A coworker who is a Muslim vented to me the other day. He’d seen yet another TV show featuring Islamic Terrorists. He wondered why there weren’t more shows about Christian terrorist groups. I had to admit that I couldn’t think of many acts of terrorism by Christian militants, and few films/episodes about them. There’s In The Heat Of the Night (racism, but I think the KKK hate more than black people), and i’m sure there must have been a series or two that dealt with women’s clinic bombings. And there’s Timothy McVeigh. Did they ever make a movie about him, or use his actions as a basis for an episode of a crime drama? And was he a member of a ‘militant group’, or was he freelance? I don’t think David Koresh counts, since he and his group didn’t initiate a terror attack. He mentioned the IRA, and I’ve seen a film or two featuring them (A War Of Children and Patriot Games come to mind).
It seems to me that our society doesn’t lend itself to non-Islamic terrorism. And of course, terrorism by Islamic radicals is topical now. How about a list of television episodes and films dealing with non-Islamic terror plots?
Or Islamic terrorism either. We’ve actually had very little of that within the country. 9/11 may have been the most spectacular incident, but in terms of frequency, we get more homegrown stuff like Eric Rudolph, Tim McVeigh, anti-abortion terrorists, white supremacists and the like. Not that any of it is pervasive or epidemic, but our Muslim population shows no more inherent tendency towards violence or extremism than our Christians.
The go-to baddies for domestic terrorism in popular entertainment tends to be white supremacists, neo-nazis, KKK rednecks and the like. Examples are innumerable.
Wel, there was Mississippi Burning about the KKK killing those civil rights activists college students in 1964 & the FBI investigation thereof. That was in 1988, so almost 20 yers ago. That’s more of a true-crime/police than a terrorism story though.
Brad Pitt also did 12 Monkeys and Fight Club, both of which featured fictional Terrorist groups which were non-religious, so I guess neither the Army of the 12 Monkeys nor Paper Street Soap Company got the tax break.
I think it might have been a forest for the trees kind of thing. There are so many that they’re engrained in the culture and practically invisible. I mean, Gone with the Wind — the whole burning of Atlanta was an act of terrorism by Christians.
Also, RE Timothy McVeigh- while some of his right-wing-extremist associations were Christian, there was no evidence that he himself was Christian, and in fact, his few statements that were made public while he was in prison indicate more of a Nietzschean philosophy. The poem INVICTUS as his last words isn’t exactly something one says when one is ready to go meet Jesus.
Oddly, Eric Rudolph is claiming much the same sort of philosophy, but his anti-abortion, anti-gay attacks seem indicative of a deranged-C’nity.
The powerful tend to get nicer labels for what they do. At this stage in history, as a group the Christians are more powerful, so they attack others in ways that don’t get labeled terrorism. Indiscriminate aerial bombing doesn’t get called terrorism, while indiscriminate car bombing does, for example.
The opposite is also true; attacks using unconventional weapons or tactics is called terrorism, when it would not be if the same act was performed by, say, our military against a similar Muslim target. I’ve often heard the truck bomb attack on the US Marine’s barracks call terrorism, while few people would call it terrorism if we lobbed a cruise missle into someone else’s barracks.
There’d be a lot more Christian terrorists if more Christians lived in countries where a lot of guys have no shot of getting laid until they are in their late 20s/early 30s, as is the case in some of the countries that are really productive of terrorists, like Saudi Arabia.
Terrorism, thankfully, is just not a major form of violence in the Christian west: in part probably because Christians have generally been the ones in power and have had little reason to use terrorism as a method, which is generally used by those who are too tactically weak to operate any other way. An obsession with terrorism as a tactic isn’t some universal idea for all groups, even highly violent activist groups. It’s a particular idea that happens to have taken a particularly strong hold on some Middle Eastern cultures.