Life Sentence for a Terrorist As a self-professed follower of Christianity, Eric Rudolph will no doubt appreciate the sentence handed down to him today. After all, as the Bible commands, thou shalt not kill. Most infamous for the 1996 Olympics explosion, God's mad bomber also blew up an abortion clinic and a gay bar in Atlanta. In Alabama, he blew up a women's clinic. All told, two people were murdered (one of them a police officer) and 122 wounded - some very badly - including a nurse. In the legal parlance of my state of residence, Rudolph's crimes would almost surely demand that a death warrant be signed. The same holds true in the states where he committed his heinous crimes. However, prosecutors granted mercy to a monster in order to protect more innocents, agreeing to a life sentence in exchange for the location of an eighth-ton of dynamite he had stashed in the North Carolina woods. Rudolph's case is much different from other "natural born killer" stories we read about, with a shudder, now and again. With BTK, for instance, Dennis Rader appeared to be just as much of a social conservative as Rudolph. But the facade of his Scout Master/Civil Servant life hid his true identity, that of a horrific predator. Eric Rudolph, on the other hand, was a flat-out Christian American terrorist. Some folks won't like reading that, and I understand. We've already dealt with overt domestic terrorism, as in Oklahoma City. We dealt with the stealth and uncertainty of the Unabomber for almost twenty years. Nobody has a problem with the label "terrorist" being pasted onto Timothy McVeigh or Ted Kaczynski. We can even indulge ourselves and call them names like "whack job", and no one will mind. Americans are much less comfortable calling Rudolph what he is, for that would indicate the presence of a homespun doppelganger of the Islamic jihadist in our own back yard. That's almost too frightening to ponder. The difference, we'd like to tell ourselves, is that people like Mohammed Atta were working as cogs and gears amidst a complex network of terrorists, determined to topple (or at least bedevil) the Western World. Rudolph, though, was a lone wolf... Wasn't he? When the former soldier went into Rambo mode, evading all manner of law enforcement for five years while hardly even trying, he seemed to have plenty of help. He had an easy time living in the backwoods, not all that far from the nation's Capitol. It almost makes you feel sorry for the Bush administration as it dog-paddles around in search of a very useful boogeyman named Osama bin Laden. Skip past the issue of how such staunch, "red state" conservatives could harbor a terrorist and get away with it. Never mind how those who would seek to defend or justify Rudolph's actions (all except the Olympics thing, of course) have this intriguing symbiotic relationship with our ruling Party, which wages war against religious extremism as a matter of public policy. Pay no attention to their usual clamor for the death penalty in murder cases, suddenly conspicuous in its absence. Rudolph was a member of a group called Christian Identity. Similar to the Ku Klux Klan in its disdain for Jews and its contention that non-White people "pollute" America, it is only a few staggering logical steps away from the kinds of people who brought us the "Neuremburg Files", a website dedicated to putting pennies on the eyes of abortion doctors all across the nation. And those people are but a few lily pads across the pondscum from people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who gladly plant seeds of intolerance among their flocks at each available opportunity. Of course, mainstream Christian conservatives are extremely quick to distance themselves from unholy warriors like Rudolph. They vehemently deny that any such militant thread exists within their ranks. And they say nothing when a terrorist plea bargains in court for a life sentence. Muslim theocrats the world over do the same thing when it comes to people like Osama. Who presents the greater threat? The numbers say the foreign terrorists, and if we as a nation did any more to fight them we would go bankrupt. But I don't know... If an outfit like Christian Identity could produce one Eric Rudolph, it can and will produce another, especially in today's political climate, when right-wing politics bends ideologically toward their extremist positions. However you want to look at it, all of these terrorists - be they foreign or domestic, from the fringes of Islam or Christianity - share a common motive. They want to kill you because they hate your freedom. Paul Heller 8/22/05 << back to the archives
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