# Christian terrorists **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [January 20, 2007, 5:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christian-terrorists/388735 "2007-01-20T17:52:05Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2007, 2:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christian-terrorists/388735/21 "2007-01-21T02:43:52Z")
Any movies or tv shows about anti-muslim terrorism in the Bosnian conflict? ---
**Author:** ![Dangerosa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/22d042/32.png) [@Dangerosa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dangerosa)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2007, 4:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christian-terrorists/388735/22 "2007-01-21T04:39:08Z")
[QUOTE=Apos] 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. [/QUOTE] Dated a guy briefly who had a back covered in scars from getting blown through a plate glass window in N. Ireland from a nearby car bomb. He might not agree with you. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_L.A](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_l.a/32/1084_2.png) [@Johnny\_L.A](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_L.A)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2007, 4:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christian-terrorists/388735/23 "2007-01-21T04:56:10Z")
I hope this doesn’t turn into a terrorism debate. I’m really just looking for terrorist films and television shows where the baddies are not Muslim. ---
**Author:** ![Horatio\_Hellpop](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e5b9ba/32.png) [@Horatio\_Hellpop](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Horatio_Hellpop)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2007, 5:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christian-terrorists/388735/24 "2007-01-21T05:21:57Z")
[QUOTE=Johnny L.A.] I hope this doesn’t turn into a terrorism debate. I’m really just looking for terrorist films and television shows where the baddies are not Muslim. [/QUOTE] The Jackal (w. Bruce Willis) Nighthawks (Stallone) ---
**Author:** ![Siam\_Sam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d78d45/32.png) [@Siam\_Sam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Siam_Sam)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2007, 5:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christian-terrorists/388735/25 "2007-01-21T05:31:01Z")
[QUOTE=Johnny L.A.] 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? [/QUOTE] All of the real-life people and groups mentioned were relatively long ago. Even the IRA has quited down. Your co-worker out\ght to face it: The religious terrorist du jour is Islamic. ---
**Author:** ![Zabali\_Clawbane](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/ecd19e/32.png) [@Zabali\_Clawbane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zabali_Clawbane)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2007, 5:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christian-terrorists/388735/26 "2007-01-21T05:43:10Z")
[QUOTE=pool] Correct me if I’m wrong but Fred Phelps has not to my knowledge committed or threatened to commit acts of violence or anything else harmful. [/QUOTE] [**Yes**](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westboro_Baptist_Church_(Topeka)#Criminal_record) he has, and he and his followers have faced charges for it. Also, **Baker** who has encountered him in person says he threatens and intimidates people. [QUOTE=Wikipedia] **Phelps Sr. was found guilty of disorderly conduct as defined by aggravated intimidation of a witness** [/QUOTE] He [also](http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/michael_haggerty/expose3.htm) severely beat his own children and wife, (and allegedly killed the fiance of one of his sons to get rid of her) according to testimony given by some of his children, though he was never convicted of it. Those still in his flock deny any abuse happened, of course. ---
**Author:** ![DanBlather](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/f4b2a3/32.png) [@DanBlather](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DanBlather)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2007, 8:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christian-terrorists/388735/27 "2007-01-21T08:20:03Z")
[QUOTE=FriarTed] 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. [/QUOTE] He is not a _true_ Scotsman. ---
**Author:** ![pool](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pool/32/4152_2.png) [@pool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pool)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2007, 8:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christian-terrorists/388735/28 "2007-01-21T08:37:50Z")
> [@](#): > > Originally posted by **Zabali\_Clawbane** > Yes he has, and he and his followers have faced charges for it. Also, Baker who has encountered him in person says he threatens and intimidates people. I stand corrected, I didn’t know that they had actually done anything other than annoy people. ---
**Author:** ![Raguleader](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/258eb7/32.png) [@Raguleader](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Raguleader)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2007, 9:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christian-terrorists/388735/29 "2007-01-21T09:00:20Z")
Pick an episode of Walker Texas Ranger at random, and the bad guy of the week will usually be a redneck or KKKrazy of some sort. A few of the episodes even include terrorism, I think. IIRC, “Behind Enemy Lines” featured, as the plot-motivating factor, a US Navy reconnisance jet witnessing a public execution by Eastern European soldiers, who then try to kill the messenger before he can get back to base (I don’t remember who they were executing, since I have never seen the first half of the movie) There was also a first-season episode of JAG which had crazy militia-types trying to steal nuclear weapons from the Navy (though one of them was planning to betray his friends and instead sell them to the Iraqis for some large sum of money), and Clark Palmer, one of the more devious bad guys on the show, was a clean-cut all-American guy who tried to do stuff like assassinate a witness in a trial with a small-scale bio-weapon, and managed to be a severe thorn in Commander Rabb’s side even after he was locked up at Fort Leavenworth. A very interesting movie to watch in a modern-day context is Red Dawn, which has American teenagers waging guerilla warfare against occupying Mexican, Cuban, and Russian soldiers in rural Colorado, even at one point blowing up a book store that had been turned into a “Friendship Center” or something like that. Has guys on both sides of the conflict in the movie portrayed as good people doing very bad things in the name of war at various points in the movie. [QUOTE=Der Trihs] 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. [/QUOTE] IIRC, the defining factors for whether or not an attack is a terrorist attack is that they aren’t done by a state directly (ie: It’s not done by Iranian or Iraqi or Saudi or Irish or American soldiers), and the primary purpose is to cause terror out of proportion to the actual material damage (ie: if a squadron of Air Force bombers flattens several city blocks to destroy a factory, terror wasn’t the primary motive). Thus, a cruise missile hitting an enemy barracks certainly isn’t a terrorist attack, since it’s one soldier fighting another soldier (albeit from 100 miles away with a guided missile at 3AM), and a truck bomb plowing into a Marine barracks, while definitley a very bad thing from where I’m sitting in the USofA, is a much fuzzier area than it is often historically made out to be. Soldiers in a war are arguably open targets, even to less-traditional strategies, but the intent of the attack was arguably to scare the Americans off, rather than killing them all or otherwise leaving them physically incapacitated to fight. Anyhow, this isn’t really on topic, so let’s just wrap it up with “Life would be better if we all just had food fights instead of wars.” ---
**Author:** ![Antonius\_Block](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/51bf81/32.png) [@Antonius\_Block](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Antonius_Block)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2007, 9:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christian-terrorists/388735/30 "2007-01-21T09:52:23Z")
One could argue that the 1857 [Mountain Meadows massacre](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Meadows_Massacre) of westbound emigrants (mainly from Arkansas) was an act of Christian terrorism. Although the subject is highly controversial, it’s **generally** accepted that the massacre, in which up to 140 pioneers were slaughtered, was carried out by Mormons, some of whom may have been dressed as Indians (the [“False Flag”](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag) style of operation being a common component of terrorism). _[Note: I don’t want to drag this into GD, and am making no claim that the massacre was carried out on the orders of (or with knowledge of) Brigham Young.]_ The Fancher party – men, women, and children – posed no military threat to the Mormon militiamen, and were massacred while being “escorted” after a white flag “truce”. The Mormon participants were later sworn to secrecy. There was a low-budget 2004 film on the subject called [Burying the Past: Legacy of the Mountain Meadows Massacre](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0397048/), but – more relevant to the OP – there’s also an upcoming higher-profile film: [September Dawn](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0473700/) with Terence Stamp as [Brigham Young](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigham_young) , Dean Cain as [Joseph Smith](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Smith%2C_Jr.), and Jon Voight. ---
**Author:** ![Lissa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/85f322/32.png) [@Lissa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lissa)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2007, 6:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christian-terrorists/388735/31 "2007-01-21T18:20:19Z")
[QUOTE=Liberal] I mean, _Gone with the Wind_ — the whole burning of Atlanta was an act of terrorism by Christians. [/QUOTE] Well, no not really. What you see in the film is when the Confederate army evacuated Atlanta. They torched their supplies and ammunition train, as well as any infrastructure, like factories, which they thought could be used by the Union. The fires weren’t meant to completely destroy the city, nor to terrorize the populace. The director actually sent out a memo to theaters and the press asking that the “burning of Atlanta” scene not be referred to as such and explaining what the scene actually represented. ---
**Author:** ![Annie-Xmas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecc23a/32.png) [@Annie-Xmas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Annie-Xmas)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2007, 2:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christian-terrorists/388735/32 "2007-01-22T14:12:14Z")
[QUOTE=pool] I stand corrected, I didn’t know that they had actually done anything other than annoy people. [/QUOTE] Eventually annoyance becomes illegal harrassment. An abortion clinic won a $8,400,000 settlement against pro-lifer, anti-abortionist [Randy Alcorn](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Alcorn) ---
**Author:** ![FriarTed](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/friarted/32/1052_2.png) [@FriarTed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FriarTed)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2007, 2:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christian-terrorists/388735/33 "2007-01-22T14:17:37Z")
[QUOTE=DanBlather] He is not a _true_ Scotsman. [/QUOTE] Seriously, give me a cite showing that Timothy McVeigh was a professing Christian, especially during the Oklahoma City bombing. His inspirational book THE TURNER DIARIES was written by William Pierce, whose brand of white supremacism was vehemently anti-Christian. ---
**Author:** ![rayh](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e79b87/32.png) [@rayh](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rayh)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2007, 3:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christian-terrorists/388735/34 "2007-01-22T15:01:36Z")
[Munich](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0408306/). [The Patriot](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120786/). [Under Seige](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105690/) Ok, anything by Stephen Seagal, really. [Victory at Entebbe](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075391/) [Raid on Entebbe](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076594/) The **Die Hard** films. ---
**Author:** ![5que](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/5/3bc359/32.png) [@5que](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/5que)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2007, 5:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christian-terrorists/388735/35 "2007-01-22T17:34:33Z")
_Contact_, with Jodie Foster. There’s a crazy white-haired Jesus Freak that blows up the first contact machine and kills Tom Skerritt. ---
**Author:** ![Bippy\_the\_Beardless](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ac8455/32.png) [@Bippy\_the\_Beardless](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bippy_the_Beardless)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2007, 11:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christian-terrorists/388735/36 "2007-01-22T23:55:07Z")
If my memory serves there were no Islamic Terrorist enimies in any James Bond film. (Though JB does meet up with the Muja Hadim (sp) as a friendly force in one film). Alias has very few middle eastern terrorists/spies (the distinction between the two in Alias is very indistinct) that might be assumed to be Islamic. Though less common now, their was a time when every film seemed to have an Englich accented evil enimy, who more often than not could be deemed a terrorist. ---
**Author:** ![Jophiel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jophiel/32/66_2.png) [@Jophiel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jophiel)\ **Post date:** [January 23, 2007, 2:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christian-terrorists/388735/37 "2007-01-23T02:43:55Z")
The first season of St. Elsewhere had a terrorist who was a young (20ish) white male from a weathly New England background who set off a bomb in a bank, killing three people. While they didn’t go into his faith, I’m assuming his upbringing wasn’t Muslim. And he was very obviously a terrorist since they referred to him as such about ten or fifteen times during the story arch. ---
**Author:** ![PastAllReason](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/f07891/32.png) [@PastAllReason](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PastAllReason)\ **Post date:** [January 23, 2007, 3:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christian-terrorists/388735/38 "2007-01-23T03:06:10Z")
[QUOTE=Jophiel] The first season of St. Elsewhere had a terrorist who was a young (20ish) white male from a weathly New England background who set off a bomb in a bank, killing three people. While they didn’t go into his faith, I’m assuming his upbringing wasn’t Muslim. And he was very obviously a terrorist since they referred to him as such about ten or fifteen times during the story arch. [/QUOTE] Yes, it was. And he was played by a young Tim Robbins. I bought the first season of St. Elsewhere on DVD, and it’s interesting to see him that early in his career. I thought he was frighteningly good. ---
**Author:** ![Askance](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/askance/32/8281_2.png) [@Askance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Askance)\ **Post date:** [January 23, 2007, 5:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christian-terrorists/388735/39 "2007-01-23T05:46:16Z")
[QUOTE=5que] _Contact_, with Jodie Foster. There’s a crazy white-haired Jesus Freak that blows up the first contact machine and kills Tom Skerritt. [/QUOTE] _First Contact_ being in Post #14 above … ---
**Author:** ![Raguleader](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/258eb7/32.png) [@Raguleader](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Raguleader)\ **Post date:** [January 23, 2007, 6:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christian-terrorists/388735/40 "2007-01-23T06:07:23Z")
[QUOTE=Askance] _First Contact_ being in Post #14 above … [/QUOTE] Isn’t First Contact about cyborgs attacking a space vehicle launch site? I mean, granted, they were white. One might say Swedish (well, OK, only one would say that, and she didn’t quite know what she was talking about…) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christian-terrorists/388735.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christian-terrorists/388735.md?page=3)