'We're coming to kill you!'

WND columnist Erik Rush

by: Chelsea Schilling 

WND columnist and nationally known conservative pundit Erik Rush has come under fire and is facing an onslaught of death threats for suggesting Islamic extremists were likely behind the Boston Marathon bombings and tweeting a sarcastic comment about killing “evil” Muslims.

After the bombing Monday, Rush tweeted, “Everybody do the National Security Ankle Grabs! Let’s bring Saudis in without screening them! C’mon!”
Rush’s comment was in response to early reports from United Press International that a 20-year-old Saudi Arabian national had been a potential suspect in the double bombings. The Boston police later said the man wasn’t a suspect.
Rush told WND he received some hostile tweets following his initial speculation about the identity of the bomber.
“This was speculation, which everyone is doing,” Rush said. “That’s when the tweets started: ‘You’re blaming Muslims already? You scumbag!’
“After several of those, that’s when I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s right, they’re evil. Kill ‘em all.’
“And that’s all they needed.”

Read Erik Rush’s “Negrophilia: From Slave Block to Pedestal – America’s Racial Obsession,” which addresses headon the “undue and inordinate affinity for blacks … that has been promoted by activists.”
Rush said RightWingWatch and the Huffington Post ran stories about his comments, suggesting Rush actually wanted to kill Muslims.
“I was being sarcastic,” he said. “It was promoted, or covered, by RightWingWatch and Huffington Post as if I had said it and meant it – which is what they do. Then all hell broke loose.
“I was getting emails, and I went from 7,500 Twitter followers to over 50,000 in 12 hours. They were sending emails and tweets: ‘We’re coming to get you.’ ‘We’re coming to kill you.’ ‘We’re going to cyber-attack you.’ Then they crashed my site.”
But the harassment didn’t stop there.
Rush said he was “swatted” Monday afternoon when someone called the police to convince an unwitting SWAT team to descend upon a house. The person called 9-1-1, pretending to be the columnist and claiming two men were firing AK-47 rifles inside his home.

“The first cop on the scene was a friend of mine, and the situation was very unlike the reports,” he explained. “The local newspaper got a hold of it and said the cops swarmed my house, even though there was only one [police] car. The local newspaper report made it look like I was the victim of this horrible thing.”
Rush said the mainstream media have been embellishing the story.
“Of course they got it wrong,” he said. “The more news outfits that pick it up, the more distorted it gets. The few that have been willing to admit that it was sarcasm act as though that doesn’t really matter.”
Should Americans learn that radical Islamic extremists were behind the Boston bombings, Rush said it won’t change the minds of the people condemning him and threatening his life.
“If it does come out that it was Islamic extremists, it won’t matter to them,” he said. “The people who are doing this kind of thing – some of them are Muslims but some are American dhimmis – when an imam talks about killing Americans or we do get hit by a terrorist attack here or our troops abroad, their attitude is that we deserve it.

“It’s brainwashing that they’ve done to bring people, mainly liberals, on the side of Islamists and to try to frighten us. It’s pretty evident. The people it’s happening to are pretty indoctrinated so they don’t see it.”
Rush said the local CBS affiliate covered the story and suggested he was trying to “defend” his tweet.
“I didn’t try to defend them,” he said. “They asked me, ‘If you had it to do over again, would you?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, probably.’”
Despite all the media hoopla, Rush said the incident opened his eyes to the real enemy.
“This really sort of sheds light on who we’re dealing with, and I don’t just mean the Islamists,” he said. “I mean the people who are really willing to stand up for people who want to kill us versus American people. Of course, the stuff that I’m getting is: ‘We’re coming to kill you!’
“Other than the practical concerns, like for safety, it furthers my resolve as far as who’s the dirt bag and who isn’t.”

Rush, author of “Negrophilia: From Slave Block to Pedestal – America’s Racial Obsession,” was the first to break the story of President (then Senator) Barack Obama’s ties to militant Chicago preacher Rev. Jeremiah Wright on a national level in February of 2007. He has appeared on Fox News, CNN and many radio shows. Late Tuesday, People for the American Way demanded that Fox News distance itself from Rush and keep him off the air.
“Erik Rush is a WorldNetDaily columnist and, frankly, this is the kind of thing one would expect from a prominent voice on that site, which is a festering cesspool of right-wing bigotry and fringe conspiracy theories, it stated. “But Fox News, albeit known for its right-wing bent, is a major news outlet and when it gives a podium to a hatemonger like Rush it legitimizes him and his views.”
Rush said he fully intends to write his WND column about the incident from his point of view Thursday.