 1995), 31.

Photobucket

I would be interested to hear and see more of what this young man was into. I have been told by many, for years now, that Timothy McVeigh was a Christian fundamentalist. This is not the truth. So if “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” as the Left like to always say. Couldn’t “one man’s Christian Fundamentalist be another’s radical cult member?” First, from the AP:

SUNDVOLLEN, Norway (AP) — The 32-year-old man [Anders Behring Breivik] suspected in bomb and shooting attacks that killed at least 91 people in Norway bought six tons of fertilizer before the massacres, the supplier said Saturday as police investigated witness accounts of a second shooter.

Norway’s prime minister and royal family visited grieving relatives of the scores of youth gunned down in a horrific killing spree on an idyllic island retreat. A man who said he was carrying a knife was detained by police officers outside the hotel, as the shell-shocked Nordic nation was gripped by reports that Norwegian gunman may not have acted alone.

The suspect in police custody – a blonde blue-eyed Norwegian with reported Christian fundamentalist, anti-Muslim views – is suspected in both the shootings at Utoya island and a massive explosion that ripped through an Oslo high-rise building housing the prime minister’s office two hours earlier, killing seven people. He has been preliminarily charged with acts of terrorism.

Oddny Estenstad, a spokeswoman for agricultural material supplier Felleskjopet, confirmed Saturday that the suspect in custody purchased six tons of fertilizer 10 weeks ago. Artificial fertilizer is highly explosive and can be used in homemade bombs…..

Firstly, Christian means Christ like. A fundamentalist Christian takes what Jesus said to be literal truth (the Bible, Jesus’ Resurrection, creation, and the like). So

John 18:33-38:

So Pilate entered his headquarters again and called Jesus and said to him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus answered, “Do you say this of your own accord, or did others say it to you about me?” Pilate answered, “Am I a Jew? Your own nation and the chief priests have delivered you over to me. What have you done?” Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.” Then Pilate said to him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world— to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.” Pilate said to him, “What is truth?”

So what would a fundamentalist say of this verse? This is not to say that one should not defend oneself against attacks or criminals, it is to say however that actions of violence toward a political end — like saving what many thought was their political leader prophesied about in the past — is forbidden. There are, however, liberal fundamentalists that like to rip from a historical time-period an event in the Old Testament where the Hebraic agrarian society [farmers] have to defend themselves against people (the Assyrians for instance) that would fillet their enemies alive and display their mangled corpses as a warning to those who opposed them. These liberal fundamentalists extrapolate that violence they perceive as unjust onto all Christian fundamentalists as normative. Please. But I ingress.

So what are a few things already making my head tilt? The Telegraph has this:

On the Facebook page attributed to him, Mr Breivik describes himself as a Christian and a conservative. It listed his interests as hunting, body building and freemasonry. His profile also listed him as single. The page has since been taken down. Police chief Svinung Sponheim said that internet posting by Breivik suggested he has “some political traits directed toward the right, and anti-Muslim views”.

I know of no conservative Christian that would be keen on Freemasons. In fact, most Christians have wild eyed conspiracies involving this gnostic sect. Continuing they say,

Police officials have also said that the suspect appeared to have posted on websites with Christian fundamentalist tendencies.

What does this sentence mean? Do they consider Christian Identity or KKK type sites, Christian fundamentalism? More info will come out, I am sure… but this is what I am use to (and most of this comes from my old blog under the tag, Crazed Gunmen Bios). And please keep in mind the following which was believed around the time of all these happenings:

And also keep in mind the tendency of the media:

The media called John Patrick Bedell, the Pentagon Shooter, a right-winger, probably a Tea Party member. However, one can rightly as what Tea Partier would believe the following:

 

  • – Shoot at the Pentagon and hate the military?
  • – Are registered Democrats?
  • – Hate George Bush and the whole Bush family?
  • – Think 9/11 was perpetrated not by Muslims but by Republicans?
  • – Grow and smoke marijuana?
  • – Read left-wing anti-Bush books?
  • – Are anti-war?
  • – Talk about “economic justice”?
  • – Think the Vietnam War and the Iraq War were not merely mistakes but were part of a government conspiracy?

The Pentagon shooter is linked to several gay rights groups along with PETA, NPR, various drug legalization orgs, Greenpeace and Al Franken. Not your typical Tea Party member, eh? Or, there was Joseph “the bomber” Stack. Another immediate member of the Tea Party (hence a conservative and/or Christian) according the media almost immediately after the attack. Interestingly enough, his written manifesto lines up well with Michael Moore movies.

 

  • Anti-health care system= Sicko
  • Anti-Capitalism= Capitalism, a Love Story
  • IRS cronyism with businesses= Capitalism, a Love Story
  • Anti-Bush= Fahrenheit 9/11
  • Blames Big Corporations for job issues= The Big One
(lots of debate here at the above quotes source) For a well thought out story string of stories, see Verum Serum’s insights: Here, here, as well as the excerpt you see here:
One – Joe Stack was a liberal. As I pointed out recently, Stack:

 

  • Hates George W. Bush and his “cronies”
  • Hates Big Pharma
  • Hates Big Insurance
  • Hates GM executives
  • Hates organized religion
  • Refers favorably to communism
  • And in his last words before dying, denigrates capitalism.

…(read more)…

Another person said to be a Christian Fundamentalist was James von Brunn, the Holocaust museum shooter. This first part is a post I did on him that counters fundamentalism:

Now isn’t this fascinating. James von Brunn , the white-supremacist suspect in the Holocaust Memorial Museum shooting in which the guard who was shot has now tragically died, describes the relevance of evolution to his sick thinking. He’s obsessed with “genetics.” He writes in his manifesto (emphasis added):

Approval of inter-racial breeding is predicated on idiotic Christian dogma that God’s children must love their enemies (a concept JEWS totally reject); and on LIBERAL/MARXIST/JEW propaganda that all men/races are created equal. These genocidal ideologies, preached from the American pulpits, taught in American schools, legislated in the halls of Congress (confirming TALMUDIC conviction that goyim are stupid sheep), are expected to produce a single, superintelligent, beautiful, non-White “American” population. Eliminating forever racism, inequality, bigotry and war. As with ALL LIBERAL ideologies, miscegenation is totally inconsistent with Natural Law: the species are improved through in-breeding, natural selection and mutation. Only the strong survive. Cross-breeding Whites with species lower on the evolutionary scale diminishes the White gene-pool while increasing the number of physiologically, psychologically and behaviorally deprived mongrels. Throughout history improvident Whites have miscegenated. The “brotherhood” concept is not new (as LIBERALS pretend) nor are the results — which are inevitably disastrous for the White Race — evident today, for example, in the botched populations of Cuba, Mexico, Egypt, India, and the inner cities of contemporary America. (Here’s the PDF version of Von Brunn’s “manifesto.”)

This wacko despises Christianity, too, though not quite as much as he does Judaism. Like Hitler in Mein Kampf, he draws lessons from his interpretation of Darwinism.

“The stronger must dominate and not mate with the weaker, which would signify the sacrifice of its own higher nature. Only the born weakling can look upon this principle as cruel, and if he does so it is merely because he is of a feebler nature and narrower mind; for if such a law [natural selection] did not direct the process of evolution then the higher development of organic life would not be conceivable at all…. If Nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with the stronger, she wishes even less that a superior race should intermingle with an inferior one; because in such a case all her efforts, throughout hundreds of thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being, may thus be rendered futile.” (Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, translator/annotator, James Murphy [New York: Hurst and Blackett, 1942], pp. 161-162)

One must keep in mind that this militant atheism is harmful and needs to be countered with Biblical principles. For instance, one article points out the following:

“Christianity has fought, still fights, and will fight science to the desperate end over evolution, because evolution destroys utterly and finally the very reason Jesus’ earthly life was supposedly made necessary. Destroy Adam and Eve and the original sin, and in the rubble you will find the sorry remains of the son of god. Take away the meaning of his death. If Jesus was not the redeemer that died for our sins, and this is what evolution means, then Christianity is nothing.” (G. Richard Bozarth, “The Meaning of Evolution”, American Atheist, 20 Sept. 1979, p. 30)

From another post of mine:

While Mr. von Brunn is currently being made out to be the poster child of the Republican Party, even a cursory look at his professed views shows he is the avowed enemy of the GOP in its current incarnation. Among many others, Mr. von Brunn hates,

 

  • Rupert Murdoch
  • Fox News
  • George W. Bush
  • John McCain
  • Weekly Standard
  • Iraq War
  • believed that 9/11 was an “inside job.”

Given this political sketch, Mr. von Brunn would feel at home at Camp Casey, Cindy Sheehan’s antiwar outpost in Crawford, Texas, and at the Daily Kos convention, rather than partaking in a National Review cruise with pro-Israeli war hawks Mark Steyn and Victor Davis Hanson. It’s not Charles Lindbergh’s Republican Party any more. And it hasn’t been for more than a half-century. But don’t tell that to the facile minds at the DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] and CNN.

I need to point out here that most violence comes from the Left. CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, etc., were all trying to find violence at Tea Parties, even the signs people carried were less violent than union or Democratic political marches. When violence was found to be done in the name of Islam, hosts would say they wished it was from a Tea Party member, or, after realizing many blacks supported the Tea Party, they even manufactured racism when they couldn’t find any!

(Much of the “violence” politically tuned is from the Left [see here, and here]):

(On this next video, watch your volume level)

UPDATE, he does seem very Christian (minus the violence and belonging to a Gnostic organization)… here are his own writings, translated (thanks to Reason.com). Much of it could be written by a conservative commentator, minus the violence:

UPDATE

The Other McCain has some good UPDATES

From the BBC (via The Other McCain):

Mr Breivik was a member of a Swedish neo-Nazi internet forum called Nordisk, according to Expo, a Swedish group monitoring far-right activity.

Here we get a definition forming of “Christian” Fundementalist. B.S.!

ALSO ~ Libertariam Republican is up to dat with the UPDATES!!

 

Also from LR:

Anders Behring Breivik might prove to be less of a conservative, and more of a populist.

This from FoxNews Twin Cities:

“He recently claimed that politics today was not about socialism vs. capitalism but nationalism vs. internationalism.”

Blogger Doug Sanders has contacts in Norway. They have offered a rough translation of some “collective writings” on the internet of Anders Behring Breivik.

There are some references to libertarians and conservatives which could be interpreted as him expressing positive viewpoints on both groups. At one point he even mentions the US Tea Party.

However, there’s also this passage which suggests that he may have been more socially conservative yet economically left-liberal, i.e. Populist.

From DougSanders.net:

The main axis is the economy and culture. They were right-wing culturally but leftwing economically. Liberals like of course to tag them as right wing as well as anti-socialists refer to them as leftextreme.

The third axis authoritarian vs liberal is inappropriate to use as a marker.

Quite bizarrely, he seems to have a knowledge of American politics, and at one point makes the statement “a Republican in the U.S. is a libertarian…”

…(read more)…