By Brigitte L. Nacos
Today, Dr. George Tiller, a long-time target of the extremist anti-abortion milieu, was shot to death while he served as an usher during the Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas. In 1993, Tiller survived a shooting attack by an anti-abortion fanatic. Nobody should be surprised about the killing because Dr. Tiller was one of the most prominent targets of anti-abortion hate speech and of the revived so-called Nuremberg Files that list the names of abortion providers and advocates. Just take a look at one
of these sites that call abortion providers “baby butchers” and ask like-minded fanatics to “Starve Satan: Stop Abortion.” Virtual blood drips from parts of aborted babies on this site and similar ones. And there is a prominent headline “Tiller the Killer” that links to a list of baby butcher’s “evils.” Another web site proclaims that “Abortion is Slavery to Satan. Stop it or God will Destroy the USA.”
Although The Nuremberg Files were banned and disappeared from the Internet for a while, they made a come back more recently and once again list abortion clinic owners and workers as well as pro-choice supporters. Moreover, anti-abortion activists are asked to “locate themselves outside baby butcher businesses across the nation and film the people coming and going” to establish a record of those “who go out to kill God’s little babies.”
While law enforcement circles and the media report regularly on “eco-terrorism” by extreme environmentalist who have not killed a single person so far, they avoid the terms anti-abortion terrorism and anti-abortion terrorists although the perpetrators of this sort of violence killed half a dozen abortion doctors in the U.S. and Canada so far and injured far more. It seems that political violence from the right tends to be characterized as crime whereas political violence from the left is more readily labeled terrorism.
At this point, nothing is known about the arrested suspect and his motives. Reportedly, authorities in Wichita assume that the shooting was “the act of an isolated individual” but typically a “lone wolf” that commits an act of political violence subscribes to and is conditioned by the ideology of hate of a larger group or movement. Thus, chances are that the perpetrator was driven by a new wave of anti-abortion fanaticism that was fueled by the unsuccessful protest against Notre Dame University’s decision to bestow an honorary degree on pro-choice President Obama and by the fear that Obama’s presidency might weaken the pro-life side in terms of pertinent policies and Supreme Court membership.
Reasonable and moral people can take different positions in the pro-choice versus pro-life controversy. But like so many problems and disagreements, this issue, too, must be dealt with in the legitimate political process—not in the realm of anti-abortion terrorism, such as the gunning down of Dr. Tiller in his church.
Comments