Senator Lindsey Graham
(R-South Carolina)
By Elaine Magliaro
Willaim Saletan has an interesting article titled Whitewashing Terrorism over at Slate. In his article, Saletan claimed that “Republicans have firm rules for fighting terrorism—unless it’s committed by domestic racists.” He added that the Republican Party’s philosophy on fighting terrorism is clear. He provided a synopsis of it.
Saletan:
First, we must prioritize the fight. Second, we must challenge the teachings that motivate terror. Third, we must confront separatists who promote these ideas in our own country. Fourth, we must monitor networks that fund radicalization and violence.
Saletan said that following the above philosophy when it comes to dealing with terrorists does not apply when the terrorists happen to be white nationalists. He then pointed out examples to show how some of the Republican presidential candidates responded to last week’s massacre of nine black people in a church in Charleston by a domestic terrorist. Saletan claimed that those candidates set “aside the principles they normally apply to terrorism.” Saletan provided some examples to prove his point.
One of the Republican candidates that Saletan wrote about in his article was Lindsey Graham, the senator from South Carolina who has accused President Obama “of ignoring the doctrines that inspire Islamic jihadists.”
Graham had said, “Their way of life is motivated by religious teachings that require me and you to be killed, or enslaved, or converted…Their religious teachings compel them to come after us … If you don’t admit that, you can’t fight the war.”
Saletan said that Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who killed the nine people in the church in Charleston last week, had also been “inspired by doctrines of enmity, enslavement, and extermination.” Saletan added that Senator Graham didn’t appear “interested in these teachings.” He noted that Graham had told CNN, “We’re not going to give this guy an excuse about a book he might have read or a movie he watched or a song he listened to or a symbol out anywhere…It’s not the book, it’s not the movie, it’s not the flags, it’s him.”
Saletan:
On Monday, after ducking the Confederate flag question for days, Graham finally agreed it should be taken down. But he hasn’t changed his view that the flag and other Confederate symbols played no causal role: “The problems we have in South Carolina and throughout the world are not because of a movie or symbols. It’s because of what’s in people’s hearts.”
Click here to read William Saletan’s article Whitewashing Terrorism: Republicans have firm rules for fighting terrorism—unless it’s committed by domestic racists.
Nicole Plyler Fisk
Gene Howington
FFS Guest Blogger
Joy of Fishes
Chuck Stanley
shortfinals
Terry Welshans
ann li-summers
wordcloud9
Flowers For Socrates 
Like cats on a hot tin roof, these guys keep trying to find a safe spot to land.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/23/hillary-clinton-charleston-shooting-racist-terrorism-ferguson “Hillary Clinton has branded the murder of nine black churchgoers in Charleston an act of “racist terrorism” and linked the attack to America’s wider problem of entrenched racial inequality.
Clinton was in South Carolina not far from the Emanuel AME church, last Wednesday, just a few hours before a white supremacist joined a Bible study in its basement and opened fire.
“That night word of the killings struck like a blow to the soul,” Clinton said on Tuesday. “How do we make sense of such an evil act? And act of racist terrorism, perpetrated in a house of God?””
Well, since Hillary commented, I’m sure Darrell Issa is soon to launch a investigation into said comments. At taxpayers expense of course.
Good for Hillary. It takes courage to stand forthrightly with truth.
Not one of the Republican candidates had the courage to come out strongly against the entrenched racism that still exists in this country. Romney at least made an attempt. Only then did some of them dare to speak truthfully about what the killings were based on. Cowards, all of them.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/cruz-campaign-sc-confederate-flag ”
Two of the state legislators chairing Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) presidential campaign in South Carolina defended the Confederate flag this week after the state’s Republican governor called for its removal from state Capitol grounds.
State Sen. Lee Bright (R), a member of Cruz’s leadership team, said that removing the flag would dishonor the memory of those who fought for South Carolina during the Civil War, according to the Spartanburg Herald Journal. He added that the media was trying to create conflict by turning the flag into a wedge issue, characterizing the movement to do away with it and other symbols of the Confederacy as a “Stalinist purge.”
In a later interview with Politico, Bright said that he hadn’t spoken with the Cruz campaign about the issue and would “encourage presidential candidates to let us deal with this.”
A spokesman for Cruz’s presidential campaign told Business Insider that the candidate would be leaving the matter of the flag up to those local lawmakers.”
Strom Thurmond’s Son Just Called for the Removal of the Confederate Flag
—By Edwin Rios
| Wed Jun. 24, 2015
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/06/south-carolina-state-senator-and-son-segregationist-just-called-confederate-flags-remov
Excerpt:
On the floor of the South Carolina Senate Tuesday, the son of longtime US Senator and segregationist Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond made an impassioned call to remove the Confederate flag from the statehouse.
Republican State Sen. Paul Thurmond looked past his own ancestry—and at least two of his colleagues in the Senate who have told the Post and Courier they would vote to keep the flag. He told his colleagues that the “time is right” to remove the symbolic flag from above the statehouse one day after Gov. Nikki Haley and Sen. Lindsey Graham called for its removal. Thurmond eulogized his friend and colleague state Sen. Clementa Pinckney, who was leading Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Church when he was killed, alongside eight other black churchgoers, in a mass shooting on June 19. Authorities have charged 21-year-old Dylann Roof.
Reflecting on the June 19 shooting, Thurmond said:
“I cannot comprehend the hate that was visited upon the Holy City, but I can respond with love and unity and kindness and maybe show others that their motivation for future attacks of hate will not be tolerated, will not result in a race war, will not divide us, but rather will strengthen our resolve to come together as one nation, one state, and one community under God.”
Senator Attributes Charleston Massacre To ‘Mideast Hate’
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2015/06/24/3673809/senator-charleston-shooter-thats-mideast-hate-thats-something-didnt-think/
Speaking on the floor of the United States Senate, Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said suspected Charleston shooter Dylann Roof was an example of “Mideast hate.” “That’s something I didn’t think we had here but apparently we do,” he added.
Graham has dismissed the idea that the Charleston murders had any larger impact. “I just think he was one of these whacked out kids. I don’t think it’s anything broader than that,” Graham said.
Roof, in fact, appeared to be strongly motivated by white supremacist ideology and allegedly wrote a long manifesto espousing those views. While Graham is focused on threats originating from the Middle East, researchers believe right-wing extremism represents a larger threat.
Lindsey Graham is a low-grade moron.
Not to put too fine a point on it.
Gene,
Charles Pierce refers to Graham as Senator Huckleberry J. Butchmeup.