The Annointed Fig

What wouldn’t you to do to protect someone you love?  And doesn’t this, whatever it is, sometimes carry the ringing name of “justifiable homicide“?

Good old Abraham! Always on the side of the angels.

An abused woman can kill in self-defense.  A dog won’t be put down for tearing out an intruder’s throat and thereby saving her owner.  A pregnant mother has a right to any means necessary if she perceives a threat to her fetus.  A soldier is expected to kill in the name of his country.

And yet, as soon as there is a disagreement on the defendant of choice, the rescuers misusing the same whatever-goes format triumphantly make it onto the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists List.  Rather hypocritical, really.

No, you won’t find me defending Bin Laden — or the celebrity criminal du jour, Daniel Andreas San Diego.  They should be caught, tried, and put behind bars.  Having lived through 9/11  (albeit nowhere near the epicenter) and personally done animal research, I can tell you an announcement about either of these men having been detained would definitely make me feel better.

At the same time, I have to ask myself.  Why do their violent actions in the name of something as dear to them as anything we may hold close to our hearts put them on the wrong side of the law?  Of course, we may discuss the legalities of overstepping the rigidly defined bounds, but it would by no means be a debate.  Society places these bounds upon itself to guard against pure Lord of the Flies chaos, and I most definitely appreciate having a barricade to huddle behind.

There are those, though, who emphatically do not.

An imposing elder straight off the pages of the Old Testament, Bin Laden is supposedly fighting for the liberation of the Muslim world.  And if it’s to be achieved by the destruction of Israel and its allies, as far as he’s concerned – so be it.  I abhor everything he stands for, but I do hear what he’s saying — providing he’s telling the truth, and not just spouting convenient rhetoric.  He does need a pulpit and a cause, otherwise, what sort of leader is he?  One mocked for certain deficiency by his ex-Western girlfriends?  Or was it for purported sexual relations with goats?

And the handsome clean-cut master sailor / computer scientist proficient in Linux and setting up e-mail accounts, Daniel San Diego, 31, is blowing up research facilities in California to punish the demon-faced scientists at Huntingdon Life Sciences for wantonly abusing the defenseless critters.  Is he right in his radical stance?  Certainly not.  He would not have been even if he and those of his ilk proposed a better way to conduct medical research.  Because even then, PETA’s statement at the US Senate hearing aside, parroting President John F. Kennedy in stating “those that make peaceful change impossible make the violent revolution inevitable”, the violence is never an answer.

Or…considering the implacable speech by Michael J. Heimbach, Assistant Director of our Counterterrorism Division at FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC, “We have added San Diego to the Most Wanted Terrorists list to increase public awareness about this domestic terrorist fugitive and to aid in his arrest.  We will not relent until San Diego is apprehended and his potential for future acts of violence and destruction is eliminated.”…is it?

Any violence done against Daniel San Diego, the first domestic offender on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists List, would, after all, be in defense of something WE love — our own peace of mind, that of our nearest and dearest.

What then puts us, as a society, that far from what Daniel, and Osama, and Abu Gharib’s now-infamous torturers were doing?  Just the fact that we are on the right side of the fence?

Tell you what, for the safety of myself and mine, I sure am glad I’m on the side of the angels!

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