The Left, Not the Right, Owns Political Violence

January 10, 2011
By Michael Filozof

It took less than 24 hours for the political Left to seize upon the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the murder of six people on Saturday to blame the political Right for the shooting.

Perhaps the most egregious example came from Paul Krugman of the New York Times, who wrote "We don't have proof yet that this was political, but the odds are that it was." (The newspaper that published plagiarized and fabricated accounts of the "D.C. sniper" by affirmative-action hire Jayson Blair in 2003 is still publishing unsubstantiated suppositions without "proof," eh?)

"[Giffords'] father says that ‘the whole Tea Party' was her enemy..." continued Krugman, "And yes, she was on Sarah Palin's infamous ‘crosshairs' list." As if that was not enough, Krugman went on to invoke the specter of Tim McVeigh.

Well, we do have some proof now, and it's clear that the shooter was in no way connected to the Tea Party, the Republican Party, or any other movement on the political Right. Law enforcement officials have revealed that suspect Jared Loughner was rejected by the Army, kicked out of college, appeared to have mental-health issues, and was a reader of the "Communist Manifesto."

But since Krugman and the other members of the Leftist chattering classes have brought up the subject of politically-inspired violence, maybe we ought to remind them of the Left's protracted association with political violence.

We could begin over a century ago when William McKinley was shot by Leon Czolgosz. Czolgosz was inspired by anarchist Emma Goldman (today a darling of the academic feminists). Goldman's lover, Alexander Berkman, attempted to assassinate Henry Clay Frick because Frick was a prominent capitalist.

But it wasn't until the 1960s (when Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and Ho Chi Minh became idols of the American Left) that the Left really ramped up the violence. Who can forget Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam? Or Eldridge "rape is an insurrectionary act" Cleaver and his Black Panthers? What about the bombings perpetrated by the Weathermen? Former Weatherman bomber Bill Ayers is, of course, a close associate of President Barack Obama. Ayers managed to escape prosecution (and proclaimed himself "Guilty as hell, free as a bird") but his wife Bernadine Dohrn served jail time for her part in the violence. Black radicals seized Cornell University at gunpoint in 1969, the same year the SDS and the Weathermen staged the "Days of Rage" riots. Race riots took place in Watts in 1965 and nationwide in 1968; leftists rioted at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago in 1968. John Kennedy was murdered by a communist, and Robert Kennedy was shot by a Palestinian - hardly men of the Right.

The 1970s weren't much calmer. The Army Math Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was bombed by Leftist radicals in 1970. Heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped and took part in and a series of armed bank robberies by the left-wing Symbionese Liberation Army. The SLA inspired Sarah Jane Moore to try to assassinate Gerald Ford --less than three weeks after Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, a disciple of Charles Manson, tried to kill Ford also. And what about the shooting of FBI agents at Wounded Knee by the American Indian Movement in 1975?

Since we're taking about violence against members of Congress, how can we possibly fail to mention the murder of Congressman Leo Ryan and the mass suicide of 900 people by the Leftist/Marxist Jonestown cult in 1978?

Does anyone recall that President Clinton pardoned members of the Marxist-Leninist inspired Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN? Clinton also pardoned left-wing radical Susan Rosenberg, who was imprisoned for her role in the murder of two police officers and a security guard in a robbery in 1981. She was offered a teaching job at Hamilton College, but public outcry forced her to decline the position.

More recently, we've seen anarchist and communist riots against the WTO in Seattle in 1999, and violent anti-Bush and anti-war protests. In 2007 Leftist playwrights in New York created a stage performance about killing president Bush.

The politics of the contemporary Left is absolutely intertwined with either tacit or overt support for violence. How dare the left-wing media attempt to pin the actions of a deranged individual in Tucson on the Right! To do so is nothing less than a calumny, a slander, and a blatant hypocrisy.
See also: Political violence and connections
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