By threatening to burn copies of the Koran on Saturday, Terry Jones is holding the world hostage to his insane hatred, threatening to unleash intold violence. He is, in effect, a terrorist. He seeks to intimidate and coerce through the threat of violence and the generation of hatred and fear. And, as Rachel Maddow explains below, he is only able to do this because of a climate of hatred and fear that's been deliberately created over the years by a number of extremist political figures, most notably, Newt Gingrich.
Gingrich is whipping up hatred and fear towards Muslims and Islam today. But it's merely a matter of political convenience. He will target anyone he finds convenient. In mid-1990s, starting just before he became Speaker, Gingrich bkamed liberals, welfare recipients and the welfare state for all manner of horrors, real and imagined. For someone who spoke endlessly about "personal responsibility", he had an amazing ability to shift the blame for a series of horrific murders off of those who actually committed them, and onto vaguely defined groups of people defined by Gingrich as the enemies of "normal Americans. Consider some of the most striking examples (these aren't available online, to my knowledge, but can be found in databases such as Proquest or Lexis/Nexus):
REMARK PUTS GINGRICH ON HOT SEAT; The Associated Press. St. Louis Post - Dispatch St. Louis, Mo.: Nov 8, 1994. pg. 13.A
Rep. Newt Gingrich came under fire Monday for using the South Carolina child-murder case to urge voters to back Republican candidates....
In an interview Saturday with The Associated Press, Gingrich was asked how the campaign was going in the final week.
"Slightly more moving our way," he replied. "I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things. . . .
"How a mother can kill her two children, 14 months and 3 years, in hopes that her boyfriend would like her, is just a sign of how sick the system is, and I think people want to change. The only way you get change is to vote Republican. That's the message for the last three days.
And this:
Gingrich revises history in partisan attack KENNETH J. COOPER. Houston Chronicle Houston, Tex.: Mar 8, 1995. pg. 9
Monday, Gingrich condemned liberal Democrats for "the monstrosity they have created, their public housing projects that are death traps for the poor, their public schools that are illiteracy traps for the poor."
But neither public education nor public housing were the legislative products solely of Democrats, as Gingrich partially acknowledged Tuesday when reporters pressed him to explain his remarks. But he insisted the blame for failures in both systems belongs to Democrats.
The nation's oldest public school, Boston Latin School, was established in 1635 -- long before either of today's major political parties was formed. It was Whigs who pushed universal public education in Northern states before the Civil War, and Republicans who opened schools throughout the South afterward.
"The public schools don't belong to one party or another," said Arthur Levine, president of Teachers College, Columbia University. "It's foolish. One would expect more of a former college professor."
Tuesday, Gingrich revised his remark to blame Democrats for ""the modern, unionized, big city school system with work rules that make no sense, with very big bureaucracies, with a tremendous amount of money wasted and with buildings that don't function."
Amd this:
Gingrich blames welfare for woman's death: Speaker's remarks on people who killed pregnant woman enrage Democrats McCollum, M.J.. Philadelphia Tribune. Philadelphia, Pa.: Nov 24, 1995. Vol. 112, Iss. 94; pg. 1-A
By M.J. McCollum
Tribune Staff
House Speaker Newt Gingrich blamed welfare for the murder of a pregnant Illinois women and her two children.
Gingrich said the killing of 28-year-old Debra Evans, 10-year-old Samantha and 8-year-old Joshua was "the final culmination of a drug-addicted underclass with no sense of humanity, no sense of civilization and no sense of the rules of life, in which human beings respect each other."
A woman and two men are accused of killing Evans to get to her unborn baby. The suspects allegedly killed Evans, then used scissors to cut out the baby who was due the next day.
It has not been revealed whether or not any of the assailants are welfare recipients. They have no prior convictions or drug violations.
Gingrich also blamed the criminal justice system and the education system for the murders.
Amd This:
Gingrich under fire for murder claim Speaker uses horrific killing to attack welfare state MARTIN WALKER IN WASHINGTON. The Guardian Manchester (UK): Nov 23, 1995. pg. 014
AN INTER-RACIAL murder, in which a pregnant woman was murdered so that the father could steal the child from her womb, triggered a political row yesterday as Democrats denounced a claim by the Republican House speaker, Newt Gingrich, that the killing was the fault of the liberal welfare state.
The slaughter in Chicago last Friday of Deborah Evans, aged 28, and two of her children, has stunned an America which had thought itself beyond shock at crimes of sexual violence. Mr Gingrich's use of the case to draw a political moral has made it a national issue.
"The speaker is out of control," said David Eichenbaum for the Democratic National Committee.
"Last week he shut down the government because he got a bad seat on Air Force One. This week he blames his political opponents for a most brutal murder that has revolted the whole of America. Where does it end?"
Deborah Evans was a white welfare mother, with two white children of 10 and 8, and all three were found stabbed to death. Her former lover, Laverne Ward, a black man and father of her 19-month-old child and father of the child in her womb, has been arrested and charged with her murder. He is further charged with then cutting open her uterus with a pair of household scissors, and taking away the baby to give it to his cousin, who had tried and failed to have a baby.
"Let's talk about the moral decay of the world the left is defending. Let's talk about what the welfare state has created," Mr Gingrich told a conference of Republican governors. "We end up with the final culmination of a drug-addicted underclass with no sense of humanity, no sense of civilisation."
Deborah Evans was on welfare, but there is no evidence that drugs were involved in the crime, Illinois police said. That did not stop Mr Gingrich before, when he last year blamed "liberal values" in the case of Susan Smith, who drowned her two children in her car so that she could go off untrammelled with a new lover. At the trial, she blamed her behaviour on sexual abuse by her father, a prominent member of his local Republican Party.
Already criticised for damaging the Republican case in the budget battle with the White House by complaining of being snubbed on the presidential plane, the accident-prone Mr Gingrich was sticking to his combative guns yesterday, insisting that the case was a parable of the social decay caused by the welfare state.
"What's going wrong is a welfare system which subsidised people for doing nothing; a criminal system which tolerated drug dealers; an educational system which allows kids to not learn and which rewards tenured teachers who can't teach, while destroying poor children who it traps in a process with no hope," Mr Gingrich said.
"This happened in America. It happened because for two generations we haven't had the guts to talk about right and wrong. We've talked about situation ethics. We've talked about victimisation. We've talked about our needs. We've had soap-opera-like television shows where people get on and describe the most disgusting behaviour."
Gingrich has always been about stirring up an atmosphere of fear and hatred, inventing imaginary horrors, distracting attention from those who are actually responsible for real horrors, in order to blame his political enemies, and posturing ludicrously as a know-it-all authority, while getting an amazing variety of fundamental facts totally and embarrasingly wrong. He is a buffoon. But an incredibly dangerous one. And he is becoming even more dangerous than he was in the mid-1990s. He is, in fact, a de facto terrorist mastermind bent on stirring up another Crusade, another Hundred Years War or better.
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