Former Attorney General Holder just made a major public statement since leaving his position at the Justice Department. That’s good. We need clarity on the path followed during his tenure and I hope we won’t have to wait for the inevitable memoir to find out a few things.
Now, to the substance of what Holder had to say today… I find it baffling to hear out of his mouth that the terrorist act in Charleston should be America’s wake-up call:
“I think that the Charleston incident is a wake-up call,” Holder continued. “It is a wake-up call for the American people to understand that the hate that has bedeviled this nation almost since its inception continues to be an active and negative force.”
While nothing in that statement is untrue, what it leaves me asking is what, over the last seven years, has been done to curb the proliferation of hate groups? What, in the last seven years has been done to limit the scope and reach of the KKK? What, in the last seven years, has been done to make the kinds of changes that will move the needle toward canceling out this nation’s “bedevilment?”
The Southern Poverty Law Center puts out yearly reports and keeps statistics on hate groups in America. If it know where hate lives, why doesn’t Justice? The FBI? What have we been waiting for?
I realize there are barriers to acting on certain things. That doesn’t mean we get to do nothing to start breaking them or that we get to point the finger elsewhere.
Was Eric Holder having an out of body experience when he gave this interview?
As for calling the Charleston massacre terrorism… I have an issue with it. White supremacist hate is not ordinary terrorism. What the KKK and other groups like it do needs its own terminology. Terrorism omits several hundred years of history that should be remembered.
Eric Holder: ‘Act Of Terrorism’ In Charleston Should Serve As A ‘Wake-Up Call’
Posted:WASHINGTON — The killing of nine members of a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, by a white supremacist was “clearly an act of terrorism” that should serve as a “wake-up call” to the American public about the domestic terror threat, former Attorney General Eric Holder told The Huffington Post on Tuesday.
Holder said that based on what we know about 21-year-old Dylann Roof, who allegedly confessed to shooting and killing the members during a Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on June 17, the incident should be considered terrorism.
“We have a young man who apparently becomes radicalized as the result of an incident and becomes more radicalized as a result of what he sees on the Internet, through the use of his computer, then goes and does something, that by his own words apparently is a political/violent act,” Holder said. “With a different set of circumstances, and if you had dialed in religion there, Islam, that would be called an act of terror. It seems to me that, again on the basis of the information that has been released, that’s what we have here. An act of terror.” […]