I am just wondering why people like this are not arrested, and people like this are?
This hypocrisy is utterly shocking to me. These two articles (that I link to above) were run in the Wash Post yesterday. One is about the Holocaust shooter, a man with a history of violent acts against government buildings and officials, one being the Federal Reserve, and of violent threats toward Jews and African Americans on his websites. But nothing was done.
The second is about Syed Haris Ahmed, a Pakistani American who was arrested as a potential 'terrorist' for taking pictures of National Monuments and other loose potential possible (who knows if they are valid) connections to some extremist groups abroad.
I am not saying that Ahmed should not have been arrested. What I am saying is that if he was arrested as a terrorist before even acting, or even getting close to acting, how was James von Brunn who had actually already committed violent acts and avowedly hated some groups of Americans - Jews and African Americans - walking the streets, considered a radical white supremacist??
How screwed up are our labels and our preconditions for these labels. I know there are differences between these cases. But it seems some have come to define 'terrorism' as something that only Arabs and Muslims and foreigners do, not Americans. A Pakistan American plans violence, he's a terrorist; a Caucasian American does the same, he's a radical white supremacist.
To be honest I think the terrorist label is totally inept and ineffective and inappropriate because it fails to to bring out political, social, and economic nuances of violent extremist groups. If we do not understand them we will never be able to combat them. We seem to bring out the nuances of von Brunn just fine in all the articles about him - his motivations his goals; why do we fail to try to understand the myriad motivations and goals of foreign groups?
Friday, June 12, 2009
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