terrorism

June 5, 2017April 18, 2020

Imprecise Labeling Of Terrorists Hurts Us All

Andy Burnham, the mayor of Manchester UK

Terry Firma over at Friendly Atheist, got in a thither because an elected official in the UK tried to claim the bomber in the suicide attack in Manchester wasn’t a Muslim. Firma falls into the trap most people do when they react to terrorism by people who don’t look like them. While the bomber’s religion probably did play a part in the motivation in the attack, Firma misses the point that using such a wide brush to label religious people doesn’t make sense and can cause more collateral damage.

June 19, 2015April 18, 2020

The Charleston Shooting Was Not About Religion

Emanuel A.M.E. Church Charleston SC

White conservatives, led by FOX ‘news’, have tried to spin the Charleston shooting as an attack on Christians. It continues their effort to marginalize and trivialize African-Americans and their experiences. Of course the issue this time isn’t debatable. Don’t let white conservatives try and distract from the real reasons for the shooting.

The evidence for this being a terrorist attack on blacks comes from the mouth of the shooter himself:

June 7, 2013April 18, 2020

Yay Congressional Bipartisanship! To Subvert The 4th Amendment! Yay??

There are actually times when Democrats and Republicans in Congress set aside their partisanship and work together. One is naming post offices and the other allowing the government to subvert our 4th Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure. In defending the NSA collecting phone numbers telecom members used, Congress members couldn’t give any specific examples that such intelligence collection actually stopped any specific attack and just said not to worry about it. When Congress tells us not to worry then we should worry especially when our civil rights are involved.

May 14, 2013April 18, 2020

Hell Freezes Over: Speaker Boehner Admits More Amendments Than Just The 2nd

Speaker John Boehner learning a law affects his friends

Just like when the Republicans were upset that the sequester they voted for would actually affect them and so they voted to fix that specific part, when it came out that the Department of Justice used the Patriot Act to secretly obtain phone records of the Associated Press, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) admitted that there is at least one more amendment to the Constitution besides the 2nd. What he complained about is what supporters of civil rights complained about before and after passage of the Patriot Act. Now that it is being used to investigate a friend of the Republican Party, the GOP is upset.

September 11, 2011April 18, 2020

September 11th – A Humanist Response 10 Years On

Image of WTC before the attack with US Flag in background

Today is the 10th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack on US soil. The World Trade Center in New York was attacked shortly before 9 AM on a bright and sunny Tuesday in 2001. By the end of the awful day both towers were destroyed, the Pentagon had been hit, and people were killed in a fourth plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. Five days later I wrote an essay about the attacks from my secular humanist perspective. I went through it this week and have posted it again – changed little from the day I wrote it.