Similarities in Iraq to American Civil Rights Era

Adam's Apple

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Apr 25, 2004
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Islamo-Klansmen Target Iraqi Voters
By Deroy Murdock, Scripps Howard News Service
27-JAN-05

NEW YORK -- As Iraqis prepare to cast secret ballots in Sunday's free election, terrorists work day and night to obliterate the entire project. Their political violence recalls that of white supremacists who shielded Jim Crow in the battle for civil rights. Those who block the doorway to Iraqi self-determination are nothing more than Islamo-Klansmen.

"Those of you who think you can vote and then run away...we will shadow you and catch you, and we will cut off your heads and the heads of your children," one Muslim-extremist leaflet reportedly threatened. "This is a final warning to all of those who plan to participate in the election," it continued. "We vow to wash the streets of Baghdad with the voters' blood."

Wednesday alone, terrorists bombed three Baghdad polling places. A fourth explosive was disarmed at another precinct: an elementary school. In Baquba, Islamic fanatics shot up the offices of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, the Coalition of Iraqi National Unity, and the Iraqi Communist Party.

Last month, terrorists in Baghdad shot three election officials point-blank in their skulls in broad daylight. They also assassinated party leader Ayatollah Baqir al-Hakim in an attack that killed 13 Iraqis and wounded 66.

Such mayhem has hindered campaigning. Some parties conceal their candidates' names to prevent political tickets from becoming hit lists.

The Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists similarly slaved away to stymie Southern democracy. An 1866 assault on black and white Republican legislators in New Orleans by racist white Democrats killed 137 people and wounded hundreds more. Ongoing Klan violence led President Ulysses S. Grant to announce in 1871 that "insurgents were in rebellion against the authority of the United States."

During 1964's Freedom Summer, Mississippi alone saw 30 black homes burned, 35 volunteers shot at, 37 black churches firebombed and 80 activists beaten by white bigots.

Freedom Summer also featured the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. These Congress of Racial Equality staffers began their last day on Earth surveying the embers of Mount Zion Methodist Church. It welcomed civil-rights-oriented educational events. Thus, it was reduced to cinders, like so many Iraqi mosques that have evoked al Qaeda's ire.

Klansmen also killed Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, two Mississippians mistakenly thought to be plotting a black insurrection. Iraqi terrorists would be touched to learn that Henry Dee was found decapitated.

In Birmingham, Ala., segregationist explosions were so routine that it was nicknamed "Bombingham." One oft-attacked neighborhood was dubbed "Dynamite Hill." Between 1945 and 1963, white racists blew up 60 black homes and churches, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

Birmingham's most notorious atrocity was the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, an integrationist hotbed. Exploding dynamite injured at least 20 people and killed Sunday-school students Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, all 14, and Denise McNair, 11, a childhood friend of Condoleezza Rice.

"The Sixteenth Street Church bombing was a wake-up call for Northern whites," says the SPLC's Mark Potok. "The deaths of four little girls in white dresses was too much even for whites who hadn't cared about civil rights."

Perhaps an equally diabolical terrorist bomb will inspire haters of President Bush to re-direct some of their abundant rage toward Iraq's anti-democratic butchers. So far, the only thing more jarring than improvised explosive devices is the accompanying quietude of American liberals. They rail against Bush's efforts to share with the Iraqi people the blessings of liberty. They have fretted themselves into knots and even stalled the Electoral College's certification of the Nov. 2 vote because some Ohioans were "disenfranchised" by long lines at some precincts. How does the MoveOn crowd respond to Iraqi voters and election officials being disenfranchised through decapitation and detonation? In a word: "Whatever."

Sunday's election pits the "blacks" of the Iraqi electorate against Grand Wizard Zarqawi and his hooded Islamo-Klansmen. Still, the pro-civil-rights left trivializes Iraqis' democratic aspirations and regards G.W. Bush as the villain in this bloody drama.

Even as liberals grumble, let's hope this historic vote will accelerate Iraq's evolution from repression to republican rule. As the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once observed: "Even though the arc of the moral universe is long, it bends toward justice."
 
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Reactions: CSM
I think this is being perceived by many Iraqis as a desperate act on the part of the terrorists. If they could really damp down the numbers, they wouldn't have to leave messages in mailboxes.
 

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