More Paul Hill madness

A creep is a creep even when that creep claims to be on our side.

Over the weekend, this showed up as a comment on one of my posts about the execrable Paul Hill Days stunt scheduled for later this month in Milwaukee. It's written by someone using the pseudonym DoctorDefense.

Those who support terrorism should themselves be terrorized. It's time to engage in counterterror.

Paul Hill wrote that he delayed killing in order to prevent his family from being charged as accessories. Evidently he could have been deterred indefinitely [sic] by a plausible threat to the safety of his family. Our goal should be to let right-to-lifers everywhere know: if you terrorize, your family will pay the price. The best way to affirm this is by example.

Paul Hill's wife, Karen, and his children, Justin, Gloria, and Joy, were last heard from in Memphis. A hero, perhaps THE FIRST PRO-CHOICE TERRORIST, will track them down and kill them.

To be sure we get the point he/she/it left a second comment.

When he does, their assassinations will not be murders, but justifiable homicides.

My hope that this was a hoax and that I was too ground down by the violence to get the irony of it was disappointed after a few seconds of Googling. DoctorDefense has been around since at least 1998 appearing in abortion related chatrooms and blog comments and may be the same person as someone calling themselves SOMG in the same venues.

DoctorDefense's recommendation of collective justice, hostage taking, and assassination is an anathema to civilized behavior everywhere. Of course DoctorDefense knows this and, despite the claim that this would constitute justifiable homicide, that is why he/she/it embraces the term terrorist.

Since, despite the threats, DoctorDefense has not actually acted in over nine years, we can thankfully assume that this act is mostly adolescent bluster. His/her/its demands for Old Testament justice unto the seventh generation are a pose calculated to shock. DoctorDefense is no different than the conservative bloggers and Republican presidential candidates who try to one up each other in their faux macho demands of greater brutality in the war on terror.

The danger of this sort of childish rhetoric is not that the speaker, be they Mitt Romney, Pam Atlas, or DoctorDefense, will actually go out and commit crimes against humanity in the name of their cause (though that is not entirely out of the question); the real danger is that they will inspire someone even less stable or mature than them to take action. Most terrorist movements consist of two levels, the leaders and theorists who come up justification for violence and who goad others into action, and the killers themselves.

My point isn't to call DoctorDefense a coward or otherwise challenge he/she/it into action. I'm glad DoctorDefense does stick to internet fora. My point is to say that he/she/it is wrong. Sure, I think assassination is wrong, but the more important point is that this plan will not work. The doctor killers are extremists. They have moved beyond caring about consequences. If our side escalates the violence, the other side will counter-escalate. The cycle of vendetta and retribution does not work.

It is a great disappointment to find that our side can generate grisly psychos like DoctorDefense, but it is not a surprise. In a way that is the greatest disappointment of all.