Homeland Security Department: Returning war veterans are terrorist threat

New Homeland Security Dept. classifications: The man on the left is the misguided defendant in the 9/11 attacks - the man on the right is a potential right-wing terrorist.  - Source photos/AP

On April 9, the thought police at Janet Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security issued a report on the potential threat of “right-wing extremism”, which categorized military veterans, and persons who are pro-life, support state’s rights, or are against illegal immigration as potential terrorists.

The threat assessment states that its authors have no information that “domestic right-wing terrorists” are planning acts of violence, but that such groups are using the election of a black president to recruit new members and have “not yet” turned to attack planning.  The report states that such groups are divided into three categories; “hate-oriented”; “anti-government” which, according to the report includes anyone who rejects federal authority in favor of state or local authority; and finally “groups or individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.”  The report repeatedly mentions returning Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans as potential recruits for right-wing terrorists.

The socialists will like to point out that the DHS also produced a report about Left-wing extremists in January of this year.  This report however, is about the use of cyber attacks by these groups.  Nowhere does the report use the term “terrorist” or list supporters of the United Nations, promoters of open borders, animal rights proponents, and pro-abortion activists as potential recruits for violent extremists.  In fact, the report goes out of its way to stress that left-wing extremists have a “…non-violent, ‘no harm’ doctrine…”

Every socialist’s favorite terrorist is Timothy McVeigh; his horrific attack in Oklahoma City in 1994 was the only terrorist attack in the United States ever perpetrated by a “right-wing military veteran.”  The Democrats like to associate conservatives and others on the political right with white supremacists and neo-Nazis.  They are able to accomplish this because these groups use appeals to the values of the right, such as patriotism, family, the rule of law, etc. to promote their cause.  This however does not make them part of the “right-wing” of American politics.  White supremacists are nothing more than racists - bent on achieving a superior place in society based upon their race because they are utter failures in life.  As for Nazis, while they try to gain support from the political right, it should be noted that the Nazi Party is properly known as the National Socialist Party – and offer nothing more than another flavor of socialist tyranny.

Unfortunately for Democrats, no matter how often they trot out Timothy McVeigh, the fact remains that political violence in the United States is the province of the left.  Organized labor, the cannon fodder of the left, has a history of violence so long and bloody that it would require volumes to catalog; From the Haymarket Square bombing in Chicago in 1886, to the United Mineworkers assassination of Jock Yablonski and his family in 1969, to the thousands of acts of violence and intimidation including vandalism, assaults, bombings, and murder.  Between 1975 and 1995 alone, the National Institute for Labor Relations Research reported more than 8,500 incidents of labor union violence.

In 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, a dedicated leftist who was a supporter of Fidel Castro and who had previously emigrated to the Soviet Union, renounced his US citizenship and attempted to become a Soviet citizen.

During the 1960’s and 1970’s significant left-wing violence raged across the United States.  The Marxist Black Panther Party engaged in acts of intimidation and violence ranging from intruding on the California Legislature carrying loaded rifles, to the planned assassinations of police officers.  All tolled, the Black Panthers murdered nine American police officers.

During the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, Youth International Party leftists descended upon the city and staged a riot, resulting in 589 arrests and 119 police officer injuries.

In the early 1970’s the leftist terror group known as the Symbionese Liberation Army conducted a bank robbery and murder spree in California.  They murdered a school superintendent by shooting him with hollow point bullets packed with cyanide, and a female bystander during a bank robbery who the killer later derided as a “bourgeois pig.”  Most famously, they kidnapped millionaire heiress Patty Hearst who later took part in several robberies.

President Obama’s associates William Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn, ran an organization known as the “Weather Underground” that conducted terrorist attacks from the late 1960’s to the mid-1970’s, in furtherance of their leftist agenda of achieving world communism.  Their activities included bombings of a New York Supreme Court justice’s home, New York City Police Headquarters, the United States Capital, the Pentagon, and the State Department.  In March of 1970, while preparing a nail bomb intended to murder hundreds of soldiers and their wives at a dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey, three Weather Underground members died when the bomb detonated prematurely.

In 1999, a conglomeration of left-leaning groups ranging from labor unions, to anti-capitalists, to anarchists, went on a rampage during the World Trade Organization conference.  The “protesters”, smashed windows, vandalized police cars, and caused $20 million dollars in total damage.

The far-left eco-terrorism organization, Earth Liberation Front, has engaged in more than 1,200 incidents of terrorism in the past decade, including bombings of a condominium complex in San Diego, and arsons of vehicles, private homes, and of a ski resort in Vail, Colorado.  In 2001, the ELF was listed by the FBI at the number one domestic terrorism threat.

During the 2004 presidential campaign, Bush/Cheney offices were vandalized in numerous cities; their supporters were attacked and brutalized in Orlando; in Wisconsin at least two Madison residents had Swastikas burned into their lawns in retaliation for displaying Bush/Cheney signs; a female Bush supporter was attacked and beaten by a male John Kerry supporter on board an airliner; and shots were fired into Bush/Cheney election campaign offices in Knoxville, Tennessee and Huntington, West Virginia. 

That same year, a Democrat who “was exercising [his] political expression” tried to run over Republican congresswoman Katherine Harris with his car.  In 2006, the left celebrated the release of the movie Death of a President which romanticized the fictional assassination of President Bush.

During the last election cycle, several McCain/Palin offices were vandalized by Democrat supporters, a phony anthrax attack was perpetrated in Denver against the McCain/Palin headquarters, and in New York City, a female supporter of McCain was beaten with a club by a professed Obama supporter.  The Black Panthers even reemerged, intimidating voters at polling places dressed in paramilitary uniforms and brandishing clubs.

By contrast, one returning veteran carried out a single, gruesome attack in Oklahoma City fifteen years ago.  If Ms. Napolitano is worried about violence she should look the socialist, communist, and racist groups among us.  Ms. Napolitano has forbidden the use of the word terrorist and terrorism when referring to Islamic terrorists, but she allows it to be freely applied to military veterans and those who oppose the administration’s left-wing agenda.  Unfortunately, the purpose of reports such as these is not to warn of potential threats, but rather to paint anyone who dissents from the government’s creeping socialism as a dangerous subversive.

I am a pro-life citizen who supports the constitution, opposes illegal immigration, owns and supports the right to possess a firearm, and once served in the military reserves.  So, even though I have never and would never take part in or advocate for an act of political violence, I urge Ms. Napolitano to add me to the administration’s enemies list along with our returning war veterans.  I would be proud to have my name listed next to them and be in the company of some other extremists - like Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Samuel Adams - who also favored state’s rights over federal intrusion, and once pledged together ‘their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor’ to throw off a tyrannical government.