Michelle Malkin has the story of Jonathan Schrieken, the airman from McGuire Air Force Base who was shot in his own driveway by a man who then killed himself. The shooter reportedly left two suicide notes indicating he was angry at the government and wanted to make a statement on Independence Day. Patrick Poole at The American Thinker notes the difference in treatment of those who kill members of other groups.
If Airman Schrieken had been an abortionist or homosexual, this story would be front page news for the New York Times and the lead story on CBS News with Katie Couric for at least the next month. But since Schrieken is serving in the military, even his hometown newspaper, the Columbus Dispatch, has ignored this story.
Predictably, a law enforcement spokesman says that Marren’s suicide notes “were indicative of an individual suffering from mental-health problems”, but that raises the question of how anyone could identify anyone suffering from mental-health problems amidst those devoted to bizarre conspiracy theories and the virulent anti-Americanism of the antiwar movement. If anything, Marren would have fit right in unnoticed.
It is also worth noting that Marren was merely following the logic of the anti-war movement’s standard public rhetoric. Their language is laced with suggestive undertones justifying attacks against our military, calling our armed forces fighting the War on Terror “baby-killers”, constantly invoking the specter of Abu Ghraib, and citing their grossly inflated statistics of civilians accidentally killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Such reckless and unbalanced rhetoric (they’re not quite as adept at keeping statistics on those murdered by terrorists) fuels the hatred that drives someone like Marren to violence against a member of our own military.So, if targeting blacks or homosexuals or abortionists can be classified as hate crimes, can crimes against members of the U.S. military?
