HIGHLAND, COLORADO — Anika Kaber is a 27-year-old resident of Colorado, and her town is not far from Colorado Springs — the scene of a deadly attack on a Planned Parenthood clinic there on Friday, November 27th, 2015. Kaber said she was “sickened” by the news of the shooting not far from her town, and that she was outraged that more moderate, white Christians haven’t denounced the shooting as an act of terrorism, as so many demand of her whenever an act of terror is carried out in another part of the world under the banner of Islamic terrorism.
Though the exact motive of the alleged shooter, Robert Lewis Dear is still not clear enough for authorities to have made any comments on them as of yet, Kaber feels the shooter’s target alone gives one a pretty good clue. Citing the recent videos put out by the Center for Medical Progress — a right-wing fundamentalist anti-abortion group that has been widely accused of doctoring, splicing, removing context and completely inventing it when necessary — Kaber feels that anti-abortion passions have been inflamed among those she calls “right-wing Christian radicals with gun collections” and that “no moderate or progressive Christian would attack the Planned Parenthood building like that.”
“I just want to know why I have to get down on bended knee and ask for forgiveness from the entire western world,” Kaber told our reporter, “every time some asshole who has twisted my religion up commits an act of violence, but whenever some delusional, white, gun toting religious fundamentalist shoots up a Planned Parenthood or a black church in South Carolina, it’s immediately labeled the act of a lone wolf or someone clearly not indicative of Christianity as a whole?” Kaber said that kind of “built-in double standard” is why “this country still has a wink-wink and not approach to the Ku Klux Klan” but why she and her fellow Islamic Americans “have to be put through sixteen levels of screening” when traveling.
The rarity of Islamic terrorist attack on American soil, Kaber said, also leads to her ire over the reaction of white, Christian conservatives to things like the shooting in Colorado Springs. “I mean, I get it, 9/11 was terrible,” Kaber said, “but what kind of idiot thinks we Muslims weren’t burying our own victims that day? Do you think no Muslims died in the Twin Towers that day? We cried right along with every American that day. And the fact is that since that day far, far more Americans have been killed in domestic mass shooting events than have been killed in Islamic terrorist attacks. So why do they insist,” she asked rhetorically, “on demanding that I apologize for the Paris attacks and specifically condemn those psychopaths, but they get to just put their hands up and slide-step six paces to the right away from this Planned Parenthood shooter?”
“I just want America to be the kind of country where I don’t have to denounce assholes that have nothing to do with me,” Kaber said as she was ending the interview, “and where other people don’t have to fall on the sword for people they don’t know. That’s not American. That’s not even common sense. We need to get back to the place where it’s just presumed that good people condemn bad people, no matter what political or religious group they belong to. But until that day comes, yeah, I’m going to speak out every time a white, middle-aged, Christian fundamentalist goes on an anti-abortion killing spree and the same bastards who demand that I bow and scrape to them over the Paris attacks don’t immediately condemn people of their own ilk. Sue me.”
