Thursday, June 11, 2009

In Wake Of Shootings, Conservatives Rush To Defend Disparagement Of DHS Report On Right-Wing Extremism

THINK PROGRESS

Following yesterday’s tragic shooting at the Holocaust Museum — reportedly carried out by white supremacist James von Brunn — two Fox News personalities, Shepard Smith and Catherine Herridge, suggested that critics of the Department of Homeland Security’s report on right-wing extremism should re-think their criticism. ” “The right went absolutely bonkers,” said Smith, adding that DHS was “warning us for a reason.”

But later on Fox, New York Post columnist Ralph Peters attacked Smith and Herridge for claiming that the shooting “validated” the DHS report. “It had nothing to do with the Department of Homeland Security report,” declared Peters. Watch it:

Though some conservatives have concluded that the recent string of right-wing violence has “vindicated” the DHS report, many others agree with Peters. Michelle Malkin, who led the charge against the DHS report, approvingly linked to a milblogger that called Smith and Herridge “pathetic” for reconsidering the report. Malkin’s Hot Air colleague, Ed Morrissey, defends the criticism of the report by claiming that it didn’t “mention anti-semitism at all.”

But as Huffington Post’s Sam Stein points out, the DHS report “warned specifically about an upswing of anti-Semitic behavior.” “Anti-Semitic extremists attribute these losses to a deliberate conspiracy conducted by a cabal of Jewish ‘financial elites,’” the report read. “These ‘accusatory’ tactics are employed to draw new recruits into right-wing extremist groups and further radicalize those already subscribing to extremist beliefs.”

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