Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a director at the New America Foundation. The New American Foundation is funded by George Soros. Bergen also uses the mega-fundraising radical leftist organization the Southern Poverty Law Center as one of his sources. These associations in and of themselves do not mean that everything Bergen writes is incorrect, but it is important to note the sources of what passes for sound argumentation.
The title of one of Bergen’s recent articles is “U.S. right wing extremists more deadly than jihadists.” It begins with this opening paragraph:
On Sunday, a man shot and killed a 14-year-old boy and his grandfather at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City and then drove to a nearby Jewish retirement community where he shot and killed a third person. Police arrested a suspect, Frazier Glenn Cross, who shouted “Heil Hitler” after he was taken into custody.
Adolf Hitler was a Nazi. Nazis are “National Socialists.” Socialism is a left-wing ideology. Apparently, it’s the fact that Cross used violence to move his cause forward and the fact that he hates Jews that puts him on the right side of the political spectrum. But as Alan Dershowitz pointed out over the weekend, the political left also has its extremists, many of whom are virulently anti-Semitic.
It’s been pointed out that Cross “founded the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Patriot Party.” Are we to assume that members of the KKK are on the right side of the political spectrum? Long time liberal Democrat senator Robert Byrd was a member of the KKK. “Byrd wrote a letter in 1946 to the group’s Imperial Wizard stating ‘The Klan is needed today as never before, and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia.’ Byrd defended the Klan in his 1958 U.S. Senate campaign when he was 41 years old.”
We should not assume, therefore, that just because Cross is a former member of the KKK, that he’s on the right side of the political spectrum. This is a myth.
It’s not always easy to identify someone on the left or the right by their actions. Timothy McVeigh was an anarchist. He was no political conservative. Most anarchists are leftists. Study the 1960s.
Eric Robert Rudolph, known as the 1996 Olympic Park Bomber, “is responsible for a series of anti-abortion and anti-gay-motivated bombings across the southern United States between 1996 and 1998, which killed two people and injured 111 others.” Rudolph is often portrayed as an advocate of rightist politics, but his own words tell a different story:
In a letter to his mother from prison, Rudolph has written, “Many good people continue to send me money and books. Most of them have, of course, an agenda; mostly born-again Christians looking to save my soul. I suppose the assumption is made that because I’m in here I must be a ‘sinner’ in need of salvation, and they would be glad to sell me a ticket to heaven, hawking this salvation like peanuts at a ballgame. I do appreciate their charity, but I could really do without the condescension. They have been so nice I would hate to break it to them that I really prefer Nietzsche to the Bible.”
Bergen begins his chronology after 9/11. “According to a count by the New America Foundation, right wing extremists have killed 34 people in the United States for political reasons since 9/11. . . . By contrast, terrorists motivated by al Qaeda’s ideology have killed 21 people in the United States since 9/11.”
Why does he begin on September 12, 2001 to make his count? Why doesn’t he include the events of 9/11? For the simple reason that he would have had to include more than 3,000 people murdered by jihadists and he wouldn’t be able to make his outlandish charge. Why doesn’t Bergen mention Forth Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan who fatally shot 13 people and injured more than 30 others?
Bergen does not mention Floyd Corkins, the gunman who opened fire on a security guard at the Washington D.C., headquarters of The Family Research Council and yelled at the guard about the organization’s policies. The FRC council had been described as a “hate group” by the SPLC, the same organization that Bergen is using for some of this research.
Corkins wanted to kill as many people as he could at the FRC. “Floyd Corkins has said he disagreed with the Family Research Council’s stance against gay marriage,” information and hate-group charges he got from the SPLC:
When Corkins was arrested investigators found 15 Chick-fil-A sandwiches in his backpack. He told the FBI he planned to kill as many people as he could at the research council and then smash the sandwiches in their faces. The head of Chick-fil-A had announced opposition to gay marriage.
This particular paragraph in Bergen’s article caught my attention:
In 2009, Scott Roeder murdered Dr. George Tiller, who ran an abortion clinic in Wichita, Kansas. In 2010 Roeder was convicted of first-degree murder. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Roeder not only had ties to the extreme anti-abortion movement, but he also had been pulled over while driving with a fake license plate bearing the markings of the Sovereign Citizens, a movement of individuals who deny that the government has authority over them.
Okay. I’m willing to take blame for the actions of Scott Roeder if Peter Bergen is ready to take blame for 56 million unborn babies that have been murdered since 1973. How about it, Peter? No? Then how about just those unborn babies that have been murdered today by abortionists? It’s around 3,500. These are your people.
Liberals get away with Bergen-type logic because they use the force of law to redefine the debate. Abortion can’t be considered murdered because the courts have said it’s a woman’s choice in consultation with her doctor.
The reason Peter Bergen won’t count abortion in his calculations is because it’s legal to kill unborn children in America. In most cases, Leftists don’t need to be violent since they have the courts to do their dirty work, like fining people who exercise their free speech rights over homosexual beliefs or harassing people to the point they lose their jobs because they donated to a referendum to prohibit same-sex marriage.
So given the numbers, the real jihadists are liberals like Peter Bergen who, along with his liberal co-conspirators, support the killing of unborn babies, now close to 60 million since 1973.