Call up the FBI. Whistle down Boston police. The commentators across the television airwaves have pinpointed if not an individual, the ideological leaning of the Boston bomber.
The right wing.
Salon writer David Sirota declared: “Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American.”
The BBC speculated the attack was from “home-grown extremists” and said security has been high across the United States ever since Barack Obama was elected because of “the right.”
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Fox News commentators said there is reason for “the right” to be upset, what with Obama’s gun law issue and other socially progressive ideals. Those who are causing trouble, they said, are concerned over things “such as the restrictions of constitutional rights.”
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MSNBC host Chris Mathews said such attackers “tend to be on the far right.”
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And CNN’s Wolf Blitzer noted that the attack happened on Patriots Day, when Bostonians mark the battles of Lexington and Concord, which launched the American Revolutionary War.
Read Joseph Farah’s related column: CNN’s expert analysis: Sheer demagoguery
Those were violent days, the commentaries note.
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Former CIA operative Robert Grenier agreed.
“This is Patriots Day in Boston. This is the day when they commemorate the battle of Lexington and Concord, which were the first two battles of the American Revolution.”
WND contributor Reza Kahlili has been reporting since early December that terrorists were being dispatched to the United States to attack. Read the reports: IRAN ORDERS TERRORISTS: PREPARE FOR WAR; U.S. WARNED: AL-QAIDA HIT-SQUADS COMING; AL-QAIDA ALIVE AND WELL, READY TO ATTACK WEST; and NEXT 9/11: IRAN’S DEATH SQUAD IS HERE.
“One wonders if perhaps there might not be a domestic right-wing terrorist component to this,” he told Al Jazeera. “People who are feeling oppressed by the federal government choose a celebration to overthrow the bond so oppression to make a point of domestic politics.”
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Then along came CNN’s Anderson Cooper. He said he didn’t know, but he speculated that the fact that the attack coincided with “Tax Day,” when federal income taxes are due, may have played a role.
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And the NBC “Today” show cited other violence in the month of April: Columbine, Virginia Tech, Oklahoma City and the Waco siege of 1993.
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ABC also referred to the “right-wing” attacks of Oklahoma City, Waco and others.
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And former Obama adviser David Axelrod made it clear. “Tax day? Was it someone … ? You just don’t know,” he said.
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Talk radio host Michael Savage also raised the issue, but to pin down what was going on, not to lay blame.
“Boston is a scene straight out of Beirut,” he said. But he added, “Mark my words. Before this is over they’ll blame the white supremacist.”
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Richard Barrett also said the likely suspect was a domestic terrorist.
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Matthews interviewed analyst Brian Levin of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, who cited Tax Day and Patriots Day, blaming anti-government sentiment.
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Talk show host Glenn Beck also warned that the sentiment would be to blame “right wing” interests.
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It started yesterday even as the smoke from the terror attack still was drifting in the skies of Boston, where three were killed and more than 170 wounded in two bomb blasts set off at the Boston Marathon.
CNN national-security analyst Peter Bergen was questioned by host Jake Tapper about the explosions, and Bergen said it reminded him of the Oklahoma City bombing, for which Timothy McVeigh was arrested, convicted and executed.
Further, he said, it brought to mind other “right-wing” attacks.
“Right-wing groups trying to attacking, for instance – trying to attack the Martin Luther King parade in Oregon in 2010,” he said. “So, if it is a device of some kind, you know, we shouldn’t leap to conclusion about where it’s coming from.”
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The identification of a specific, suspect segment of society recalls the multiple times the Obama administration has identified conservatives, returning veterans or those with pro-life views as a potential enemy.
In Boston, two explosions were heard near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, and authorities said three died, so far. Another 17 were in critical condition.
The New York Post said a short time later investigators took a Saudi national into custody. Officials said the 20-year-old was under guard at an undisclosed Boston hospital.
Authorities later said the Saudi national was not a suspect.
When a dozen people were shot and killed, and another couple dozen wounded, at a theater in Aurora, Colo., last year, ABC’s Brian Ross immediately suggested the attacker was from the political right – because there was a “James Holmes” in Colorado’s tea party movement.
Both Ross and ABC later apologized for their overreach.
Obama’s Department of Homeland Security famously warned at the beginning of his first term of Christians, pro-lifers, those who supported third-part presidential candidates and returning vets. Recently, the “inflammatory rhetoric” of Army officials was cited by the head of the Family Research Council in his warning to supporters that Obama could put evangelical Christians and Catholics on a “watch list” to prevent them from purchasing guns.
FRC President Tony Perkins said on his “Washington Watch” radio broadcast Wednesday that the Senate’s bipartisan proposal requiring background checks for Internet gun sales is “very concerning given the fact that the United States military has been increasingly showing hostility toward evangelicals and Catholics as being somehow threats to national security and people that need to be watched.”
In an email to FRC supporters, Perkins explained that a recent Army briefing on “religious extremism” declared evangelical Christians and Catholics are among the biggest threats to America, along with Islamic supremacist groups such as al-Qaida and Hamas.
Perkins said it was also discovered that, in an email, Army Lt. Col. Jack Rich highlighted FRC and the American Family Association as groups that do not share “our army values.”
In his broadcast Wednesday, Perkins tied together the Army rhetoric with the proposed Senate legislation.
“Well, what does that have to do with gun control?” he continued. “Well, what happens if all the sudden you are identified as an evangelical, Bible-believing fundamentalist and the government decides you’ve got to be put on a watch list?”
Perkins explained that under the legislation, if “a caution comes up when they put your name in, you don’t get a chance to buy a gun.”
The controversial Army briefing, titled “Extremism and Extremist Organizations,” was given to an reserve unit in Pennsylvania.
A slide titled “Religious Extremism” listed organizations and movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaida, Hamas, the Nation of Islam, the Ku Klux Klan and Christian Identity as examples. Along with Christian evangelicals.
Other military missteps that have been identified include:
- A Fort Leavenworth War Games scenario identified Christian and evangelical groups as potential threats;
- A 2009 Department of Homeland Security memo identified evangelicals and pro-life groups as potential threats to national security;
- The U.S. Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center released a study linking pro-lifers to terrorism;
- Evangelical leader Franklin Graham was uninvited from the Pentagon’s National Day of Prayer service;
- At the National Cemetery in Houston, Christian prayers were prohibited at the funeral services for military veterans;
- Distribution of Bibles was banned for a time at Walter Reed Army Medical Center
- Christian crosses and a steeple were removed from a chapel in Afghanistan because the military said the icons disrespected other religions;
- Catholic chaplains were prohibited from reading a letter to parishioners from their archbishop regarding the Obama HHS mandate.
