Not much news coverage about this, but you can bet if the suspect’s last name was Ahmed or Mahmoud instead of “Stewart” he would immediately be labeled a “terrorist.”

What if he were Muslim? (h/t: CriticalDragon)

Suspect Throws Bombs, Leads Police on 40-Mile Chase

A suspect with an anti-police agenda and wanted for attempted murder in Virginia is under arrest in Great Falls, Mont., after leading police Thursday on a wild 40-mile chase during which he tossed seven ignited pipe bombs into the path of pursuing officers.

Laurence Alan Stewart II, 25, is believed to have fled Stafford County, Va., on Tuesday during the height of Hurricane Sandy after separate pipe bombs exploded at the homes of a sheriff’s deputy, a detective and Stewart’s ex-girlfriend. No one was injured.

On Thursday, 1,800 miles away from where the saga began, a Montana state trooper stopped a red Hyundai for speeding on U.S. Highway 87 southeast of Great Falls. As the trooper returned to his vehicle to check the driver’s license, the fugitive’s car sped off with Montana license plates stolen the night before from a Wal-Mart parking lot.

The driver of the vehicle, later identified as Stewart, led state troopers and sheriff’s deputies from two counties on a 40-mile chase, Bradley Beyersdorf, a spokesman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, told Hatewatch today. Local schools were locked down as a squad of police cars chased the fugitive vehicle while it sped across the Montana plains.

“He tossed out approximately seven devices (pipe bombs) during this high-speed chase with police,” Beyersdorf said.

After spike strips failed to stop the vehicle, a deputy finally forced Stewart’s vehicle into a ditch.

“At that point, he gets out and runs with a handgun,” Beyersdorf said. Stewart eventually surrendered without gunfire as a Department of Homeland Security helicopter and several police officers arrived on scene.

After Stewart was arrested, a bomb squad found several more pipe bombs in his car. Beyersdorf declined to provide a more precise description of the munitions or say whether other bomb-building components were found in the vehicle.

A 40-mile stretch of the highway was closed until 4 a.m. Friday as police and evidence technicians picked up remains of the pipe bombs, some of which exploded. No one was hurt by the explosions.

“From what we know at this point, he was angry at law enforcement in Virginia for investigating him,” the ATF spokesman said. “There is no indication that he had any extremist agenda outside of his propensity for violence toward law enforcement officers.”

It’s not known why Stewart was fleeing to Montana, a state that is regarded as a haven for assorted anti-government extremists and white supremacists.

Investigators at this point also don’t know when or where the suspect built his arsenal of pipe bombs, or where he obtained plans to build them, Beyersdorf said.

Stewart is charged in Stafford County, Va., with two counts of attempted murder of law enforcement officers and two counts of arson of an occupied dwelling and one count of use of a weapon for a terrorist act. Additionally, he is charged in Fredricksburg, Va., with one count of attempted murder of a law enforcement officer, firing a missile into an occupied dwelling and arson of an occupied dwelling.

He is being held in the Cascade County jail in Montana, where additional state or federal charges are expected to be filed.

Stewart was arrested on a domestic assault charge on June 26 in Stafford County, Va., and failed to show up for a court hearing on that case, the Fredricksburg News reported in today’s editions.

Prior to the bombings, Stewart set up a website and claimed he has been unfairly treated in Stafford, the newspaper reported. “He had particularly harsh words for the former girlfriend and several of the officers involved in the misdemeanor cases against him,” the newspaper account said.

“With all of the lies and dirty dealings I feel like I do not have a chance for justice,” he wrote.

“At this point, I might as well commit some crimes,’’ Stewart wrote, according to the Fredricksburg newspaper. “If I am to be blamed for wrongdoing I should at least have some fun and do whatever I want without regard. Tell a man he is something enough times and eventually even he will start to believe it.”

Gregory Arthur Weiler II, mentally ill man who was going to strike Churches. He has a cat in his arms, can you imagine a Muslim who was charged with terrorism being shown with a cute little cat?

Look at the way the story below about Gregory A. Weiler II, an Illinois man who planned to bomb 48 churches is framed. He is not labeled a terrorist, even though one of the charges he faces is “terrorism,” his biography of dealing with life long depression and mental health issues is prominently highlighted. There are many cases in which the FBI has arrested Muslims who have had a history of mental health issues, who were in fact guided by the FBI every step of the way in cases that are either outright or borderline “entrapment.” One can rarely expect that the  nuance afforded Weiler would ever be given to a Muslim suspected of terrorism.

Juan Cole noted the Top Ten differences Between White Terrorists and Others, his article rings particularly true in light of Weiler’s arrest and the subsequent media coverage.

1. White terrorists are called “gunmen.” What does that even mean? A person with a gun? Wouldn’t that be, like, everyone in the US? Other terrorists are called, like, “terrorists.”

2. White terrorists are “troubled loners.” Other terrorists are always suspected of being part of a global plot, even when they are obviously troubled loners.

3. Doing a study on the danger of white terrorists at the Department of Homeland Security will get you sidelined by angry white Congressmen. Doing studies on other kinds of terrorists is a guaranteed promotion.

4. The family of a white terrorist is interviewed, weeping as they wonder where he went wrong. The families of other terrorists are almost never interviewed.

5. White terrorists are part of a “fringe.” Other terrorists are apparently mainstream.

6. White terrorists are random events, like tornadoes. Other terrorists are long-running conspiracies.

7. White terrorists are never called “white.” But other terrorists are given ethnic affiliations.

8. Nobody thinks white terrorists are typical of white people. But other terrorists are considered paragons of their societies.

9. White terrorists are alcoholics, addicts or mentally ill. Other terrorists are apparently clean-living and perfectly sane.

10. There is nothing you can do about white terrorists. Gun control won’t stop them. No policy you could make, no government program, could possibly have an impact on them. But hundreds of billions of dollars must be spent on police and on the Department of Defense, and on TSA, which must virtually strip search 60 million people a year, to deal with other terrorists.

Family: Elk Grove Village man held in bomb plot ‘can’t hurt anyone now’

By Carlos Sadovi and Dawn Rhodes Tribune reporters

By the time Gregory Weiler II was in his late teens, his family said, the Elk Grove Village native was well down a path toward destruction.

Both his mother and father had committed suicide before he was 16, and Weiler had also tried to kill himself in 8th grade. He had been hospitalized for mental illness at least six times. In between, he had become addicted to heroin and alcohol.

When Weiler, 23, left several years ago to join a religious group in Missouri, his family knew they’d eventually hear that “Greg” had again gotten into trouble.

It happened last week, when Weiler was arrested in Miami, Okla. for allegedly gathering materials to make 50 Molotov cocktails, with plans to bomb nearly that many local churches.

On Saturday, his family in Elk Grove Village expressed relief that Weiler had been caught, certain that he would have followed through with what an Oklahoma court affidavit described as a deadly terrorist plot.

“It’s a blessing in disguise that they were able to get there,” said Weiler’s cousin Johnny Meyers in an interview. “He has to be held accountable. It’s a blessing, he can’t hurt anyone now.”

According to court documents, Weiler was arrested after police found the bomb-making equipment in a garbage can at a motel. He has been charged with violating Oklahoma’s anti-terrorism laws, a legacy of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people.

Entering Weiler’s motel room, police found dozens of empty beer bottles fashioned as Molotov cocktails, along with a torn-up page that had hand-written instructions for making the bombs. The document had a hand-drawn map of 48 local churches, and plans to make more bombs, according to the affidavit.

The churches were “grouped and circled with a key detailing how many nights and how many people,” would potentially be affected, according to the affidavit. Officials said Weiler had plans to videotape the explosions. A hand-written journal discovered in his motel room laid out plans to destroy churches across the U.S. “a tiny bit at a time — setting foundation for the years to follow,” the affidavit said.

Miami Police Chief George Haralson said Weiler checked into the motel on Sept. 20 using an Illinois driver’s license with an address in Washington, Ill., just east of Peoria.

Haralson said police have not found any indication of a partner in the plot.

“To be able to fire bomb 48 churches in a week, that’s an awful lot of effort,” Haralson said. “But we’re confident that he was acting alone.”

As for why Weiler might have targeted the rural community of 15,000 people, “I couldn’t even begin to guess,” Haralson said.

His aunt Joanne Meyers said she believes the latest incident is another example how mental illness has devastated their family. She and her husband Chris took in Weiler after his mother committed suicide in 2002 after years of depression and alcoholism, she said.

Weiler’s father suffered from alcohol and drug addiction before he killed himself in 2005.

And, a sister is hospitalized for mental illness after several suicide attempts, said Meyers.

“We just want people to understand how mental illness such as Greg’s affects our whole family,” Meyers said.

Weiler showed signs of mental illness early, she said. After graduating from Elk Grove High School, he went to Bradley University — where he skipped classes and stole money from friends and family through a pyramid scheme, said Meyers.

About three years ago, Weiler joined a church in Missouri that his family called “a cult.”

Several weeks ago, family members began reading odd missives Weiler posted on his Facebook page, which was the only way they kept in touch with him.

A Sept. 25 entry — apparently written from his motel room — referred to his childhood and focused on the Catholic Church, whose leaders he claimed are responsible for “hypocrisy, murder and deceit.”

He ends: “I have not opened a bible in a while, and I haven’t stepped foot into a church building in quite some time — and though I may be very lonely right now, I am hoping that someone, and maybe someday in the future, someone will take notice.”

Weiler is charged with threat to use explosives, incendiary device, simulated bomb to damage or injure persons or property, and a violation of the Oklahoma anti-terrorism act. He is being held without bail in Ottawa County Jail.

If these “militiamen” were Muslims this would be called terrorism.

What if they were Muslim? (h/t: CriticalDragon)

Alaska Militiamen Convicted in Conspiracy to Murder Officials

(SPLC)

Rejecting Schaeffer Cox’s claim that he was merely exercising freedom of speech when he spoke of killing a judge and law enforcement officials, a federal jury this summer convicted the boyish Alaska militia leader of heading a murderous conspiracy against the government.

Also found guilty on June 18 of conspiracy to commit murder was Lonnie Vernon, a member of Cox’s group, the Alaska Peacemakers Militia. The jury could not reach a unanimous verdict on that same charge against a third defendant, Coleman Barney. But Barney, 38, of North Pole, along with Cox, 28, of Fairbanks, and Vernon, 56, of Salcha, was found guilty of a host of weapons charges, including conspiracy to possess unregistered silencers and destructive devices.

The convictions cap an FBI investigation that began in August 2009 and culminated with the suspects’ arrest in March 2011, after they began taking concrete steps to carry out a wild-eyed plot to kill, kidnap, and terrorize their perceived enemies in the government.

Described in court documents as “extremely paranoid and narcissistic,” Cox was once something of a rising star in Alaska politics. In 2008, he received 37% of the vote in a Republican primary bid to upset a GOP incumbent in a race for the state House of Representatives.

But he soon drifted away from the mainstream, instead embracing militant antigovernment views. In 2009, he was listed as a delegate to the We the People Continental Congress, which brought together antigovernment “Patriot” leaders, conspiracy theorists, tax protesters and other radical-right leaders. As an alternative to the established system he so reviled, Cox also organized a pseudo-legal “common-law court,” which met in the back room of a local Denny’s.

Read the rest…

A very interesting article by Juan Cole:

White Terrorism at Oak Creek: The Paranoid Style in American Violence

by Juan Cole (Informed Comment)

We still have only rumors about Wade Michael Page, the gunman who walked into a Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin near Milwaukee and opened fire with a semi-automatic weapon (weapons that should be illegal) on men women and children beginning to gather for a day of worship, singing and feasting. He killed 6 Americans and critically wounded 3 others, including a Wisconsin policeman kneeling to help one of the Sikh victims. Others were more lightly wounded and went to ordinary hospitals rather than to the trauma unit.

Page is said to have served in the military, discharged for misconduct in 1998.

He is said to have had a 9/11 tattoo.

He was in a white supremacist punk band, “End Apathy.”

He likely thought he was targeting American Muslims. He operated in an atmosphere of virulent hate speech against American Muslims. A discourse of Islamophobia has plagued the United States in the past decade, pushed by unscrupulous bigots in public life and by entire media organizations such as Fox Cable News and other media properties of billionaire yellow press lord Rupert Murdoch. Among them is also Rush Limbaugh, who, incredibly, is still broadcast to US soldiers abroad.

Among the hatemongers are Frank Gaffney, and his acolyte Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn), Rep. Peter King (R-NY) Daniel Pipes, James Woolsey, Robert Spencer, Steve Emerson, John Bolton, and sometimes Rudi Giuliani, Mike Huckabee and others, most associated with the Republican Party. The push for hate speech against American Muslims is funded by a small group of billionaires through their foundations. Some of the Muslim-haters are connected to the US arms industry and are hoping for profits from further wars in the Middle East. Others are Israel-firster fanatics. Others are looking for a bogey man to scare Americans with, so as to convince them to vote against their interests, as they used Communism during the Cold War to convince ordinary Americans to give up their constitutional rights.

It is legitimate to criticize Muslim organizations and parties, and to work against violent groups like al-Qaeda. But al-Qaeda is a tiny fringe religious-nationalist movement; far fewer Muslims have been involved in it than white southerners have been involved in the Ku Klux Klan. Nevertheless, American politicians at least implicitly attempted to tar all Muslims with its brush. Like anti-Semitism, racist anti-Muslim discourse has illegitimate properties. It shouldn’t be acceptable to attribute to Muslims a vast general conspiracy. It shouldn’t be acceptable to assert that they are all dishonest and lying about their real beliefs. It shouldn’t be acceptable to lie and allege that they believe in casually murdering non-Muslims. Their religious law, or sharia, shouldn’t be demonized more than the Talmud or Roman Catholic canon law. It shouldn’t be acceptable to accuse them all of waging jihad or holy war.

Since many in the hate-the-Muslims network are closely associated with the campaign of Mitt Romney, reporters should ask Romney again whether he is willing to repudiate this kind of hate speech.

As in Norway, where the Muslim-hating network (fostered also by hateful web sites like “Gates of Vienna,” “Elders of Ziyon,” and a host of others) deeply influenced mass murderer Anders Breivik, so in the United States the purveying of a negative image of Muslims predictably has resulted in violence. In Norway, Breivik targeted what he called liberals soft on the alleged Muslim menace. In the US, Wade targeted people he thought looked like Muslims, the Sikhs. (Actually I don’t know any American Muslims who wear turbans, as observant Sikh men do, but Hollywood stereotypes die hard). As always, hatemongering never only affects the objects of hatred. It distorts and wounds the people who promote it, and it usually spills over onto society in general. Neoconservative anti-Muslim bigots are usually indirectly also promoting anti-Semitism in the long term.

Did Michele Bachmann, Peter King, Daniel Pipes and the others cause the Wisconsin shootings? No. Did they create an intellectual and cultural atmosphere that naturalized such violence against the supposed Other? Well, Bachmann publicly alleged that a minor aide to Hillary Clinton of Pakistani heritage is at the center of a vast infiltration of the American government by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. You decide.

The image emerging of Page is emblematic of America in the past decade and a half. We are a violent country infested by dangerous semi-automatic weapons. Not only do we have far more murders, and especially murders by firearm, than other societies with advanced economies, but we launch far more wars than other such countries, and spend more than the next 20 advanced countries combined on our war industry. The mindset of frontier warriors taming the encircling savages, which goes back to early American history and, later, the legends of the Old West, informs both domestic attitudes and foreign policy. George W. Bush actually talked about the “romance” of fighting the Pushtuns of Afghanistan.

The US mass media suspected that the shooter actually intended to massacre Muslims, and some unfortunately referred to the temple attendees as “innocent,” as though a mosque congregation would not have been equally innocent.

Sikhism is a north Indian religion that began with ecstatic worship of a generally monotheistic sort some 500 years ago in India. It is an independent religion whose adherents say its scriptures are divinely revealed. As a historian I’m bound to say that it grows out of the cultural mix of Hinduism, Bhakti (ecstatic popular worship), and Sufi Islam (Muslim mysticism) of Mughal India in the early modern period). It is specially associated with the Punjab region of India (and what is now Pakistan). Sikhs say there are some half a million adherents in the United States, though sociologists assert that the figure is more like 100,000. Sikhs are just wonderful people, and a person’s heart is shredded at the idea of this horrible atrocity committed against them.

Sikhs have tall too often been targeted by perpetrators of hate crimes in the US.

The characteristics rumored of the shooter mirror the worst of America in the Bush era and after. The Muslim-hating political discourse, already discussed, was pioneered by Karl Rove in 2006.

As for a mistaken target, the United States government attacked Iraq in 2003 after an insidious propaganda campaign that falsely attributed the September 11, 2001 attacks to the government of Saddam Hussein (a conspiracy theory pushed with special ferocity by then Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, other Neoconservatives tied to the Israeli right wing, and by vice president Dick Cheney). There was never any credible evidence linking Iraq to 9/11 and I said so repeatedly and publicly in 2002 and early 2003. In fact, al-Qaeda was fostered in the 1980s by the United States and its regional allies as a way of pushing the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan.

Paranoid “revenge” on Iraq to the extent that some US soldiers in the illegal invasion actually wore pictures of the Twin Towers, the building destroyed by the al-Qaeda hijackers, on their backpacks. I showed in my Engaging the Muslim World that in fact Saddam Hussein was afraid of al-Qaeda and had put out an all points bulletin for a suspected al-Qaeda operative who was rumored to be in Iraq in summer of 2002.

The crazed US invasion of Iraq set off social turmoil that has left tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead and the country still a basket case nine years later. Thousands of Americans were plunged into a quixotic attempt to occupy an Arab Muslim country, forced in many cases into acts of brutality against Iraqi civilians that continue to haunt them. Large numbers of Americans who served in Iraq suffer Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. As the fruitless war ground on, the US army became desperate for recruits, and allegedly increasingly let in members of biker gangs and criminal elements, latter-day Pages. It is horrible to contemplate that our own government, which is terrified of a few Occupy Wall Street hippies, happily gave advanced weapons training and battlefield experience to criminals and white supremacists so as to put down the Iraqi resistance to foreign occupation.

The violence, hatred, paranoia and racism that courses in the subterranean depths of the American psyche has played out on the world stage in the past decade, but also in countless small acts of bigotry and maliciousness at home, as with Rep. Peter King’s hearings on the alleged radicalization of the American Muslim community (an IRA supporter himself, has he had any hearings on the radicalization of white people?) and the campaigns by Evangelical politicians to condemn Muslim canon law or sharia or to prevent Muslims from building mosques and worshiping freely.

That we are all victims of this campaign of hate is eloquently underlined by what happened at Oak Creek.

Another case of, “All Muslims are Terrorist…no, wait.”

White Terrorism

by Juan Cole

Jared Lee Loughner,the assassin of Federal judge John M. Roll and five others and attempted assassin of Rep. Gabrielle Gifford (D-AZ), was clearly mentally unstable. But the political themes of his instability were those of the American far Right. Loughner was acting politically even if he is not all there. He is said to have called out the names of his victims, such as Roll and Gifford, as he fired. As usual, when white people do these things, the mass media doesn’t call it terrorism.

It is irrelevant that Loughner may (at this point we can only say “may”) have been a liberal years earlier in high school. If so, he changed. And among the concerns that came to dominate him as he moved to the Right was the illegitimacy of the “Second Constitution” (the 14th Amendment, which bestows citizenship on all those born in the US, a provision right-wingers in Arizona are trying to overturn at the state level). Loughner also thought that Federal funding for his own community college was unconstitutional, and he was thrown out for becoming violent over the issue. He obviously shared with the Arizona Right a fascination with firearms, and it is telling that a disturbed young man who had had brushes with the law was able to come by an automatic pistol. He is said to have used marijuana, which would be consistent with a form of anti-government, right-wing Libertarianism. I don’t think we can take too seriously the list of books he said he liked, as a guide to his political thinking. They could just have been randomly pulled off some list of great books on the Web, since there is no coherence to the choices.

The man who had most to do with Loughner after his arrest, Pima County Sherriff Clarence W. Dupnik, was clearly angered by what he heard from the assassin: “When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government, the anger, the hatred, the bigotry … it is getting to be outrageous. And unfortunately, Arizona, I think, has become sort of the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”

When Gifford helped pass the Health Care bill, according to Suzy Khimm, “extremists subsequently encouraged the public to throw bricks through the windows of lawmakers.” Gifford had to call the police once before when an attendee at one of her events dropped a gun. Gifford had complained ‘ in an MSNBC interview that a Sarah Palin graphic had depicted her district in the crosshair of a gun sight. “They’ve got to realize there are consequences to that,” she said. “The rhetoric is incredibly heated.” ‘

The subtext of the angst over the shooting of Gifford is that in recent months Loughner was saying Tea-Party-like things about the Federal government. The violent language of “elimination,” “putting in the cross-hairs,” (as with Palin’s poster, above) “taking back,” “taking out,” to which members of that movement so often resort, has created a heated atmosphere that easily seeps into the unconscious of the mentally disturbed. That is Dupnik’s point.

There apparently is some indication that Loughner had an accomplice, and his arrest and identification will shed a great deal more light on the motivations behind this political massacre. Did Loughner have a Rasputin?

In some ways, the turn of Loughner to the themes of the American far right parallels what happened to Michael Enright, who slashed the throat of a Bangladeshi cab driver at the height of the campaign promoting hatred of Muslims launched last summer-fall by Rick Lazio and Rupert Murdoch. Everyone should have learned from that tragedy that heated rhetoric has consequences.

Those right-wing bloggers who want to dismiss Loughner as merely disturbed are being hypocritical, since they won’t similarly dismiss obviously unstable Muslims who, like the so-called “Patriots” of the McVeigh stripe, sometimes turn violent. (Zacharias Moussawi, for instance, isn’t playing with a full set of backgammon dominoes, and blaming Islam for him is bizarre). In fact, the right-wing Muslim crackpots and the right-wing American crackpots are haunted by similar anxieties, about a powerful government in Washington undermining their localistic ideas of the good life.

AP has video on the shootings, h/t LAT.

Among the last things Gifford did before she was shot was to reply to the Tea Party-inspired congressional reading of the Constitution by reading out the Bill of Rights. She obviously enjoyed pronouncing the words, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” But where members of Congress encourage extreme rhetoric, and where Rupert Murdoch’s stable of demagogues use code to whip up racial hatred and violence, those rights can be withdrawn by vigilante and mob violence. Not the letter of the Constitution can protect us, but only its spirit, and then only when implemented in our daily lives.