Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Opinion

Peter Roff

DHS Report on Leftists Not Like Napolitano Report on Right-Wing Extremism

April 16, 2009 04:34 PM ET | Peter Roff | Permanent Link | Print

Reader Comments

It's All Perspective

It's all a matter of perspective, to the Left, anti-abortion, anti-tax, born again christians, the Boy Scouts and any veteran that believes in what America is supposed to be is ripe to be a "right wing extremist". If these people are considered a threat to the country, what is the Nation of Islam, ACORN, or the New Black Panthers? Voting poll security?

Could be setting the stage for...

...a new level of control and restrictions of American citizens, specifically targeting military veterans, supports of right to live, legal immigration, and Christians. The Obama's administrations lame attempts at demonizing veterans and the conservative right could be just the start of worse things to come. My concern, as someone who is a "perfect match" for the veteran / parent-who-did-not-abort-his-children / married to a legally nationalized US Citizen / go-to-church-and-worship-God-every-Sunday type of person, is that our "type" creates such fear in the heartless-souls of the racial left, that Obama will use his absolute democratic party controlled presidential powers to institute his "National Police" (he did mention this during his campaign) to monitor and control us. Imagine this...military veterans, Christians, Right to Lifers, etc, having to registered with federal, state and local law enforcement agencies in the same manner that Level III sex offenders...the ONPF (Obama National Police Force) regularly tracking your location in the same manner that a parole officer tracks a released convict. Sounds extreme? Ask yourself this; did you ever imagine the US Govt taking over private commercial and financial institutions? Given the "excuse" of financial crisis, the Obama administration exercised power and control over private companies and citizens that no one ever expected. Now try to imagine what the Obama administration response might be to some sort of incident (they liken veterans to OK City bombing) and use that as an "excuse" to take control over veterans. Don't think it's possible? Time will tell but I for one will be watching very closely.

The Klan is "Right Wing"?

What the heck is Right Wing about the Klan? What's Right Wing about the Neo-Nazis? These, and so many others called Right Wing, are not "conservative" by any stretch of the imagination.

Unless, I suppose, you are Left Wing. In that case, I guess anything seems to be to the Right.

Unequal Evaluations

Reading both reports, one thing immediately lept out at me: the lop-sided use of the words "terror", "terrorist" and "terrorism".

*The report on Leftwing Extremism contains Z-E-R-O occurrences of those words.

*The report on Rightwing Extremsim contains 12 occurrences of those words.

On the right, they paint a picture of folks who want to do nothing but stockpile guns and kill as many people as possible. The DHS would have you believe that Leftwing Extremists are all pacifists and and do nothing to physcially harm people. What a crock!

Leftists in this country have included the likes of the Unabomber, Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army to name just a few. They were all hard-core Left who killed people.

So don't give me that the reports are fair because they're anything but. The timing of this report is more than suspect and definitely reflects a political objective.

All about timing

The reason there's such an uproar about this report is the timing. Despite the UNBELIEVABLY biased "reporting" by the CNN, MSNBC and such, there were over a Billion people in 160-170 seperately organized protests of not just Obama's policy but the long standing Washington policy of spending and DEBT that the USA can no longer tolerate. No coincidence this report was released the same day.

Media and GOP Hype

The right wing extremist report list 9 different incidents of radical malitia activities. It does not list specific malitia groups but you have got to be kidding me that you people are getting so worked up about this.

The republicans are making a stink and draping themselves in the flag again over NOTHING. The report doesn't characterize soldiers as terrorist. It indicates that returning soldiers can and have been recruited by these extremists.

Read the report rather than rely on the media spoon feeding you your outrage.

Illegal Profiling of Citizens

Dear President Obama,

In 2004, congress introduced legislation called the "End Racial Profiling Act" to stop the offensive discriminatory act of stereotyping ordinary citizens as criminals. The ACLU said this act was "a key step in the fight to ensure that no one in America is subject to law enforcement encounters based on crude bias." Now, your administration, under Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, has committed the same criminal act against our citizens, denying them equal protection and, instead, holding them under criminal suspicion because they hold a conservative political position. This action taken by your administration is offensive, un-American and has already eroded the trust between citizens, the federal government and law enforcement. It needs to be retracted and the appropriate disciplinary action needs to be taken against those who implemented this federally sanctioned discrimination. I am requesting your prompt attention to this matter.

Regards

MEDIA HYPE

I'm so tired of all the media hype surrounding this story. The media (including this article) is taking things completely out of context. This document is about EXTREMISTS...the words "VIOLENCE" and EXTREMIST" are mentioned together numerous times. It is NOT about "conservatives" or protest groups. It's talking about racist groups (like the Ku Klux Klan that has conducted murders and bombings) as well as armed paramilitary groups that want to forcibly overthrow our government. This story has thrived because the media is taking sentences out of context and putting a political spin on it. People need to stop hyperventilating and put this report into the proper context.

Just read the two reports

I urge anyone who is interested in this topic to skip the articles ABOUT the reports and just read the two reports and form your own view. They are both very short.

My own view, after reading both, is that the "left-wing extremism document" provides very specific information to police departments about actual hacking/cyber-attack techniques that specific organizations had adopted or were currently promoting on their websites.

The "right-wing" extremism report, by contrast, just provides a general supposition that people who belong to single issue groups (such as those who oppose abortion) may be domestic terrorists.

Personally, I do not like being labelled as someone who "may" be a domestic terrorist.

The left wing extremism document makes no such claims whatsoever about honest, law-abiding and loyal American citizens who belong to animal rights or other groups. It just focuses on specific groups that have promoted hacking.

anarchist groups

crimethinc is a book publisher, and recreate 68 was a short lived group of progressives from denver. they are not national organizations...

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Peter Roff is a contributing editor at U.S. News & World Report. A former senior political writer for United Press International, he is currently a senior fellow at the Institute for Liberty and at Let Freedom Ring, a non-partisan public policy organization. His writing has also appeared on Fox News' Fox Forum.

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