ISIS IN AMERICA

For the past eight months,or so,as ISIS/ISIL/The Islamic State has wreaked havoc in Iraq with both pure military action and pure craven horrific terrorism in the form of murders of civilians, especially public executions of journalists or other foreigners chosen to be examples of the power of ISIS. Those executions have notably included beheading and immolation.

And these actions have drawn the usual panic stricken outcry from the right for the most extreme, militaristic response possible. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R.-S.C.) among others have warned the American people that if proper measures are not taken ISIS will be in America and “killing us all”.

Sen. Graham: Obama Must Stop ISIS ‘Before We All Get Killed Here at Home’

I’ve got news for you, Senator, ISIS has been present in America for well over one hundred years. Only it has been known by another name—the Ku Klux Klan.

What ISIS has done to its opponents of innocent victims ensnared by its sleazy tentacles is no different than the havoc wreaked by the Klan upon thousands of black people in the late 19th and the 20th centuries. While nooses were the lethal weapon of choice sometimes the criminals, many of who would have been described as productive upstanding citizens in their normal lives. acted out the motto “hangin’s too good for ’em”. As you can see in the photo above this man was hanged AND burned.

Graham’s own state of South Carolina has its own ugly history of lynchings. Okay, some were in response to murders and the lynchees may have even been guilty of such crimes themselves, but they were not convicted in our courts in a trial of any kind though if they had been tried it’s doubtful the proceedings would have been fair.

Even more so, a great number of the lynchees were murdered for alleged offenses that would not have invoked the death penalty. You can find on the list linked to below the capital “crimes” were for “quarreling”, “seditious utterances” (whatever they are), “intimate with white woman” (presumably consensual since it is not listed as rape as are so many).

There was even one man summarily executed having “shot the sheriff”. Funny, neither Bob Marley nor Eric Clapton suffered that fate.

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~sctttp/lynchings.htm

So while ISIS does pose a genuine threat to the areas where it operates, and in a none too gentle way, the possibility of ISIS being able to produce a physical presence within our borders is so remote as to be laughable. Not that a few stray sympathizers, home grown at that, may take it upon themselves to misguidedly emulate their heroes, but if they do it by acquiring some AK-47’s and blasting their way through the matinee showing of Fifty Shades of Gray at their local cineplex, the NRA will be staunch defenders of their right to do so.

In the meantime, until ISIS embarks upon a warship building frenzy or manages to procure military aircraft (Hey! A new market for American weapons dealers! Talk about increasing the export prowess of the United States!) my sleep is unlikely to be disturbed by anything more than the increased volume of commercials as I doze while enjoying the latest dramatic recreation of a murder story on Investigation Discovery.

The knocking on my door will be a neighbor complaining of noise, not some Muslim fanatic wielding a scimitar.