The Terrorist Next Door – White and Male
By: Lisa M. Hayes Confluence Daily is your daily news source for women in the know.
I’m going to say something no one really wants to hear:
The body count for the bombings in Austin was notably low.
And there is a reason for that. Mark Anthony Conditt was a terrorist. His mission was fear.
This was a white man in his 20’s who was very good at building bombs. Bombs are a weapon that have the potential to create mass casualty events. However, these weren’t that.
His weapons were specific, not intended to harm large numbers of people. They were weapons of a very precise kind of hate with one purpose – TO CAUSE FEAR.
ter·ror·ism
ˈterəˌrizəm/
noun
the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians.
The White House said Tuesday that a string of deadly bombings in Texas has “no apparent nexus to terrorism”. The White House has it’s head up its ass.
Conservatives have one thing right. Terrorism is a threat to US citizens. The problem is they fail to realize the photo on the posters for terrorists should be a white radicalized man.
Mary Beth Altier from Center for Global Affairs, New York University says, “It’s a very serious threat and one that’s often underplayed. There’s an inherent bias in how we frame Islamist versus far right-wing, white supremacist terrorism.” She pointed to the Charlottesville car attack as an example: “The guy ran people over with a car. If a Muslim deliberately ran people over with a car, immediately it would be a terrorist attack.” We know this is a fact because we’ve seen it play out many times.
The experts on radicalization and terrorism have studied this issue, and they all say one thing. They consistently say that the processes of radicalization are similar across ideologies, whether the person is a jihadist, a white supremacist, or some other belief system.
“The processes are pretty much the same,” Mary Beth Altier, an expert on radicalization at New York University, told me. “There aren’t really distinctions between joining a group like the KKK and ISIS.”
Until we name it, we can’t address it, and this needs addressing.
Mark Anthony Conditt was a terrorist.
He was a radicalized extremist.
And he’s not alone.
Incomplete list below:
Oct. 9, 1995. An Amtrak employee is killed when a train derails near Hyder, Arizona because the track it’s traveling on has been sabotaged. The perpetrators are never found, but anti-law enforcement propaganda messages from the “Sons of Gestapo” are found near the scene.
April 12, 1996. A neo-Nazi named Larry Wayne Shoemake, who is found to have owned at least 22 firearms and an estimated 20,000 rounds of ammunition, kills a black man in a random Jackson, Mississippi attack.
July 27, 1996. A bomb set by Eric Robert Rudolph, who is affiliated with the “Christian Identity” fundamentalist movement, kills one person at the Atlanta Olympics.
Jan. 29, 1998. Another bomb set by Rudolph kills a man at a Birmingham abortion clinic.
May 29, 1998. Three militia sympathizers named Alan Pilon, Robert Mason and Jason McVean fire 29 shots at a Cortez, Colorado police officer who is trying to apprehend them because they’ve stolen a water truck, killing him. The three evade capture but are believed to ultimately have died in the desert wilderness surrounding the crime scene.
July 4, 1998. Several neo-Nazis murdered anti-racism activists Lin Newborn and Daniel Shersty in an ambush attack in the Las Vegas area.
Oct. 23, 1998. With his wife and children nearby, an abortion provider in Amherst, New York is shot and killed through the window of his home by James Charles Kopp.
July 1, 1999. Brothers Benjamin Matthew Williams and James Tyler Williams, who also have connections to the “Christian Identity” movement, kill a gay couple in Redding, California.
July 2–July 5 1999. Neo-Nazi Benjamin Nathaniel Smith kills black basketball coach Ricky Byrdsong and and a Korean graduate student and wounds nine other non-white victims in a three-day shooting spree.
Aug. 10, 1999. Neo-Nazi Buford Furrow kills a Filipino immigrant after firing 70 shots inside a Jewish community center near Los Angeles.
April 28, 2000. An unemployed immigration attorney named Richard Baumhammers who believes “non-white immigration” should be banned shoots and kills five people in the Pittsburgh area.
Sept. 15–Oct. 4, 2001. Mark Stroman, a lifelong criminal with connections to the Aryan Brotherhood, shoots three South Asian men in the Dallas area—killing two—in what he describes as revenge for 9/11.
Dec. 8, 2003. Steven Bixby kills two police officers in Abbeville, South Carolina during a dispute over the state’s decision to use a 20-foot strip of the Bixbys’ land to widen a highway.
May 24, 2004. Wade and Christopher Lay, a father-son pair obsessed with the 1993 government siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, kill a bank security guard in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
July 27, 2008. Jim David Adkisson shoots and kills two people during a childrens’ performance of a musical at a Unitarian Univeralist church in Knoxville, Tennessee, telling police that he intended to target individuals who had voted for liberals and Democrats.
Jan. 21, 2009. Neo-Nazi Keith Luke rapes and kills an immigrant from Cape Verde in Brockton, Massachusetts, then kills a 72-year-old homeless immigrant.
April 4, 2009. Richard Andrew Poplawski, a frequent poster on the white supremacist Stormfront website who apparently believes a national “gun ban” is imminent, kills three Pittsburgh police officers.
April 25, 2009. Joshua Cartwright kills two Okaloosa County, Florida sheriff’s deputies. Per a police report, Cartwright’s wife says he was paranoid about the U.S. government and “extremely disturbed” by Barack Obama’s election.
May 30, 2009. Shawna Forde, Albert Gaxiola, and Jason Bush kill a Latino man and his nine-year-old daughter in Arivaca, Arizona during a robbery intended to raise funds for the “Minutemen American Defense” group.
May 31, 2009. Scott Roeder kills Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider, in the Wichita, Kansas Lutheran church where Tiller serves as an usher.
June 10, 2009. An 89-year-old white supremacist named James von Brunn kills a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. from point-blank range.
Feb. 18, 2010. Joseph Andrew Stack flies a plane into an Austin, Texas IRS office, killing one person.
May 20, 2010. A father-son pair named Jerry and Joseph Kane (who conduct “seminars” about how “sovereign citizens” can evade debt) kill two West Memphis, Arkansas police officers.
Sept. 26–Oct. 3, 2011. Avowed white supremacists David Joseph Pedersen and Holly Ann Grigsby kill Pedersen’s father and stepmother in Washington, a man they believe is Jewish in Oregon, and a black man in California.*
Aug. 5, 2012. A white supremacist named Wade Michael Page kills six people at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin.
Aug. 16, 2012. “Sovereign citizen”-movement adherents Brian Smith and Kyle Joekel, who are now awaiting trial, allegedly kill two Louisiana sheriff’s deputies in a trailer-park ambush.
Sept. 4, 2012. Christopher Lacy, a software engineer who lives in a rural trailer and apparently sympathizes with the “sovereign citizen” movement, shoots a California Highway Patrol officer who dies the next day.
April 13, 2014. Frazier Glenn Miller, a 73-year-old with a long history of KKK activity, kills three people in the area of a Jewish community center and Jewish retirement community in Overland Park, Kansas.
June 8, 2014. Jerad and Amanda Miller kill two police officers in a random attack at a pizza restaurant in Las Vegas, then kill a customer at a Walmart. The Millers had spent time on Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s property during protests related to Bundy’s dispute with the federal government.
Sept. 12, 2014. Eric Frein allegedly shoots and kills a Pennsylvania state trooper; he’s caught 48 days later after hiding from authorities in “survivalist” fashion in a rural area.
June 17, 2015. Dylann Roof murders nine people at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina.
July 24, 2015. John Russell Houser, a 59-year-old man with a history of expressing extremist and anti-feminist beliefs, kills two women at a screening of the Amy Schumer comedy Trainwreck in Lafayette, Louisiana.
Nov. 27, 2015. A 57-year-old religious fanatic named Robert Lewis Dear shoots and kills three people, including a police officer, at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs.
Aug. 10, 2016. A 38-year-old Oregon man with connections to a white supremacist prison gang drove over and killed a 19-year-old black man after a sidewalk altercation in what authorities are prosecuting as a hate crime.
March 20, 2017. A 28-year-old white supremacist named James Harris Jackson stabs a 66-year-old black stranger to death in midtown Manhattan.
May 26, 2017. Two men are stabbed to death on a light-rail train in Portland, Oregon by a “known local white supremacist” named Jeremy Joseph Christian.
Aug. 12, 2017. A white supremacist named James Fields Jr. attending the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, allegedly runs over and kills an anti-racism protester.
Source: Slate
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