Source: National Post
The killing spree by Wade Michael Page on the Sikh Gurudwara in Milwaukee that left seven dead including Page’s own death in a hail of bullets is an act of Christian terrorism. Page was a member of a skinhead band, End Apathy, that advertised the evils of multiculturalism and advocated white power.
It is fair to call Page a Christian terrorist since the evidence indicates that he thought he was defending the purity of white Christian society against the evils of multiculturalism that allow non-white non-Christians an equal role in America society. Like the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, and the Norwegian militant, Anders Breivik, Page thought he was killing to save white Christian society.
Though there is no evidence that Page was a pious Christian, that is true of many religious terrorists. If the hard-talking, swaggering al Qaeda militants can be called Muslim terrorists, certainly Page can be called a Christian terrorist.
Many of the al Qaeda activists—including the World Trade Center bomber Mahmud Abouhalima and the Iraq al Qaeda leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—were attracted to the jihadi message not for reasons of personal piety, but because they were lured by the image of cosmic war. They saw themselves as religious warriors.
Wade Michael Page also gloried in the idea of war. The poster for his band, End Apathy, portrays a dead skinhead, lying in the street with police cars in the background. A banner in the poster states “Self Destruct.”
Like many religious terrorists, Page thought he was a soldier in a cosmic war. It is the image that Breivik tried to evoke in his manifesto justifying his attack on a Norwegian youth camp in 2011. Cosmic war was in the mind of McVeigh when he bombed the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, and it has been a part of the mindset of virtually every religious terrorist in recent memory—be they Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, or Sikh.
Like Timothy McVeigh, Page thought himself a soldier for Christendom. And like McVeigh, Page had been a real soldier.
Categories: Americas, Hate Crime, Terrorism