Robert Lewis Dear Is A Terrorist

Posted by Armadillo Joe

Terrorism (according to the FBI): "the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives." 

I can't say for certain who Robert Lewis Dear might be in his heart, nor what he might think or truly believe nor can I really know how he got there, though I can guess. Fact is, I don't care. Robert Lewis Dear is a terrorist. The undisputed facts are that he is white and male and had easy access to large, powerful guns with which he sought to impose the death penalty on women exercising their legal right to control the reproductive functions of their own bodies, the skilled personnel providing the services that facilitate that exercise and a sworn officer of the law who fulfilled his duty to protect that exercise. He was also subsequently captured alive by the constabulary. I could not help but notice that he is not Syrian nor even Middle Eastern. He is also not African-American. I also noticed that he is still currently alive, even after murdering three people (including a cop), injuring at least ten others and standing-off with police for several hours with hostages.

How he chose his target is not a mystery, or at least it shouldn’t be to anyone paying attention to the opportunistic maneuvers of craven politicians desperately groping around for a wedge-issue to gin up votes from an angry electorate. It is the very bloody real world result of the cynical demonization of the Planned Parenthood organization by the Republican Party’s wing-nut brigade, the conniving GOP leadership who enable them and a cowardly media who steadfastly refuse to use the word “fake” to describe a fake video because the provocateurs who made it can summon the ire of the stupid, the deluded and the corrupt to make cower the politicians who have staked their political fortunes on garnering the votes of the people who fervently believe the video is real despite all evidence to the contrary.

So many explosive issues are wrapped up in this event that any attempt to analyze it from any viewpoint will run smack-dab into something that will offend the other side, so let me just boil it all down to this: Robert Lewis Dear is a terrorist. He is not a lone wolf. He is not an isolated incident. His violence did not mysteriously drop out of a clear-blue sky. Just like other bursts of mass-violence such as Columbine or Aurora (or Charleston or Sandy Hook) this did not happen in a vacuum. I’m talking about context. I’m talking about the before, the during and the after.

Before: the socio-political space within which this man got revved-up enough to murder his fellow citizens in cold blood in broad daylight and was able to freely equip himself to that purpose, encouraged by a political party that has surrendered its duty to lead for the need to provoke, while the NRA will remain his unindicted co-conspirator for making it safe to manufacture ever more efficient death machines, market them to paranoids and crazies and sell them to whoever might feel the need or urge to inflict violence on some living thing, hopefully not human (wink-wink), and a cowardly media who have consistently failed to call his predecessors terrorists because a not-small segment of the American populace, a violent and armed segment, happens to largely sympathize with the underlying motives

During: his targets, that building, those people. Not random at all but instead utterly, depressingly predictable.

After: the segment of the population applauding his actions or blaming his victims or cheerfully explaining how the horrifying details are somehow kinda sorta understandable and how Robert Lewis Dear is somehow kinda sorta sympathetic and NOT at all a terrorist because he is white and male and American because terrorism is something THOSE people do. And, eventually, the truthers who will fight their cognitive dissonance by either deciding Robert Lewis Dear is an actual American hero doing what wimpy politicians have failed to do or, like Sandy Hook, eventually denying the truth of it at all, instead concocting an elaborate false-flag conspiracy theory to absolve their consciences of adjudicating such weighty moral choices. Easier by far to imbue your enemy with malevolent omnipotence to explain the gap between professed beliefs and worldly choices.

Robert Lewis Dear is a terrorist. He is as much a terrorist as the men who flew planes into buildings on 9/11. If you disagree, we have nothing to talk about.