THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, May 8, 1995 TAG: 9505060021
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A7 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 75 lines
NEW YORK When the full history of home-grown American terrorism in the 1990s is written, the chapter before Oklahoma City will tell of a little-noticed press conference last August in New York.
It was called by Planned Parenthood to showcase a videotape of a meeting held by the Wisconsin branch of the far-right U.S. Taxpayers Party. The meeting's speakers included two of the country's most militant anti-abortion leaders, Randall Terry of Operation Rescue and Matthew Trewhella of Missionaries to the Preborn. But they weren't talking about abortion. Trewhella spoke of training his young child to use guns. The meeting's attendees were offered a manual titled ``Principles Justifying the Arming and Organizing of a Militia'' in which the Bible was invoked to justify the formation of ``assault teams'' to protect the unborn.
For Planned Parenthood, which had been forced by Reagan-era federal indifference to do its own research into the steep 1980s rise in abortion-clinic bombings and murder, this demonstrable link between anti-abortion extremists and a growing militia movement was a major breakthrough. In the stepped-up investigation that followed, Planned Parenthood began to uncover a commingling of anti-abortion extremists, new-world-order paranoids, Waco wackos, Reconstructionist Christians, white supremacists and assault-weapon fanatics in a national paramilitary subculture. Abortion turned out to be merely the come-on issue, designed to attract followers to a rabid anti-government crusade.
Since the Oklahoma bombing, federal law enforcement officials have been in constant touch with Planned Parenthood, explained Pamela Maraldo, the organization's president. By now they've no doubt seen an anti-abortion terrorism manual from the mid-1980s with an elaborate illustrated plan for building a fertilizer bomb. Presumably the FBI is also consulting the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, which, like Planned Parenthood, were driven by criminality in their own backyards to investigate the paramilitary right.
As the Jewish weekly The Forward reported last week, anti-Semitic violence in the militia strongholds of Idaho and Montana is now routine.
It's not yet known whether this evidence will connect a specific militia or far-right group to the Oklahoma tragedy. What is clear is how extensively the nation's far-right factions are interconnected, forming a political network that often publicly espouses the same ideology as the terrorists in our midst, much as the Sinn Fein speaks aboveground for the IRA.
For one example of the far right's cohesiveness, consider Lawrence Pratt, head of the rabid Gun Owners of America. Wearing another hat, Pratt also runs the Committee to Protect the Family Foundation, a fund-raiser for Operation Rescue. As a public speaker, Pratt tours with ``Preparedness Expo '95,'' where he shares top billing with Mark (``from Michigan'') Koernke, the shortwave radio voice of the militia movement, and Bo Gritz, the Idaho militia guru and Christian Covenant leader who last week described the Oklahoma bombing as ``a Rembrandt - a masterpiece of science and art put together.''
And who is the biggest recipient of campaign funds from Pratt's Gun Owners of America? None other than Rep. Steve Stockman, the Texas Republican who last week denied any connection to militias when asked to explain the mysterious fax his office received after the Oklahoma bombing. Even so, Roll Call, the Capitol Hill paper, condemned Stockman and Idaho's Rep. Helen Chenoweth on Thursday in an editorial titled ``Paranoid Fringe.''
At last, though at a high price, the country and Justice Department are starting to catch up to Planned Parenthood. As Frederick Clarkson, one of its researchers of the radical right, says: ``Abortion clinics have had an average of 15 bombings or arsons every year for a decade. If that had happened at churches or newspapers or federal office buildings, we would have called it terrorism. But society didn't want to recognize the pattern of violence.''
Now that we're starting to recognize the complexity of that pattern, we also see that even when all the Oklahoma City bombing suspects are arrested, the investigation will have only just begun. by CNB