March 2, 2005 - Judge Barwez Mohammed Mahmoud al-Merwani of the Special Iraqi Tribunal preparing to try the members of the former Ba`athist regime and the judge’s son are shot dead in Baghdad. The husband and mother of United States District Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow are shot dead in Chicago. In both cases investigators are at work trying to determine whether the motives for the murders are something other than terrorism. In Baghdad Saddam Hussein and his henchmen are held incommunicado awaiting trial. In Chicago Matthew Hale the self-styled Pontifex Maximus of the Creativity Movement, formerly the World Church of the Creator is held incommunicado awaiting sentencing after having been convicted of plotting to kill Judge Lefkow. While the investigation in both cases continue the finger of suspicion in Baghdad naturally comes to rest on Ba`athist insurgents and in Chicago on the proponents of RAHOWA, the Creativity Movement’s coined code-word for Racial Holy War.

We are busily fighting a crusade against terrorism in the Middle East. We even give it our own coined code-word, WOT, the War on Terror. We tell ourselves that we have to fight the terrorists there lest we have to fight them in our own cities and on our own streets. We count our casualties in the WOT at more than 1,500 soldiers in Iraq alone this morning. Michael Lefkow and his mother-in-law, Donna Grace Humphrey are just the latest two casualties of RAHOWA. They are the latest evidence that terrorism is here and that it stalks our streets and infests our cities. Whether its victims fall in the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City; in Constitution Park in Atlanta; at abortion clinics and doctors homes across America; or now on a quiet street in a quiet neighborhood in Chicago our home-grown terrorists have long since declared their war on us, our liberty and our freedom. Let the government act to counter that terrorist war, as the first Bush Administration did at Ruby Ridge and the Clinton Administration did at Waco, too many otherwise sane Americans rush to paint the terrorists as victims and the government as villains.

We sanitize the RAHOWA terrorist attacks as “hate crimes”. We give the terrorists sanitized labels calling them White Supremacists or Pro-life Extremists. Whether their names as Matthew Hale, or Randy Rudolph, or Timothy McVey, or Terry Nichols we accord them due process of law and treat them as good Christians turned bad. Too many Americans explain and justify their acts as understandable in the complicated context of America’s secular society. We refuse to recognize that they are equally at war with us as are the Islamic Jihadists and while we focus on fear of Al Qaeda we turn a blind eye toward the terrorist cancer growing in our own body politic.

The deaths of Judge Lefkow’s husband and mother must be a call to arms against those terrorists moving in our midst. The truth is that we cannot defeat terrorism abroad while it continues to thrive, ignored in our own country. We cannot cast out the mote in our brother’s eye until we remove the log from our own,