Frank Rich Takes On The Republican Party Noise Machine's Role In Inciting Right Wing Terror

Although it hasn't gotten much play in the U.S., Europeans are feeling a little queasy about a new far right vigilante organization that sounds and looks incredibly like Mussolini's Blackshirts. And Silvio Berlesconi's right-wing government is sanctioning them.

Prosecutors immediately opened an investigation into the group because of the similarity to the black and brown Fascist uniforms worn during the 1930's by sympathizers in Italy and Germany... These groups have sprung up in several Italian cities, especially in the northern strongholds of the right wing, anti-immigrant Northern League.

But controversy was sparked when the Italian National Guard revealed its uniform in Milan at the weekend.
Members will wear a khaki shirt, black cap featuring a rampant eagle insignia, 18 hole leather boots, Latin motto and armbands bearing a black sunwheel very similar to a Nazi swastika.

...Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, whose centre right wing coalition was elected on a tough law and order campaign, has insisted that vigilante groups, such as the Italian National Guard, would be simple 'citizen patrols'.

The group is based in Turin, but has offices in the south of Italy in Puglia and Calabria as well as on the island of Sicily.

Many Italians blame the country's growing crime rate on illegal immigrants and especially Romany gypsies and see the 'ronde' or vigilante patrols as a necessary course of action.

Marco Minniti, from the opposition centre left, described the situation as 'disconcerting delirium'.

'Entrusting the security of the country to political groups like this is a blow to the very heart of democracy,' he said.

Here in the U.S. there is a rising tide of right-wing terrorism and violence encouraged by Hate Talk radio and Fox TV, which is far worse and far more dangerous and destructive than the neo-fascist movement in Italy. Fox's hate-spewing Bill O'Reilly is an inciter and unindicted conspirator in the murder of Dr. George Tiller. Quietly justified inside the Republican Party base, the now closed clinic-- yes, the terrorists have won-- is being eyed by rightists who want to buy it as a symbol of their "victory."

Last week, as we came to grips with the right-wing sociopath running into Washington's Holocaust Memorial Museum with a shotgun and opening fire we also read the details of another horrible and brutal acting out of far right terrorism, this one by Minutemen driven to violent delirium by the daily xenophobic rantings of extremists like CNN's Lou Dobbs and the GOP's vicious anti-Hispanic hitman Brian Bilbray (R-CA). The murder rampage in Arizona included the point blank killing of a 9 year old girl. Jason Bush, operations director of the Minutemen American Defense, Shawna Forde, head of the same right-wing terror group, and Albert Robert Gaxiola dressed up as police officers and forced their way into a home, shooting and killing a father and daughter and wounding the mother.

Forde is well known in the anti-illegal immigration community, said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University-San Bernardino.

"She's someone who even within the anti-immigration movement has been labeled as unstable," Levin said. "She was basically forced out of another anti-immigrant group, the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, and then founded her own organization."

When Obama spoke at Buchenwald he warned us all that we need to be internally vigilant that we don't fall into the inhumanity that rightists are so very susceptible to. "And just as we identify with the victims, it's also important for us I think to remember that the perpetrators of such evil were human, as well, and that we have to guard against cruelty in ourselves." Yes, we do-- and I felt compelled at that moment to show another kind of repellent right-wing orgy of hatred-- from American Jews in Israel calling Obama a nigger, calling for his assassination and repeating a slanderous Republican Party talking point that he wasn't born in America. (Watch the video at the link above-- but only on an empty stomach.)

Yesterday Frank Rich grappled with the complicity of GOP front organizations in the rise of domestic right-wing hate groups in a NY Times Op-Ed, The Obama Haters' Silent Enablers. He recounts a Fox anchor, Shepard Smith, somehow surprised that the anti-Obama drum beat that his station sounds 24/7 has resulted in an outpouring of psychotic hatred from the station's viewers, “'hate that’s not based in fact,' much of it about Barack Obama and some of it sharing the museum gunman’s canard that the president was not a naturally born citizen. These are Americans 'out there in a scary place,' Smith said." A scary place alright; they're in a word created by Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity and Fox News.

These are extraordinary words to hear on Fox. The network’s highest-rated star, Bill O’Reilly, had assailed Tiller, calling him “Tiller the baby killer” and likening him to the Nazis, on 29 of his shows before the doctor was murdered at his church in Kansas. O’Reilly was unrepentant, stating that only “pro-abortion zealots and Fox News haters” would link him to the crime. But now another Fox star, while stopping short of blaming O’Reilly, was breaching his network’s brand of political correctness: he tied the far-right loners who had gotten their guns out in Wichita and Washington to the mounting fury of Obama haters.

What is this fury about? In his scant 145 days in office, the new president has not remotely matched the Bush record in deficit creation. Nor has he repealed the right to bear arms or exacerbated the wars he inherited. He has tried more than his predecessor ever did to reach across the aisle. But none of that seems to matter. A sizable minority of Americans is irrationally fearful of the fast-moving generational, cultural and racial turnover Obama embodies-- indeed, of the 21st century itself. That minority is now getting angrier in inverse relationship to his popularity with the vast majority of the country. Change can be frightening and traumatic, especially if it’s not change you can believe in.

We don’t know whether the tiny subset of domestic terrorists in this crowd is egged on by political or media demagogues — though we do tend to assume that foreign jihadists respond like Pavlov’s dogs to the words of their most fanatical leaders and polemicists. But well before the latest murderers struck-- well before another “antigovernment” Obama hater went on a cop-killing rampage in Pittsburgh in April-- there have been indications that this rage could spiral out of control.

This was evident during the campaign, when hotheads greeted Obama’s name with “Treason!” and “Terrorist!” at G.O.P. rallies. At first the McCain-Palin campaign fed the anger with accusations that Obama was “palling around with terrorists.” But later John McCain thought better of it and defended his opponent’s honor to a town-hall participant who vented her fears of the Democrats’ “Arab” candidate. Although two neo-Nazi skinheads were arrested in an assassination plot against Obama two weeks before Election Day, the fever broke after McCain exercised leadership.

That honeymoon, if it was one, is over. Conservatives have legitimate ideological beefs with Obama, rightly expressed in sharp language. But the invective in some quarters has unmistakably amped up. The writer Camille Paglia, a political independent and confessed talk-radio fan, detected a shift toward paranoia in the air waves by mid-May. When “the tone darkens toward a rhetoric of purgation and annihilation,” she observed in Salon, “there is reason for alarm.” She cited a “joke” repeated by a Rush Limbaugh fill-in host, a talk-radio jock from Dallas of all places, about how “any U.S. soldier” who found himself with only two bullets in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden would use both shots to assassinate Pelosi and then strangle Reid and bin Laden.

This homicide-saturated vituperation is endemic among mini-Limbaughs. Glenn Beck has dipped into O’Reilly’s Holocaust analogies to liken Obama’s policy on stem-cell research to the eugenics that led to “the final solution” and the quest for “a master race.” After James von Brunn’s rampage at the Holocaust museum, Beck rushed onto Fox News to describe the Obama-hating killer as a “lone gunman nutjob.” Yet in the same show Beck also said von Brunn was a symptom that “the pot in America is boiling,” as if Beck himself were not the boiling pot cheering the kettle on.

But hyperbole from the usual suspects in the entertainment arena of TV and radio is not the whole story. What’s startling is the spillover of this poison into the conservative political establishment. Saul Anuzis, a former Michigan G.O.P. chairman who ran for the party’s national chairmanship this year, seriously suggested in April that Republicans should stop calling Obama a socialist because “it no longer has the negative connotation it had 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.” Anuzis pushed “fascism” instead, because “everybody still thinks that’s a bad thing.” He didn’t seem to grasp that “fascism” is nonsensical as a description of the Obama administration or that there might be a risk in slurring a president with a word that most find “bad” because it evokes a mass-murderer like Hitler.

The Anuzis “fascism” solution to the Obama problem has caught fire. The president’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and his speech in Cairo have only exacerbated the ugliness. The venomous personal attacks on Sotomayor have little to do with the 3,000-plus cases she’s adjudicated in nearly 17 years on the bench or her thoughts about the judgment of “a wise Latina woman.” She has been tarred as a member of “the Latino KKK” (by the former Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo), as well as a racist and a David Duke (by Limbaugh), and portrayed, in a bizarre two-for-one ethnic caricature, as a slant-eyed Asian on the cover of National Review. Uniting all these insults is an aggrieved note of white victimization only a shade less explicit than that in von Brunn’s white supremacist screeds.

Obama’s Cairo address, meanwhile, prompted over-the-top accusations reminiscent of those campaign rally cries of “Treason!” It was a prominent former Reagan defense official, Frank Gaffney, not some fringe crackpot, who accused Obama in the Washington Times of engaging “in the most consequential bait-and-switch since Adolf Hitler duped Neville Chamberlain.” He claimed that the president-- a lifelong Christian-- “may still be” a Muslim and is aligned with “the dangerous global movement known as the Muslim Brotherhood.” Gaffney linked Obama by innuendo with Islamic “charities” that “have been convicted of providing material support for terrorism.”

If this isn’t a handy rationalization for another lone nutjob to take the law into his own hands against a supposed terrorism supporter, what is? Any such nutjob can easily grab a weapon. Gun enthusiasts have been on a shopping spree since the election, with some areas of our country reporting percentage sales increases in the mid-to-high double digits, recession be damned.

...Last week it was business as usual, as Republican leaders nattered ad infinitum over the juvenile rivalry of Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich at the party’s big Washington fund-raiser. Few if any mentioned, let alone questioned, the ominous script delivered by the actor Jon Voight with the G.O.P. imprimatur at that same event. Voight’s devout wish was to “bring an end to this false prophet Obama.”

This kind of rhetoric, with its pseudo-Scriptural call to action, is toxic. It is getting louder each day of the Obama presidency. No one, not even Fox News viewers, can say they weren’t warned.

Warned? Why not taken off the public airwaves for incitement? Maybe we can finally make some good use of Bush's and Cheney's insistence on preventive detention for terrorists.