By Sikivu Hutchinson
In yet another act of domestic terror against a family
planning facility, a Planned Parenthood clinic in Wisconsin was fire-bombed
recently. The attack comes on the heels
of the bombing of a Pensacola, Florida clinic in January. Although no one was injured in the attack,
the fascist demonization of Planned Parenthood by inciters like Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney continues
to put women’s lives in the line of fire; in an era of vanishing clinics and
mounting violence.
In honor of Abortion Providers’ Day last month I visited a
family planning clinic after participating in an abortion rights protest. The head doctor on staff lamented how few of
his colleagues had been trained to perform abortions. Volunteer patient escorts
helped protect the tucked away strip mall facility from violent interlopers. The scene was a vivid reminder of the
atrocity of the assassination of Kansas abortion provider Dr. George Tiller in
2009.
Tiller was murdered in cold blood in his church by former
Montana freemen and Army
of God member Scott Roeder, who said
he was just following God’s law. At Tiller’s funeral anti-abortion protesters
wielded signs proclaiming “God sent the shooter.” His murder was the
culmination of years of attempted murders, death threats, bombings and arson
attacks waged against abortion providers by white Christian terrorists. While
law-abiding Muslim Americans continue to be profiled
and surveilled, white Christian terrorists are handled cautiously. Historically the feds have always reserved
their most savage, concerted “counter-terrorist” campaigns for radical activists
of color. From 1956 to 1971 J. Edgar
Hoover’s FBI launched its notorious Cointelpro “counter-intelligence” operation
targeting radical groups in the U.S. The
operation systematically co-opted, jailed, and murdered activists of color in
organizations like the Black Panther Party, the US Organization, the American
Indian Movement, and the liberal Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Hoover relentlessly smeared these groups as
domestic terrorists. The fire-bombing of a Wisconsin Planned Parenthood clinic
is a potent reminder of how white Christian terrorism gets a pass in the
mainstream media.
Yet white militants who invoke Christian fundamentalism to
justify their barbaric acts against women and their allies are still dismissed
in the mainstream as aberrations. These spasms of Christian fundamentalist violence are largely peculiar to the United States France and Italy U.S.
Writing
for the Southern Poverty Law Center back in 1998, Frederick Clarkson pinpointed
the alignment of anti-abortion terrorism, white supremacist activism, and the
far right militia movement. Like the
perennial black male inner city perp, the profiles of anti-abortion terrorists
are always the same—“disaffected” white middle aged males, drunk with
anti-government militia and/or a fundamentalist ethos steeped in the bloody
retribution of the Old Testament. Clearly black men running around bombing
abortion clinics or plotting to kill abortion doctors would get no farther than
the nearest county jail cell. And as the
lynch mob justice meted out to Trayvon Martin, Kendrick
McDade, and scores of other people of color demonstrates the threat of
“savage” black criminality—particularly vis-à-vis white lives in the heartland
or in gated communities—is the only national scourge that must be contained by
any means necessary.
