Christians have and will continue to kill for their beliefs. In the summer of 1992, Dr. David Gunn was the subject of "wanted posters" distributed by Operation Rescue. Then, on Sunday, March 7, 1993, things took an ugly twist:
Quote:On Sunday, at a service attended by protest organizers and participants, Griffin [Michael F. Griffin, who was to shoot Dr. Gunn] reportedly asked the congregation to pray for Gunn's soul.
"He asked that the congregation pray, and asked that we would agree with him that Dr. Gunn would give his life to Jesus Christ," said John Burt, an organizer of today's protest and a lay preacher at Whitfield Assembly of God Church.
"He wanted him to stop doing things the Bible says is wrong and start doing what the Bible says was right," Burt told reporters.
"There's talk of making protesting abortion clinics a felony. If you start talking about that, people are just going to find other ways of dealing with it," Burt said.
On Christmas Day 1984, two doctors' offices and a clinic in Pensacola were bombed by abortion foes who were convicted and imprisoned.
Source at the Washington Post
On the morning of Thursday, March 11, 1993, Griffin approached the clinic and shot Dr. Gunn to death in full view of the anti-abortion prosters. From the same article:
Quote:Steve Powell, an employee at an office park where the clinic is located, told reporters that Griffin singled out the physician as his target, chased him and shot him at point-blank range.
Powell said the protesters acted strangely after the shooting. "It looked like they were just happy," he said.
A little more than a year later, also in Pensacola, Dr. John Britton and his escort, James Barrett, were shot to death outside an abortion facility, by Paul J. Hill, an excommunicated Presbyterian minister. He had been excommunicated after stating publicly that he was the new national spokesman for abortionist killers (i.e., those who kill abortion doctors). He was affiliated with the Army of God, who later made a hero of him. The Army of God issed a statement after the murder which read:
We the undersigned, declare the justice of taking all Godly action necessary, including the use of force, to defend innocent human life (born and unborn). We proclaim that whatever force is legitimate to defend the life of a born child is legitimate to defend the life of an unborn child
We declare and affirm that if in fact Paul Hill did kill or wound abortionist John Britton, and accomplices James Barrett and Mrs. Barrett, his actions are morally justified if they were necessary for the purpose of defending innocent human life. Under these conditions, Paul Hill should be acquitted of all charges against him.
Hill was convicted and executed for the murders.
In December, 1994, two abortion clinic receptionists were killed in Brookline, Massachusetts. They were killed by John Salvi, whose mother stated that her son had told that he "was the thief on the cross with Jesus." Salvi was found dead in his cell after being convicted, and it was ruled a suicide, although his lawyers claimed there was evidence that he had been beaten, and in fact had been murdered. The sentencing judge then overturned Salvi's conviction, because Salvi had died before his appeal could be filed.
Eric Rudolph, whose bombing of an abortion clininc in Birmingham, Alabama killed and off-duty police officer who worked there as a security guard. Rudolph, who also planted the bomb at Atlanta's Centennial Olympic park, received two life sentences as a result. Rudolph is sufficiently well known not to need further introduction. Rudolph identifies himself as a Catholic, and was connected with Christian Identity, a white supremacist group which asserts that non-Caucasian people have no souls.
Dr. Barnett Slepian and was shot and killed, in what was the last in a string of shootings at abortion providers in Canada and New York. The shooter in those cases was beleived to be James Kopp, who was convicted of the murder of Dr. Slepian. James Kopp was affiliated with "The Lambs of Christ," a group identified by the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism as a terrorist organization.
Rachelle "Shelley" Shannon was convicted of attempted murder after shooting Dr. George Tiller outside his abortion clinic in Witchita, Kansas. She had been an anti-abortion activist and had written letters in support of Michael Griffin who killed Dr. Gunn. After being convicted (it took the jury only an hour) of attempted murder, and while incarcerated, Miss Shannon signed the Army of God statement in support of Paul Hill which is quoted above.
Clayton Waagner in 1999 began what he called a mission from God, taking his wife and their nine children across country to attempt to murder an abortion doctor in Seattle, Washington. However, he was arrested in Illinois. He then escaped from the county jail in Illinois where he was being held, and began a new crime spree. In November, 2001, he sent envelopes containing a white powder with a message that whoever had opened the letter had now been exposed to anthrax--he sent these letters to more than 500 abortion clinics. He was convicted of this crime in 2003. Waagner is also affiliated with the Army of God, and continues to correspond with members of the group from his prison cell in the Federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.
In addition to obvious groups such as the Ku Klux Klan (with their burning crosses), there are christian terrorist groups which are both anti-abortion and white supremecist, such as Christian Identiy, Identity Doctrine, the Army of God, the Aryan Nations, and the Christian Patriots. Timothy McVeigh, notorious for the Oklahoma City bombing, has admitted to being an adherent of the christian patriotism doctrine, and to involvement in Christian Patriot activities.
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Now the christians here are going to whine about how these people aren't true christians. In that case, one can simply assert that Muslim terrorists aren't true Muslims. But more to the point, one can point to the literally centuries of murder and warfare between the Catholics and Protestants of Northern Ireland. One can point to the Serbs, who consider that they are justified to murder other people and carry out ethnic cleansing because those others are Muslims or Catholics. In fact, the Croats and the Serbs both speak the same language, the only differences between them being that the Croats use the Roman alphabet while the Serbs use the Cyrillic alphabet, and the Croats are Catholic, while the Serbs are Orthodox. The Serbs would love to invade Croatia (again), but they have pretty well reconciled themselves to the notion that they'd get their collective ass handed to them.
When you get right down to it, most christains live in the modern industrial world, and have a great deal to lose if they were to become involved in "holy war." The most populous Muslim country in the world is Indonesia, and there has been little significant Muslim terrorist activity in Indonesia, which is one of the more successful nations of the "third world," and where, once again, most of the population has something to lose. In southwest Asia and south Asia, however, many Muslims live in poverty, many on the knife edge of survival. They have little to lose, and given the successful propagandizing of militant leaders, combined with stupidity such as the invasion of Iraq, it doesn't take much to convince them to take violent action on behalf of the warped agenda of the warped mullahs who manipulate them.
