According to the AP,
Condoleezza Rice said Thursday that terrorists today are driven by the same hatred that inspired Klansmen to bomb a church in 1963 in her hometown of Birmingham, Ala. . . .
The bombing at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham killed four girls, including her friend, 11-year-old Denise McNair, and was meant to instill fear, Rice said.
“Those terrorists failed because of the poverty of their visions — a vision of hate, inequality. . . . And they failed because of the courage and sacrifice of all who suffered and struggled for civil rights.” . . .
An apt analogy, on which Clayton Cramer aptly elaborates:
It is a very fitting comparison. I am afraid that most Americans don’t really know what “lynching” involved. . . . [H]anging someone would have been positively humane compared to what lynch mobs often did. It was quite common to castrate the victim before hanging him. Sometimes, victims weren’t hung, but burned alive.
Think of Nick Berg — screaming in pain as they cut off his head with a knife. The analogy really does fit quite well. . . .
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