Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles
Alexander Zaitchik
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Racist Novel Glorifying Assassination of SPLC Staffer Endorsed by Profs
01 year ago
It should surprise no one that former hate group leader Kyle Bristow has self-published a white nationalist novel that features the graphic assassination of a character based on a prominent Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) figure. After all, Bristow has an ax to grind with the SPLC and first attained notoriety for promoting a video game centered on killing Mexicans.
What is somewhat surprising are some of the names that appear among the dozen gushing blurbs praising the violently racist novel, White Apocalypse.
Among those who have endorsed Bristow’s novel is Kevin MacDonald, professor of psychology at California State University at Long Beach. McDonald calls Bristow’s book “an emotionally compelling account of Whites as historical victims of non-Whites — just the sort of thing we need to motivate a renaissance among our people.”
Despite his high-sounding position, MacDonald is a raging anti-Semite who contends that Jews are driven by a genetically programmed evolutionary strategy to undermine Western civilization. MacDonald, whose writings on Jews have been condemned by his academic colleagues, recently joined an explicitly white supremacist group, the American Third Position, which was started by a man who has called for the deportation of all Americans with any “ascertainable trace of Negro blood.”
Another fan of Bristow’s novel is self-described white “separatist” Virginia Abernethy, a professor emerita at Vanderbilt University medical school. Abernethy calls White Apocalypse a “well-researched page-turner” and hopes it is the first of many. “One looks forward to much more from this author,” she writes.
Craig Bodeker, producer of the film “A Conversation About Race,” also weighs in with a prominent endorsement. Bodeker, who claims he is no racist (despite posting Internet comments describing black people as “EVIL monkeys”), calls Bristow’s book “the jolt Whites need to awaken from our suicidal slumber!”
Let’s hope no one takes Bristow’s book seriously, let alone being “awakened” by it. Its plot revolves around a series of violent revenge fantasies against Jewish professors, Latino and Native American activists, and the SPLC.
One of the main story lines of White Apocalypse involves one man’s crusade against the “evil, anti-Western” activities of an Atlanta-based organization called the “Center for Diversity and Multiculturalism.” The organization, with its “hate group list” and large legal staff, is clearly modeled on the Montgomery-based SPLC. The book also includes characters whose roles match that of two SPLC senior staffers: Mark Potok, the director of SPLC’s Intelligence Project and editor of its Intelligence Report and this blog, and Heidi Beirich, the SPLC’s director of research (Beirich’s name is rendered as “Beirman” in Bristow’s book).
On page 195, the Potok character — who Bristow describes as an “oily, curly haired troll” and Center spokesman named David Greenberg — has just finished delivering testimony in a federal courthouse. As Greenberg stands outside the building, the novel’s hero, a one-man militia named Jack Schoenherr (which translates from the German, roughly, as “Mr. Handsome”), fires a bullet from his AR-15 from the roof of a nearby parking garage. Bristow describes the event as follows:
The supersonic projectile hit the leftist agitator one inch below the eye, and the bullet exited the back of his head nanoseconds later. … Brain, blood, and skull fragments burst forth from what was once Greenberg’s head, and the leftist was blown off both of his feet. Greenberg died instantly, and his last words were “We must destroy the plague that is Western culture.” Ironically, Western culture got him first. From Valhalla [a celebration hall in Scandinavian mythology], Thor, the archenemy of trolls, smiled at the accomplishment of the epitome of Western Man.
When asked to comment on what is obviously a murder fantasy concerning the SPLC’s Potok, Bristow replied in an E-mail that began “Dear Guttersnipe” that any parallels were purely coincidental.
“I do not ‘fantasize’ about anyone’s death,” said Bristow. “I do, however, fantasize quite often of taking the country over and implementing a real right-wing agenda that would make [archconservative MSNBC commentator] Pat Buchanan and the late Sam Francis [the chief editor of the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens] proud. What I mean by this is the most offensive thing possible, and what this is I will leave to your imagination.”
Precious little imagination is required.
With its anti-Semitism and racist venom, White Apocalypse is the latest entry into a long tradition of American hate-fiction animated by the hatreds and frustrations that fester in far-right circles. The most famous of the genre in recent times, of course, is the late neo-Nazi William Pierce’s The Turner Diaries, a race-war fantasy novel that inspired the Oklahoma City bombing and the murderous acts of the domestic terrorist group, the Order, in the mid-1980s.
Bristow’s book makes clear that his current heroes include, not just marginal far-right figures, but conservative commentators employed by major cable news and radio networks. Early in the novel, Bristow quotes “Dr. Michael Savage” approvingly, an obvious reference to hate-radio jock Michael Savage. The book’s militia tough-guy hero offers a reading list that includes Pat Buchanan’s The Suicide of the West. Nor does it take long to figure out that the name of the Bristow book’s protagonist, Samuel Buchanan, is meant as homage to Pat Buchanan and Buchanan’s late friend, one-time Washington Times columnist, Samuel Francis.
Bristow, now a law student at the University of Toledo, forged most of his connections to the radical right as the 21-year-old campus director of the nationally recognized Michigan State University chapter of Young Americans for Freedom. He gained notoriety (as well as SPLC’s hate group designation) for inviting well-known extremists to speak on campus, such as the leader of the whites-only British National Party, Nick Griffin, and for stunts like advocating a video game in which players earned points by shooting Mexican migrants at the border.
While representing YAF, Bristow earned notice from bookers and hosts at Fox News Channel. As Bristow still proudly boasts on his website, he once appeared on “The O’Reilly Factor” and has been quoted on-air by Sean Hannity.
New Report Examines ‘Tea Party Nationalism,’ Charts Extremist Ties
01 year ago
Back in July, the NAACP publicly called upon Tea Party leaders to repudiate extremists and racist individuals within their ranks. Although the presence of such elements in Tea Party circles had been evident for some time, movement figures tended to be dismissive and defensive in their response.
Such denials may be a little harder to make following today’s release of “Tea Party Nationalism: A Critical Examination of the Tea Party Movement and the Size, Scope, and Focus of Its National Factions.” The report, published by the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, is the first in-depth analysis of the main Tea Party groups and their various connections to extremist groups and individuals with past and present activities in hate groups. The full report is available at teapartynationalism.com, with running updates to follow.
“Tea Party Nationalism” examines the leaderships, histories, and activities of six national organizational networks at the core of the Tea Party movement: FreedomWorks Tea Party, 1776 Tea Party, Tea Party Nation, Tea Party Patriots, ResistNet, and Tea Party Express. In each case, with the exception of FreedomWorks, the authors found associations between Tea Party organizations and extremists spanning from anti-immigration activists to militia leaders to white nationalists. Groups with known anti-Semitic agendas come up often and prominently in the report’s 94 pages, which also catalog numerous vitriolic attacks by Tea Party members using anti-Muslim and Islamophobic rhetoric.
The report names several figures whose histories of hate speech or associations with hate organizations have been documented by the Southern Poverty Law Center, including Rosanna Pulido, associated with ResistNet; Dale Robertson, founder of the 1776 Tea Party and TeaParty.org; Roy Beck (NumbersUSA), affiliated with Tea Party Nation, Pamela Geller, who has hosted workshops for Tea Party Patriots, and former Tea Party Express Chairman Mark Williams, who resigned from the organization in June after a series of racially volatile comments, including calling slavery “a great gig” in a satirical piece he authored, and referring to President Obama as “a Nazi, a half-white racist, a half-black racist and an Indonesian Muslim turned welfare fraud.” Also mentioned in the report are individuals with links to the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens.
The authors do not argue that all or most of Tea Party activists are explicit racists or sympathize with the ideas and goals of extremists. Rather, they argue that racist individuals and groups have been drawn to the movement from the beginning; in most cases, they are forced out of their respective groups only when their beliefs and associations result in bad press.
The authors further argue that the movement as a whole is based on “a form of American nationalism [that] does not include all Americans, and separates itself from those it regards as insufficiently ‘real Americans.’” Furthermore, “a bright white line of racism threads through this nationalism [in which] race and religion are powerful determinants of national identity [and] mark the border between ‘self’ and ‘other.’”
The diffuse Tea Party movement is irreducible to race, and it is not motivated by “a full-fledged variety of white nationalism,” conclude the authors. But it is still evolving, and in often disturbing ways.
“It is as inchoate as it is super-patriotic,” they write. “It is possibly an embryo of what it might yet become.”
9.12 Project Paranoia: Obama Wants to See You… Naked!
01 year ago
Unsurprisingly, Glenn Beck’s 9.12 Project has absorbed much of its founder’s famous paranoia. Based on Beck’s fevered lectures and paid endorsements, legions of 9.12’ers have eagerly bought up overpriced gold coins, non-hybrid seeds, and lots of ammo for use in 9.12 Project practice shoots. But not even the most skeptical and bemused observer of 9.12 culture could have seen the latest trend which may see 9.12’ers stocking up on an unlikely survival tool in preparation for the coming Obamapocalypse: very thick underwear.
On his Sept. 27 show, Beck found time in between exercises in connect-the-dots conspiracizing to discuss something called the Z Backscatter Van (ZBV), a mobile X-ray scanning device produced by the Massachusetts firm American Science & Engineering. After reading about the product in Forbes, Beck was confident that the Obama Administration had ordered intelligence and law enforcement agencies to purchase this technology — which can determine from a distance the general contents of parked cars and duffle bags — with nefarious ends in mind.
“They’re using them now in your neighborhoods,” warned Beck. “And the Obama administration won’t say exactly why we’re buying their vans and driving them down our streets.”
Luckily for Beck, he has an army of constitutional watchdogs scattered throughout the country in the form hundreds of 9.12 Project chapters. The clearinghouse for its intelligence efforts is the 9.12 Project Network. It was here that 9.12’er Jared Law offered the real reason the government is interested in the ZBV: To better understand what conservative activists look like in the buff.
“Any progressive in government, whether it’s your local city mayor, all the way up to an Obama regime bureaucrat, can now see you and your family, totally nude (through your clothes),” writes Law. “They have sold enough of these now that every single 9.12′er, Tea Partier, and conservative leader in America could potentially have dozens of photos of themselves and their families in the nude on Obama Regime hard drives… Yet another reason to throw out the ‘progressives,’ and to Turn To God!!”
Because if there’s one thing God hates more than totalitarian progressive peeping Toms, surely it’s nudity.
Report: Would-Be Terrorist Inspired by ‘Schoolteacher’ Glenn Beck
01 year ago
The media watchdog Media Matters for America today released audio of an interview conducted with Byron Williams, the would-be terrorist who last July was arrested after a shootout with cops on his way to San Francisco, where he allegedly planned to kill employees at the offices of the ACLU and the Tides Foundation.
The interview and the accompanying article, by Pacifica Radio producer John Hamilton, illuminates the role Fox News and specifically Fox host Glenn Beck played in turning Williams’ attention toward the groups and convincing him that they were at the center of a vast plot to destroy the country.
“I would have never started watching Fox News if it wasn’t for the fact that Beck was on there,” Williams tells Hamilton. “And it was the things that he did, it was the things he exposed that blew my mind.”
Beck’s influence seems especially salient with regards to Williams’ strange obsession with the Tides Foundation, a low-profile group that dispenses grants to liberal causes. According to Hamilton, Beck had attacked Tides 29 times on his Fox News show in the year-and-a-half leading up to the shooting, often placing it at the center of fantastical diagrams depicting liberal-socialist plots to wreck America.
In the interview from prison, Williams describes Beck as being “like a schoolteacher on TV.” This contradicts statements made by Williams in another interview with the Examiner, in which he claims he already knew everything Beck discussed on his show.
In his conversation with Hamilton, Williams also mentions the influence of David Horowitz, whose Discover The Networks website is the source of much of Beck’s material, and Alex Jones, the Austin-based radio conspiracist whose friend Andrew Napolitano will soon host a daily show on Fox Business.
Beck’s breathless demonization of Tides and other liberal groups has not occurred in a vacuum. The rhetoric that helped inspire Williams to pack his car with guns and ammo and head toward San Francisco finds echo throughout the rightwing media world. Media Matters has a compiled a useful archive of this material here.
Anti-Immigrant Groups Continue Greenwashing Campaign
01 year ago
Progressives For Immigration Reform (PFIR) held its inaugural conference Tuesday at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The small, invitation-only, one-day conference was entitled, “The First National Conference on Immigration, Conservation, and the Environment.” The conclave is just another example of PFIR’s cynical greenwashing campaign to recruit environmentalists to the anti-immigrant cause by blaming them for urban sprawl, overconsumption and a host of other environmental problems.
Many speakers at PFIR’s event had links to John Tanton, the racist founder of the modern anti-immigration movement. Representatives from NumbersUSA and the Center for Immigration Studies—groups founded by Tanton—participated. The incestuous nature of the Tanton network was embodied in the person of PFIR Executive Director Leah Durant, who formerly was employed by the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s (FAIR) legal arm, the Immigration Reform Law Institute. FAIR, which the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as a hate group, was founded by Tanton, who still serves on the group’s board. For a time, Durant also was part of Choose Black America, a FAIR front group supposedly representing the interests of African Americans concerned with high levels of immigration. The group disintegrated not long after its first press conference, which was paid for and stage-managed by FAIR.
According to the Center for New Community, Tuesday’s conference discussions addressed the topics that have long consumed Tanton-linked pseudo-environmental front groups: “the population taboo;” “the impact of immigration on population size;” and “how U.S. immigration policy impedes the economic progress of developing nations and sustainability of other species.” The conclusions reached were, of course, preordained by the bigotry that has always guided Tanton’s 30-year project to inject race hate into environmental politics. Conference participants blamed immigrants for being responsible for everything from increased traffic to high gas prices to looming resource scarcity.
There is nothing new about this tactic. As early as 1986, Tanton was writing in private memos to his colleagues, “The Sierra Club may not want to touch the immigration issue, but the immigration issue is going to touch the Sierra Club!” For several years, Tanton and his allies made concerted efforts to turn the Sierra Club into an anti-immigrant organization. They came very close in 2004, when anti-immigrant candidates nearly secured a majority of the club’s board. The SPLC played a pivotal role in pushing back against those efforts, writing a letter to the club’s board warning of the impending takeover and running its co-founder Morris Dees for the club’s board so that his candidate’s statement could warn environmentalists about the anti-immigrant campaign.
Antigovernment Dad, Son Blame Each Other in Bank-Bombing Trial
01 year ago
The trial of Bruce and Joshua Turnidge begins its sixth day of testimony in a Salem, Ore., courtroom today, where the father and son face nearly 20 counts ranging from aggravated murder to assault stemming from a December 2008 bank bombing that killed two police officers and seriously injured two others.
According to prosecutors, at least one of the two men – who have turned on each other as the trial has unfolded – began planning the bombing shortly after the election of Barack Obama, fearing the new president would restrict their gun rights upon taking office.
On the opening day of the trial last week, Marion County deputy district attorney Katie Suver told the jury that the election served as a “catalyst” for the bombing. She stated further that the father, Bruce, 59, attempted to start his own militia following the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, fearing a similar crackdown on guns.
It remains unclear exactly why the two men thought planting a bomb outside and robbing a bank in suburban Oregon would strike a blow against federal power. What is known is that on Dec. 12, 2008, an employee at a Wells Fargo Bank in Woodburn received a call from a man instructing her and her fellow employees to leave the building. When her manager told her to hang up, she did so and notified the police, who arrived and found a suspicious green metal box outside an adjacent bank.
William Hakim, a bomb technician with the Oregon State Police, thought the box was a hoax and brought it into the other bank for dismantling. When it went off, Hakim was killed along with Woodburn Police Capt. Thomas Tennant. Woodburn Police Chief Scott Russell survived but lost his right leg in the blast; a bank employee was also wounded. Authorities believe a passing trucker talking on a CB radio inadvertently triggered the remote-controlled device.
The father and son have acquired separate legal counsel and are at odds over who bears responsibility for the failed plot. Steven Krasik, the younger Turnidge’s attorney, stated last week that his client is innocent and had no idea that his father was actually going to follow through on one of his schemes. The father’s lawyer, meanwhile, has called 34-year-old Joshua Turnidge a liar, and pointed out that some of the elements in the failed plot, such as two throwaway cell phones, are linked to the son.
Whatever the truth, the elder Turnidge has never been discreet about his politics. “When the FBI went to Bruce Turnidge’s house the first time, he struck up a conversation with one of the agents ranging from his support of the Second Amendment to the origin of a racist slur against African Americans,” prosecutor Suver told the court, according to the Oregonian. “Turnidge then told the agent, ‘Now we have one in the White House.’”
The trial is expected to last into December. If either defendant is convicted, prosecutors are expected to push for the death penalty.
Veterans Against Jihad Takes on ‘Threat’ of Sharia Law
01 year ago
The latest fairy tale to emerge from the paranoid right is the idea that the United States legal system is haunted by the specter of Sharia law. Although strict Islamic legal codes are the rare exception even among Muslim-majority nations, anti-Muslim groups and individuals — including well-known politicians like Newt Gingrich — are now warning with straight faces that mullahs could soon be caning American schoolchildren if they get caught chewing gum.
Among the groups decrying this make-believe threat, a relatively new organization called Veterans Against Jihad (VAJ) seems particularly well positioned to benefit from the current Sharia hysteria. Founded last spring by two retired Marine Corps veterans, the goal of VAJ is to “to encourage Veterans to more actively respond to challenges threatening our Constitution [and] awaken American Citizens to Islam’s Jihadist religious mandate, which dictates the teaching of Shari’ah law, and how Shari’ah Law will impact our way of life.”
Toward this end, the group is asking all veterans to “renew and retake The Oath of Enlistment, reaffirming their loyalty to our Constitution, our Country and it’s [sic] citizens.” But the VAJ’s understanding of that loyalty is an unusual one; its manifesto specifies the kinds of orders its members can respect as well as what sort of authority it deems legitimate. The VAJ code promises only to cooperate with those officials “legally enforcing, and/or preserving our nation’s security.” Judging from the VAJ site, it is clear the group does not consider that the current Democratic White House fits the bill.
The VAJ’s distaste for religiously flavored law, however, is selective. Among the far-right groups and individuals linked to on its site is Reclaim America for Christ, which is on a mission to “educate our pastors, legislators, educators, students and all citizens as to the truth about America’s Christian Heritage and the role of fundamental, Biblical Christianity in the establishment and function of our legal, legislative and educational systems.”
While the VAJ works to protect America from Allah and reclaim it for Christ, it sees the menace of Sharia everywhere, including law firms that offer consultations on the (private) intricacies of Islamic estate planning. But as this article in the New Jersey Jewish News notes (referenced in this Eugene Robinson column), there has in the entire history of the republic been only one instance of an actual crime (domestic abuse) being forgiven by a U.S. judge on grounds of “Islamic practices” — and this ruling was swiftly overturned by another judge.
“Talk of Sharia law taking root in our country is just a way of stirring up nativist fears,” said Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center. “It would require throwing out the entire Constitution, including the Bill of Rights. Obviously, no such effort would have the remotest chance of success.”
JDL Leader’s Shooting Trial to Resume Next Month in Michigan
01 year ago
by Alexander Zaitchik
in Anti-Arab
Was it road rage or self defense? Or maybe even a politically motivated act of violence?
That’s what a jury will decide when the trial of Jewish Defense League organizer Carl Mintz begins on Oct. 14.
Mintz, 27, a state chapter organizer for the JDL in Michigan, is charged in the shooting of a 20-year-old Arab-American named Faith Said. The prosecution’s first attempt at a conviction ended with a mistrial in August when three members of the jury refused to acquit Mintz.
According to local police reports, Said approached Mintz’s car after the two came to rest at a stoplight in Farmington Hills, Mich. Said got out of his car and walked toward Mintz, loudly criticizing him for tapping his brakes as he approached the light. Mintz then reached for his concealed handgun and shot Said in the arm. Mintz is claiming self-defense, but prosecutors note that the light had already turned green when Mintz opened fire and that he could have simply driven away.
At first, local news accounts failed to mention Said’s ethnicity. That changed when reporters discovered that Mintz was not only a state chapter organizer for the JDL but had posted video clips on YouTube in which he rants against socialists and Muslims, and declares Islam to be “the enemy.”
If convicted of the felony charge of assault with intent to do great bodily harm, Mintz faces up to 10 years in prison. He faces another two years on weapons charges.
In the past, JDL members have not fared well in prison. In 2005, Earl Krugel, a key JDL member who was serving time for a 2001 plot to bomb a California mosque and the office of a Lebanese-American congressman, was killed at a federal prison in Phoenix when another inmate struck him on the head with a cement block. In 2002, JDL leader Irv Rubin died of an apparent suicide in federal detention while awaiting trial in connection with the same plot. His family and the JDL contend that he was murdered.
The JDL, which preaches a violent form of anti-Arab, Jewish nationalism, has maintained a relatively low profile in recent years. The group is still active, however, on both sides of the Atlantic. In London earlier this month, British JDL activists took to the streets together with the English Defence League in a counter-demonstration against a Muslim rally in support of Palestinians.
The British (Extremists) Are Coming — Or, the English Defence League Hearts Pam Geller
01 year ago
Saturday’s 9/11 protest in downtown Manhattan featured the by-now-familiar chants and symbols of the debate over the so-called Ground Zero mosque. But amid the sea of red, white and blue, there were a few new icons added to the usual mix. As featured in a series of pictures posted Wednesday by the New York Times, a handful of protesters—seven to be exact—came from England toting flags (and ski masks) bearing St. George’s Cross. White with red crossbars, the medieval flag is most famous for its use by British Crusaders. The flag also has a long history of use by far-right British nationalists in conjunction with other regional flags. In recent months, it has become the central symbol of the English Defence League (EDL), a thuggish anti-Muslim street movement that is rapidly spreading throughout the United Kingdom.
The EDL was in New York to show support for the event organized by Pamela Geller, who, according to the EDL, personally invited the group to participate. A post to the EDL website dated Sept. 16 states: “The English Defence League would like to thank Pamela Geller for inviting us over to her ground zero freedom rally.” This would seem to contradict Geller’s claim to have repudiated the group after learning that one of its leaders was a member of the racist and anti-Semitic British National Party. (Geller is Jewish.) In February, Geller wrote admiringly of the EDL on her blog. “I share the E.D.L.’s goals,” she said. “We need to encourage rational, reasonable groups that oppose the Islamisation of the West.”
The idea that the EDL is either rational or reasonable is quickly destroyed by an 11-minute Guardian documentary that recounts the group’s defining features: street intimidation and violent rhetoric. In the video, EDL activists are heard issuing targeted threats and speaking of upcoming “murders” and “stampings”. Among the British groups that have attached themselves to the EDL are violent neo-Nazi outfits such as Combat 18 and far-right racist parties like the National Front. Because of the increasingly ominous atmosphere surrounding its public gatherings, the EDL’s founder and leader Tommy Robinson was stopped last week by authorities at JFK Airport on a tip from British police and sent back to England.
According to the narrator of the Guardian video, a reporter who spent months inside the movement, the EDL is not “simply a rerun of previous far-right organizations.” Rather, “it has acted like a lightning rod with people with a range of grievances who appear to be coalescing around a rampant Islamaphobia.”
It makes sense that Pam Geller has found admirers among extremists across the pond. As Hatewatch reported last month, Geller, co-founder of the Muslim-bashing Stop Islamization of America group, also has a fan club among the generally anti-Semitic white power activists of Stormfront.org. Such unexpected mutual affinities are also a feature of the community flocked under the EDL banner. Unlike British skinhead groups of the past, the EDL features black and Jewish members, as well as non-Jewish members who have taken to waving Israeli flags and singing the Israeli national anthem at demonstrations. One of the EDL’s leaders is a brown-skinned, British-born Sikh whose family emigrated from the same part of the world as those the EDL refers to as “pakis.”
Such is the ecumenicalism of today’s transatlantic Islamophobia: Anybody is welcome, so long as they can chant “Islamic scum” and don’t mind rubbing shoulders with neo-Nazis.
End of Summer Sees Growing Threats to Abortion Clinics and Mosques
01 year ago
Recent weeks have seen one attack and one stymied attack on abortion clinics around the country. Both have shared a subplot of anti-Muslim extremism.
On Sept. 2, in the small central California city of Madera, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at the local Planned Parenthood building, the first such attack suffered by the clinic in its 20 years of operation. Following the bombing, local news reports described burnt blinds on the front lawn and boarded-up windows. “I believe it’s extremists who want to make a statement,” said Patsy Montgomery, the clinic’s public affairs director.
Federal agents did not have to travel far to investigate: The FBI was already in Madera looking into the late August vandalizing of a mosque involving bricks and anti-Muslim graffiti. The mosque attack was just one incident in a wave of bias-motivated violence that has been building momentum all summer.
Anti-Islam animus was likewise a motivating factor behind another would-be abortion clinic bomber: Justin Carl Moose , a Christian radical and self-described “Christian Osama bin Laden.” The 26-year old Moose was arrested at his home last week in Concord, N.C., after it was discovered that his Facebook page contained bomb-making instructions and a stated intention to use homemade explosives against a local abortion clinic. As reported by the Charlotte Observer, the Facebook page maintained by Moose, who hung a Gadsden (“Don’t Tread on Me”) flag outside his home, “express[ed] anger at abortion doctors, President Barack Obama’s health care plan, and plans to build a mosque near ground zero in New York City.”
It is not at all surprising that Moose would mention abortion and mosques in the same breath. As an alleged adherent of the radical anti-abortion movement Army of God, he has likely absorbed the heterodox hate spewed by the Rev. Donald Spitz, an extremist who maintains a website in the name of the Army of God who combines calls for violence against abortion doctors with anti-Muslim invective. Spitz believes that Islam is “Satanic” and that Muslims “should not be allowed to live in the United States.”
It is a little strange, though, to hear a Spitz acolyte like Moose echo the newest conservative talking point about Ground Zero. Spitz and his fellow soldiers in the Army of God are not exactly known for their love for Gotham. According to Spitz, the city is a “sex perverted cesspool” that richly deserved the Sept. 11 attacks.