It’s been 10 years since a rookie police officer in Murphy, N.C., captured one of the FBI’s most wanted fugitives, abortion clinic bomber Eric Rudolph. Yahoo News gives a look at Officer — now Sergeant — Jeffrey S. Postell as he recounts his famous capture.
Rudolph pleaded guilty to four bombings between 1996 and 1998, which killed two people and wounded 110. In an 11-page statement, he justified his attacks on the basis of morality and “protecting the innocent from assault.” He expressed unwillingness to wait for political winds to change and quoted the Bible.
“Abortion is murder,” he said. “And when the regime in Washington legalized, sanctioned and legitimized this practice, they forfeited their legitimacy and moral authority to govern.”
Shortly afterward he wrote,
There is no more fundamental duty for a moral citizen than to protect the innocent from assault. This is inherit in the values of all higher civilizations. You have the right, the responsibility and the duty to come to the defense of the innocent when the innocent are under assault.
He then proceeded to discuss “another assault upon the integrity of American society is the concerted effort to legitimize the practice of homosexuality.”
Rudolph placed his religious beliefs above all others and was unwilling to work through the political process, and instead resorted to violence to try to force society to conform to his creed. He was, in short, a terrorist. And in the eyes of the media at the time, he was the Christian equivalent to Osama bin Laden. But as Paul Chesser pointed out, Rudolph’s actions were decidedly not Christian:
The comparison breaks down because supremacist groups who use the Bible to justify their violence and beliefs fail to follow Christ. They misinterpret and twist Scripture to fit their preconceived ideas. Supremacists may be categorized as extreme rightists, but they can’t be called Christians because they don’t follow the teachings of Jesus Christ.
The simple fact of the matter is that violence is violence and terrorism is terrorism regardless of whether it is “religion-inspired violence” (as Chesser phrased it) or violence inspired by some other cause. Impatient and fed up, Rudolph chose against the peaceful, legal means to effect the political changes he wished to see, so he resorted to violence to try to force his views on society.
That is textbook terrorism. Even though he swaddled it in Biblical precepts and called it “moral,” his decision to cross the line into deliberate violence was dangerous, counter to civil society, immoral, and indeed un-Christian.