Subject: After Planned Parenthood Attack, No Calls to Close Churches or Register Evangelicals - World News - Israel News - Haaretz Israeli News Source
From: Daniel Lubetzky <[email-masked]>
To: John Podesta <[email-masked]>, Erskine Bowles <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 29 Nov 2015 09:10:10 -0500

Interesting perspective... Worth thinking about message implication for
campaign.

http://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium-1.688891?v=BE04D78ED77B9CEC5F5A76B2A97AE4A0

After Planned Parenthood attack, no calls to close churches or register
Evangelicals

GOP presidential candidates incited against reproductive health group
before Paris terror provided a more lucrative target.
Chemi Shalev
28.11.2015 | 21:59
  4 comments
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Up until a month ago, Republicans had stepped up their ongoing holy war
against Planned Parenthood. After the publication of doctored tapes
alleging that the organization had been merchandizing fetal tissue and
organs, Mike Huckabee compared it to heroin dealers; Ted Cruz said it was a
criminal enterprise; and Carly Fiorina gave graphic descriptions of
flailing embryos callously harvested for organs. Less than two months ago
the GOP’s Congressional caucus deemed the defunding of Planned Parenthood
important enough to shut down the federal government altogether: this was
one of the main impetuses for John Boehner’s resignation as Speaker of the
House.

Small wonder, then, that in the 24 hours after Planned Parenthood in
Colorado Springs was turned into a war zone by 57-year-old Richard Lewis
Dear – who killed 3 people, including a policeman
<http://www.haaretz.com/world-news/1.688821> – the Republican presidential
candidates have maintained a deafening silence, with the exception of Cruz,
who expressed sympathy for the victims. Unlike the seemingly endless stream
of demands and condemnations that followed the November 13 terrorist
attacks in Paris, no one has suggested that churches in which Planned
Parenthood are routinely depicted as the devil’s spawn be closed; no one
has demanded that Evangelicals who believe performers of abortions are
committing crimes against humanity should be issued with special identity
cards <http://www.haaretz.com/world-news/1.687343>; and no one has called
for arresting or deporting the inciters who exploit such incidents to whip
up hate (and garner more votes).
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Instead, Republicans are fervently praying that the police investigation
reveal that Dear is insane or that his choice of Planned Parenthood as a
venue for his 6-hour long gun battle with the police was mere coincidence.
The last thing GOP candidates need right now is for the rash assaults on
Planned Parenthood to come back at them like boomerangs, or, even worse,
for the political momentum that has shifted in their favor since the Paris
attacks to suddenly stall. In the aftermath of Islamic State’s onslaught in
the French capital, the GOP has succeeded in shifting the public focus away
from the ideological fanaticism and the bizarre presidential candidates
that seem to have taken over the party and towards President Obama’s
perceived weakness in the war against ISIS and the promotion of the fear
and loathing that many Americans feel towards Muslims in general and
American Muslims in particular.

Planned Parenthood, after all, has been the target of violence and arson
and even murder since its inception almost a century ago, much more so
since right-wing conservatives promoted the organization to public enemy
number one in recent years.  And even though 26 Americans have been killed
since 9/11 in terror incidents linked to Muslims in America, 48 have died
at the hands of right-wing terrorists: The FBI consistently warns that
home-grown right-wing terror is a danger no less clear and present than
jihad-inspired assaults. And never mind the horrendous statistics of
gun-related violence that consistently shock the world, including the fact
that since 1968, more people have been killed by guns in the U.S. than
those who have died in all of its wars combined.

Nonetheless, no one is under any illusion that anything is about to change:
The U.S. is far from being the only nation in the world in which inciting
against foreigners, especially if they are Arab and Muslim, is more
worthwhile for politicians than lecturing citizens on how they must change
themselves in order to face the challenges to their societies. Americans
are also willfully blind to the obvious connection between their
intolerably high rates of death by gunfire and the incredible ease of
acquiring weapons and ammunitions. If nothing happened after 12 people were
shot down in a cinema in Aurora, Colorado in July 2012 or after 27 people,
mostly young children, were slaughtered in Newtown in December of that year
or after nine African-Americans were targeted in a church in Charleston in
June, 2015 or another nine were killed in a college in Oregon less than two
months ago – it certainly won’t happen after an incident in which “only”
three people are killed. Especially when the venue for the bloodshed is
a place that supposedly respectable political leaders have described as a
hellish altar in which embryos are routinely tortured and sacrificed by
godless liberals.

First and foremost among those who seem to have lost hope is Obama, who has
made no less than 15 public pronouncements in the wake of deadly shooting
sprees since he took office seven and a half years ago. After each carnage
he has asserted that things can’t go on like this, after each atrocity he
has prodded Congress to toughen gun laws and after each massacre his anger
and frustration are harsher and clearer than before. Perhaps this is one of
the reasons – in addition to the Thanksgiving holiday – that Obama made do
with a statement but no public appearance this time around. “This is not
normal,” he said, but it was in a tone of resignation, not defiance.

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