Why Pat Robertson isn't treated as a terrorist [View All]

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Why won't Pat Robertson be treated as a terrorist? Believe me, if you said what he said about any of America's current leaders, you would be arrested quickly under the Patriot Act and locked away. Why will Pat Robertson's broadcasting empire not be classified as an organization supporting terrorist activities? Perfectly legitimate organizations in other parts of the world have been declared outlaw in the United States for having less direct association with terrorist hate-speech. Several bloodthirsty-sounding Muslim clerics, completely unrepresentative of their faith, have been jailed recently for speech closely resembling Robertson's.

At the very least, Robertson should be charged under hate-speech laws. But such laws are weak in the United States, and many Americans fear the idea of hate-speech laws. So radio and television broadcasters continue spewing hate and dishonest claims in the exalted name of free speech.

We really do know why Pat Robertson won't be treated as a terrorist. It's for the same reason Bush's former Attorney General of the United States could tell a group of decent, honest, hard-working American Muslims that they should count themselves lucky they weren't being treated the way Japanese Americans were during World War II. It's for the same reason that Bush protects a mass murderer named Luis Posada Carriles from extradition and trial. It's for the same reason that American troops have made a horror of the lives of millions of innocent Iraqis. It's for the same reason a distraught mother who lost her son in Iraq is vilified by Right Wing savages. It's the same reason why the morally-contemptible Bush is President.

The reason is the worship of power and greed. While it's true that a great deal of America's history has to do with worshipping power and greed, never in my memory has it been so openly expressed, so contemptuously embraced as it is today. It is a sad to reflect in my twilight years that almost everything I was taught as a boy has proved to be wrong. I don't mean subjects like math or English. I mean values. Most of the evidence of my adult life tends to support the opposite of every moral lesson of my youth, certainly as they apply to the land of my birth, a place where power and greed now trump everything.

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