Maybe it's just my imagination, but it sounds like Fox News's Shepard Smith is suggesting that the Muslim fanatics involved in the Charlie Hebdo massacre were motivated by religion in much the same manner as that notorious Christian extremist, Timothy McVeigh.
You remember, the one who spent months in prayer at his evangelical church before detonating a truck bomb outside the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City nearly 20 years ago. And when McVeigh wasn't praying, he was certain to be fasting or poring over Scripture or obsessing over his next pilgrimage to the Holy Land, you know, the types of things that Christian extremists can be expected to do. Aside from the fact that none of this happened, except for McVeigh murdering 168 people for no reason than his virulent loathing of the federal government, the closest he actually came to religious fervor.
What is it about liberals that compels them to react to violent Muslim fanaticism, such as the mass execution in the Parisian offices of a satirical newspaper, by invoking McVeigh? Every time I hear it, and it's been a while since the last hoary invocation, I wonder if the person mouthing this inanity notices that he's had to dig back a couple decades to prop up his flimsy analogy.
Did Smith on his Fox show Wednesday provide the latest example, or was his remark so incoherent that it bordered on nonsensical? You be the judge --
SMITH: Islamic extremists have launched a number of attacks in France over the last few years. As we've reported here, witnesses say today's attackers spoke fluent French. Analysts estimate more than 5 million Muslims live in France. That's about 8 percent of the population. And Muslims are now the second-biggest religious group in France after Catholics.
To call the kind of religious extremists who are doing this sort of thing Muslim seems way out there, any more than the guy who blew up the federal building in Oklahoma might be considered a Christian.
Notice that Smith initially refers to "Islamic" extremists who've "launched a number of attacks in France over the last few years" -- not Presbyterians, Methodists, Hindus, Seventh-day Adventists, or the Amish. Yet when it comes to the militants who attacked the Charlie Hebdo offices, you remember, the ones who shouted "Allahu akbar!" and "the Prophet is avenged!," all of a sudden it's "way out there" to describe them as Muslim?
To invoke McVeigh in the wake of yet another Islamic atrocity comes across as particularly gratuitous. Even though he was raised Catholic, McVeigh drifted from his faith as a young man. In their 2001 book "American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing," Buffalo News staff reporters Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck quoted McVeigh saying that "science is my religion," a belief anathema to Christians.
Michel told American View blogger John Lofton in 2008 that McVeigh was not a Christian "though he acknowledged the possibility of a higher power. But he didn't accept Jesus Christ as his personal savior, so far as I know."
McVeigh did pray with a chaplain and accept the last rites in the Catholic Church before his execution, according to Michel, "but I think he was just covering his bases." McVeigh didn't ask for the rites until they were offered to him, Michel also told Lofton. In a letter McVeigh wrote to the Buffalo News on the day before his execution, he described himself as agnostic.
We'll be hearing more about McVeigh as the 20th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing approaches in April. None of the commentary will change the fact that McVeigh was undeniably indifferent toward religion and it had nothing to do with his motive for killing as many people as he could in the Murrah building -- in stark contrast to the ruthless predators in Paris for whom religion was everything.
