The September 11 suicide attack you probably never heard about …

Posted by Joshua Holland at 4:14 PM on October 28, 2006.

If you read the right-wing blogs -- and you have my sincere sympathies if you do -- you know that the hot story right now is about a free speech trial in france. The war-bloggers are a little too excited about it to give their readers much background, but it's got something to do with the controversial killing of Mohammed al Durah by Israeli troops (or not) that helped fire up the second Palestinian Intifada. (I'd link you to the Wikipedia article but, unsurprisingly, its neutrality and factual accuracy are disputed -- Israel/Palestine is the ultimate postmodern conflict, where no reality exists that's not subject to passionate dispute.)

A common theme of the right's breathless "coverage" of the trial -- also unsurprisingly -- is that the biased liberal media just refuse to give this momentous case the attention that it's due, despite the obvious fact that libel trials in France have long been a source of fascination for Americans of all backgrounds. Beer, boobs, football, French libel trials -- you know what captures our imaginations.

Anyway, while waiting to do a radio show (which you can catch tomorrow, if you care to, at 5:30, 7:30 and 9:30 pm EST on one of these fine stations), there was a story that I had completely missed about an attempted suicide bombing right here in the US of A on September 11 of all days.

What? I had missed an attempted suicide bombing -- a car bombing, no less -- on September 11? How could that have happened?

It became clear after a little Googling turned up this piece by Jennifer Pozner, which appeared almost a month after the fact in New York Newsday:

On Sept. 11, 2006, the fifth anniversary of the terror attacks that devastated our nation, a man crashed his car into a building in Davenport, Iowa, hoping to blow it up and kill himself in the fire.

No national newspaper, magazine or network newscast reported this attempted suicide bombing, though an AP wire story was available. Cable news (save for MSNBC's Keith Olbermann) was silent about this latest act of terrorism in America.

Had the criminal, David McMenemy, been Arab or Muslim, this would have been headline news for weeks. But since his target was the Edgerton Women's Health Center, rather than, say, a bank or a police station, media have not called this terrorism - even after three decades of extreme violence by anti-abortion fanatics, mostly fundamentalist Christians who believe they're fighting a holy war. [...]

Abortion providers and activists received 77 letters threatening anthrax attacks before 9/11, yet the media never considered anthrax threats as terrorism until after 9/11, when such letters were delivered to journalists' offices and members of Congress.

After 9/11, Planned Parenthood and other abortion rights groups received 554 envelopes containing white powder and messages like, "You have been exposed to anthrax. ... We are going to kill all of you." They were signed by the Army of God, a group that hosts Scripture-filled Web pages for "Anti-Abortion Heroes of the Faith ... "

If a Muslim sneezes and someone catches cold, the war-blogs scream "bioterrorism!" Again and again they've embarrassed themselves by jumping all over a story about some asshole that committed some act of violence and declaring him part of their imagined, all-consuming Islamic Jihad against the West, only to have to retract when the facts came in. But this attempted suicide bombing … well, it apparently wasn't nearly as interesting as, say, your typical French libel trial -- even, apparently, to the liberal media.

That, despite the fact that it's part of a pattern; as Pozner adds, there also hasn't been much attention in the media to the fact that "just last year, nearly one in five abortion clinics experienced gunfire, arson, bombings, chemical attacks, assaults, stalking, death threats and blockades, according to the 2005 National Clinic Violence Survey."

Anyway, it turns out that McMenemy was as stupid as he is crazy; the clinic he attacked doesn't offer abortions, it "provides mostly low-income patients with pap smears, ob-gyn care, testing for sexually transmitted diseases, birth control, and nutrition and immunization programs for women and children."

PS: I remember when this was peaking in the 1990s. As Wikipedia reminds us:

Rev. Paul Jennings Hill ... was an excommunicated Presbyterian minister and anti-abortion activist connected to the Army of God, who was convicted of the murders of Dr. John Britton and his armed escort James Barrett outside a Pensacola, Florida abortion clinic on July 29, 1994. In addition to the two murders, Hill wounded June Barrett, the wife of James Barrett. Sentenced to the death penalty under Florida law, Hill died by lethal injection, making him the first person to be executed in the U.S. for killing a physician who provided abortions.

In a statement before his execution, Hill said that he felt no remorse for his actions, and that he expected "a great reward in Heaven."

At the time of Hill's death, Michael F. Griffin was serving a life sentence for the murder of a doctor, David Gunn, in Pensacola, Florida in 1993, and James Kopp was in prison for the killing of a physician in Buffalo, New York. Eric Rudolph was awaiting trial for a 1998 bombing that killed a police officer at an Alabama abortion clinic. John Salvi had committed suicide in prison two years after killing two receptionists at a clinic in 1994 in Massachusetts.

Tagged as: abortion, terrorism, religious right

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.