PIML 96061904 / Forwarded to Patriot Information Mailing List: From: ralph@teaminfinity.com Date: Tue, 18 Jun 1996 19:45:43 -0400 Subject: L&J: >>>> CHURCH FIRES: Fanning the FLAMES of RACISM Reply-To: liberty-and-justice@pobox.com WASHINGTON TIMES PAGE A4 I TUESDAY, JUNE 18, 1996 *~ WESELY PRUDEN: wtletter@wt.infi.net Setting fire on facts in pursuit of justice With a little Hot Springs luck, the churches will burn into November. We can expect Bill Clinton to arrive on the scene just after the fire trucks. The bad news for the White House is that they'll have to work hard to keep the focus on race. The inconvenient fact is that the racists, firebugs, secular humanoids and bipartisan loonies who are torching the churches are torching more white churches and synagogues than black. These are the fires you won't hear much about. Mr. Clinton's Burnt-Church Tour of '96 can't in- clude every smoking holy ruin, of course, and we shouldn't be too hard on him for just being who he is. But it's no crime -- not yet, anyway -- to try to set the record straight. Burning a black church, which every decent person of every race finds abhorrent and wishes to be punished severely, is not, however, first an offense against blacks. It's first a sin and a crime against God, though the politicians will certainly pander to God last, since so far as the Federal Election Commission knows, God doesn't vote in U.S. elections. Besides, the politicians prefer to keep God out of sight, even when they're talking about churches. But in the rush to judgment and, more important, the rush to get on the front page and on the evening news as being against burning a church, perspective is the first casualty. Anyone who puts in a good word for the facts risks being labeled racist, or worse, politically incorrect. Nevertheless, a few facts: The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) had catalogued 123 church fires over the past five years where arson is either proved or suspected -- this before the toll of the past several days, when three more churches were fired. Of these 123 fires, 85 were at white or predominantly white congregations, and 38 were at black or predominantly black churches. Among the white houses of worship were 12 synagogues. No mosques were on the ATF list, nor is it known whether the ATF counts as arson the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, which the ATF itself set afire. Church-burning, like child-molesting, is a crime so heinous to most of us that merely to subject allegations to careful examination, the first step in effective law enforcement, is regarded by the hysterics as evidence of insensitivity. Mere allegation is proof of guilt, and when Bill Clinton included his home state in his indictment of Southern racism -- even though no one, including past and present officials of the NAACP had ever heard ot anyone burning a church in Arkansas -- no one in Washington rebuked him for it. Attorney General Janet Reno, who has learned to be responsive to the president's whims and needs, quickly put a stop to aggressive investigation of the church burnings when some -- but not all -- black ministers objected to close questioning by federal prosecutors, who apparently had not got the word that what the Clinton campaign wants is not necessarily to stop the arson, but to cultivate an issue for the presidential campaign. There is much work to do to stop the burning of churches. By one estimate, more than 600 of the nation's 300,000 churches and synagogues suffer fires every year. Some are set by earthquake, lightning, floods or what insurance company lawyers call "acts of God." (They are His houses, after all.) Others are the work of firebugs, who like to watch buildings burn, particularly the tinderboxes that weathered wooden churches often have become, and assorted crazies. Scripps Howard News Service, citing ATF statistics, reports that one Protestant man torched 32 white Protestant churches and one Jewish man torched 12 synagogues. Investigators concluded that both of these men are "deranged." Still others of the 600 church fires reported in a typical year are set for malicious purposes without regard to race. Many are the satanic work of men (and even women) driven by the dark and evil urges of racist resentment, and deserve swift and harsh punishment. There's another element in the story that the politically correct among us turn away from considering. The concerted campaign to drive religion from the public square has marked the church, with its spire pointing to the unseen mystery that guides the hungry human soul, as irrelevant and worsened no longer entitled to the reverent deference that decent men and women have paid to the church, even when it was deference paid in the breach by coarse and unchurched men. The president has been eloquent in his denunciation of those who would defile and destroy one of God's holy houses. He could be more effective if he would scorn the cheap politics, and tell it like it is. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Unsub info - send to majordomo@pobox.com with "unsubscribe liberty-and-justice" in the body (not the subj) of the msg. 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