The T-word

Rick Moran savages Sarah Palin for her apparent refusal to call abortion clinic bombers "terrorists":

...Yes, she condemns their actions. But she is parsing the definition of terrorism so as not to offend that small, but vocal part of the conservative base who may not see clinic bombers as heroes, but refuse to place their actions in a a moral context that equates the tactics of the jihadis with the Eric Rudolphs of the world.

This is moral cowardice. The purpose of bombing abortion clinics (it hasn’t happened in a decade) is exactly the same as fanatics who set off car bombs in crowded markets; that is, to intimidate and to terrorize people.

Have Muslim fanatics set off more bombs than Christians? Of course they have. But if you are going to base a moral judgment on numbers of dead, then you are probably able to parse the moral guilt of Hitler compared to Stalin – or perhaps Hitler compared to Idi Amin. The death of innocents perpetrated for political ends, be it fewer abortions due to the terrorizing of women and fewer abortion clinics due to their destruction, or the blowing up of a marketplace to intimidate and frighten people into abandoning support for their government is terrorism. It is always terrorism. It was terrorism yesterday, it is terrorism today, and it will be terrorism tomorrow. And anyone who can’t make the moral judgment that this is so is, in my opinion, a coward – especially since if Palin had admitted that bombing abortion clinics was terrorism, she would have angered a small but significant part of the conservative base.

A halfway competent conservative candidate would have pointed out that abortion clinic bombings are usually invoked by people desperate to draw a moral equivalency between Islamists and the Christian right, and that John McCain, as far as we know, never served on any boards with Eric Rudolph. (If she read Kathy Shaidle, she might have added that more clinics have been bombed on Law & Order than in real life.) But she also would have conceded that, by definition, anyone who would do such a thing is a terrorist.

I emphasize the words "halfway competent" here.

Damian P.

Posted by damian at October 26, 2008 09:36 PM