[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 7]
[House]
[Pages 9596-9597]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                               THE TERROR

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Ms. Cheney). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 3, 2017, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Nebraska (Mr. Fortenberry) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. FORTENBERRY. Madam Speaker, last week, as we are all too aware, a 
gunman opened fire on Members of Congress and staff assistants as they 
were practicing for the annual bipartisan baseball game to raise money 
for a Washington-based charity. Among those who were injured is my dear 
friend and colleague, Congressman Steve Scalise, the House majority 
whip.
  As news of this event came in right before our weekly Nebraska 
breakfast, a 74-year tradition--by the way, a bipartisan tradition in 
which the entire Nebraska delegation gets together on a weekly basis 
and invites anyone from our home State to gather with us. As that was 
about to occur, I heard the news of the shootings. I felt bewildered, 
shocked, and numb.
  As further reports came in from my colleagues throughout the morning, 
I heard that Steve was playing second base at the time of his shooting. 
He crawled from the infield, leaving a trail of blood.
  Mr. Speaker, this isn't a movie. These are not distant figures. These 
are our friends and our colleagues, people who work right here in this 
institution. Representative Scalise and I frequently interact on the 
nuances of policy, and sometimes differences of policy. No matter what 
our disagreements--and believe me, there are hard differences even on 
one side of the political aisle. No matter what the differences might 
be, Steve always has worked with me in a cordial, professional, 
constructive, and, perhaps most importantly, gentlemanly manner. That 
is just who he is. So regardless of what anyone may think of his 
policies, of his political point of view, Congress, or the GOP, he did 
not deserve to be shot.
  As noted by Senator Rand Paul, who was also at the practice, were it 
not for the courageous Capitol Hill Police officers who accompanied 
Representative Scalise to events, this would have been a massacre. Were 
it not for the first responders from the Alexandria Police Department 
and Fire and Rescue, many of those injured, for them it could have been 
much, much worse.
  My heart goes out to Steve Scalise and the others who were injured in 
this tragic event.
  However, my words cannot stop here. For years now, across multiple 
administrations and across party lines, we have seen accelerating 
political rancor in our country that goes way beyond normal partisan 
politics. It is hard to get your mind around some of the stuff that 
people write. It is awful. It goes beyond just pointed language. It is 
now so frequent, so violent, and so directly threatening that security 
personnel are working overtime to keep up with it.
  Madam Speaker, you know this. Many good men and women of differing 
political perspectives work in the United States Congress. These are 
people who have accomplished important things in their own home 
communities and decided that their heart was calling them to serve in a 
broader capacity.

                              {time}  1800

  I fully recognize that Washington, D.C., can seem elitist and aloof, 
but as you know, Madam Speaker, Members of Congress are real people, 
with real families, from real places across our land. Sure, there may 
be a disproportionate share of lawyers in the institution, but there 
are also nurses, social workers, doctors, teachers, and small-business 
owners.
  In fact, one of the doctors, Representative Brad Wenstrup, a friend 
of mine, happened to be at the baseball practice. He is an Iraq veteran 
and surgeon. He attended to Steve Scalise's gunshot wound, thankfully.
  Above all, all of these persons are Americans. Nevertheless, there is 
a limit to what the human person, even a paid public servant, can 
absorb. We can take the violent words, but when it spills into violent 
action, it is too much. This country cannot continue to rip itself 
apart like this.
  Madam Speaker, there is one additional difficulty here that needs to 
be unpacked. There is a real risk and vulnerability in what I call 
regularizing this response, in making it like a ``new normal.''
  In fact, within only a few hours of the shootings, certain national 
media had begun to routinize the tragedy, as they returned to obsessing 
on the latest crisis du jour in Washington, as if nothing fundamentally 
destructive to all that we hold dear as Americans had just occurred. 
And why not? As the media tells us, the assassin was a ``troubled 
man,'' a ``lone wolf,'' with a ``history of violence'' and ``easy 
access to guns,'' who was likely ``mentally ill.'' Nothing unique to 
see here.
  Madam Speaker, these were not our thoughts after the assassination 
attempt on Ronald Reagan or the shooting of Democratic Arizona 
Congresswoman Gabby Giffords of Arizona. When President Kennedy was 
shot, I am told, it was as if the entire world came to a halt.
  If we are now going to move beyond words and normalize the violent 
targeting of people just because they choose public service, hold views 
that are different from our own, or speak in a style that is not to our 
liking, there is no country.
  I find it particularly jarring that the widely praised theatrical 
assassination of President Trump at a rendition of Julius Caesar in New 
York City's Central Park--underwritten, by the way, by The New York 
Times--continues to go on.
  Madam Speaker, violence is violence. When it is here and it is 
political, of course, it is particularly jarring.
  Tragically, we also may be growing used to the idea of terror abroad. 
Although its root causes are different than those of domestic political 
attacks here on our own shores, the same thing is at stake: the very 
principles of civilization itself.
  Madam Speaker, let me digress for a moment, because this is 
particularly notable.
  After 9/11, crime all but vanished from the streets of New York City. 
In other words, the shock and the horror caused a community to rally 
together above any social discord in a spirit of true unity. We 
glimpsed that same spirit of solidarity as a nation when Osama bin 
Laden was finally confronted.
  Just recently, a day after the terror attacks that rocked London a 
few weeks ago, Richard Angell, a patron in a restaurant that had been 
evacuated during the jihadist rampage, calmly returned to pay his bill. 
In explaining his generosity, Angell told a reporter, ``These people 
shouldn't win.''
  The night before, several bartenders had risked their lives to defend 
patrons in that particular establishment with bottles, chairs, tables, 
anything they could find, as the terrorists tried to hack away their 
customers with large knives. More lives would have been lost were it 
not for their bravery.
  Only a few weeks before that, at a concert attended mostly by young 
girls, a homeless man, Stephen Jones, who slept most nights near the 
stadium, helped several victims of that bombing to safety, even pulling 
nails from the faces of young children.
  The resolve and courage in the face of barbaric violence harkens back 
to the passengers of United Flight 93 who sacrificed their own lives on 
9/11 in order to take down a plane headed straight for Washington, 
D.C., probably for the White House.
  While we appropriately recognize those who act with courage, the 
constant repetition of these scenes appear to be resulting, sadly, in 
what I call ``terror fatigue.'' We go about the same tired ritual: the 
requisite shock and horror; the 24-hour media coverage of victims, 
heroes, and families; and the inevitable autopsy of what went wrong. By 
this exercise, I am afraid we further enable what Hannah Arendt once 
famously wrote, ``the banality of evil.''

[[Page 9597]]

  Against this backdrop, I think it is important and useful to pull 
back and contemplate the fundamental error in our analysis and 
approach. In the West, we have a blind spot. We want to believe that if 
we can only understand how a disordered person was raised, how his 
parents treated him, if he was an orphan or poor or misunderstood or 
abandoned or a victim of some real or imagined prejudice, then we can 
understand what makes him kill. Armed with this soft understanding, 
perhaps we can prevent further tragedy by ameliorating the conditions 
that we think gave rise to barbaric deeds.
  In many discussions of unpredictable and random attacks on bystanders 
in Europe and America, we find a perverse unwillingness to accurately 
identify the true motivations of the perpetrators, lest we close the 
space to ``cure them'' of their zealotry.
  In the current, highly polarized, oversensitized, and extremely 
volatile climate, it is risky to call a thing for what it is. Instead, 
again and again, we hear that these were just a few misguided 
individuals--another mental health problem, another aberration, another 
police problem; nothing to do with dark theology to notice here. Carry 
on. We must just accept this as a new normal.
  What makes these particular vicious actors different? In a study, the 
Gallup organization basically finds that most people in the world want 
similar things. Most people in the world want a good job: to be able to 
take care of themselves; to be able to take care of their family; to be 
able to use the creative talents of their personhood, whether it be 
their intellect or their hands to make things for the benefit of others 
and, in turn, receive an income that they can support themselves with.
  However, as one of my Muslim friends has noted, Petro-Islam has 
enabled and unleashed a narrow sect of men and women who often want for 
nothing. Several of the terrorists on
9/11 were young men of both wealth and privilege, with world-class 
educations. They weren't motivated by the allures of Western secular 
materialism. They used those values to hide in plain sight. Rather, 
they were in the grip of a dark, violent theology. They were willing to 
die for its inherent irrationality.
  This cannot continue. Even the Saudis, who have lived for too long 
with the hyper hypocrisy of buying off Wahhabists while shopping in 
Paris, recognize this is an unsustainable trend.
  Madam Speaker, when I was in college, I remember the day when 
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was assassinated. It was a hard day for 
me. Shortly before, I had lived in that country on an exchange program. 
I received the bountiful gift of hospitality and an invaluable source 
of deep and reach cultural understanding.
  Sadat died. Sadat gave his life because he made a reasoned choice to 
reach across the divide to find peace. In another courageous move, just 
a few years ago, in a little-known speech, the current Egyptian 
President, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, said: ``Is it possible that 1.6 
billion Muslims should want to kill the rest of the world's 
inhabitants--that is, 7 billion--so that they themselves may live? 
Impossible.''
  Quite a courageous statement.
  At this moment, Madam Speaker, we are on the verge of wiping out ISIS 
militarily. But it is only the latest brand. We will only fully resolve 
the thinking that leads to the embrace of dark theology through a 
rebirth in reason, modeled through courageous leadership.
  As we see in our battle against ISIS, when you call for evil to 
happen on social media, in Main Street media and in art, eventually 
someone in the real world takes it to heart. We must stop creating the 
rhetorical conditions and the media cover for this politically 
motivated violence or the grotesque twisting of mediums to encourage 
terror. There is no rationalization that can justify it. This is not 
about freedom of speech. It is about freedom from violence.
  Ask yourself a question: Where would you like to live? Where people 
lie, steal, and kill? Or where people are good, trustworthy, and free?
  Madam Speaker, I will close with this because it is a hint of good 
news.
  Last week, the House of Representatives, in a private session, 
Democrats and Republicans, had a family meeting and, with due candor, 
spoke about the effect of escalating rhetoric and the responsibility 
each of us must take in owning our share of it.
  Importantly, the bipartisan Congressional Baseball Game went on as 
planned last Thursday night. I took my younger staff. The game was 
energetic and patriotically bipartisan. Madam Speaker, as you are 
aware, my side lost, but I believe America won.
  Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________