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Ever since Hedda Nussbaum’s battered face appeared on the cover of tabloids in 1987, the wives of insane, violent men have faced a particularly cruel kind of scrutiny. Nussbaum called herself the victim of “intimate terrorism,” but the world judged her culpable for failing to protect her adopted 6-year-old daughter from her murderous husband. The BTK Killer had a wife and children. James von Brunn, the white supremacist who allegedly shot two people at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum yesterday, does too—or at least he did (one son committed suicide, his wife divorced him). They surfaced last night in the Daily News. His 32-year-old son Erik is a student at the University of Maryland, and defends his father: “I love my father,” he said. “Everything you need to know about him is on his Web site.” That such a website (it crashed yesterday, here are its remnants) could coincide with love, even in a son, is hard to stomach. The ex-wife, at least, kept her distance: "[It] ate him alive like a cancer," she said of Von Brunn’s hatred. "It's all he would talk about. When I questioned him, he would get angry and abusive.” She did not, however, alert the authorities.
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What is it with Obama and the Jews? Ever since he chose Rahm Emanuel, the child of an Israeli, as his chief of staff, conspiracy theories have raged about Obama's connection to the Jews. Jeffrey Goldberg writes about the number of conspiracy nuts who insist that Tim Geithner, and not just "jew Summers" and "jew Bernanke" is a Jew. (He is not.) Even Obama's own pastor, Jeremiah Wright, blamed "them Jews" for not letting "him talk to me." Surely James von Brunn waited 88 years to act on his inane, murderous thoughts because until now, the connection never seemed so real.
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The crazy thing though, Hanna, about the fringe obsession with Obama and Jewish conspiracy is that it's happening even as the Jews who worried that Obama wouldn't show enough allegiance to Israel are worrying more. Before the election, Obama the candidate held the hands of the little old Jewish ladies with blue hair in Florida who want a president who will put Israel first no matter what—even when the Israeli government doesn't necessarily deserve that kind of fealty—and reassured them that he wouldn't move even the teeniest step away from Bush's Israel stance. (I won't call it pro-Israel, because I don't think it actually works out that way all the time.) And in the end a lot of those Jews in Florida and other states voted for him. Now Obama as president is riling Bibi Netanyahu and talking about Palestine in his big address to Muslims in Cairo and getting stern about Israel's settlements in the West Bank. So how do we explain that Obama's relationship with Jews is being caricatured as too close even as he makes some of them nervous? Maybe James von Brunn picked up sick signals that are even less grounded in reality than usual.
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On May 30 several men and a woman broke into an Arizona trailer, killing 9-year-old Brisenia Flores and her father. This weekend three people were arrested for the murder, two of whom are leaders of the Minutemen American Defense, an anti-illegal immigrant group not connected with the Minuteman Project. Here’s one of the accused on his web site:
"I take a very hard line with drugs and illegal immigration. Make no bones about it, I have a zero tolerance for terrorists, and that is what they are.”
It would not have occurred to your average anti-immigration activist, before 9/11, to describe Mexican families seeking honest work as “terrorists.” Nor would it have occurred to liberals to call the Minutemen themselves “precursors of domestic terrorism.” Yet George Bush used this rhetorical device so successfully, and so pervasively, that it has now become standard to characterize any violent person with potentially politically motives as representing some larger terrorist threat. James von Brunn was declared a terrorist hours after he murdered a guard at the Holocaust Museum. Dayo points out, as has Ann Friedman, that Tiller’s killer might be deemed a terrorist.
These men are terrorists, but I don't know that shouting "terrorist" from the rooftops gives us any insight into the causes of violence. The word "terrorism" is rhetorically useful precisely because it’s substantively vacuous. Bush used accusations of terrorism to render complex political situations black and white, to dehumanize entire nations, and to demonize a class of people rather than merely those responsible for an atrocity. He used it to drive any semblance of complexity from the conversation. Like “industry,” as in “abortion industry,” the word terrorism is meant to trigger thoughts of a coordinated conspiracy rather than individual action, Manichean morality tales rather than nuance, an amorphous glop of evil rather than gut-wrenching individual stories. As blogger IOZ puts it in a discussion of Tiller’s-killer-as-terrorist, this kind of rhetoric exists to remove any given crime “from the ordinary processes of criminal law and sanction, which are already quite draconian in these United States.” The men at Guantanamo, we were told, weren’t among those deserving of basic legal protections; they were alleged terrorists after all, and everyone knows you can’t use normal interrogation techniques with terrorists.
What does the left gain by calling a lone gunman an agent of right-wing terror? I think it obscures more than illuminates, but I don’t know that it’s an ineffective political strategy. The right has been extremely successful in adopting a leftist rhetoric of victimization. No surprise, then, when the left finds use for a rightest rhetoric of militarism.
