But it's the kind of story relegated to page A13 in the NY Times.
Nearly a month after a cleanup crew found the live bomb along the planned route of a large downtown march honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the F.B.I. is investigating the incident as an act of domestic terrorism. And Spokane has cycled from shock to relief to reassessment: have the white supremacists who once struck such fear here in the inland Northwest returned at a new level of dangerousness and sophistication?
“We don’t have that kind of intelligence level to make that kind of explosive,” said Shaun Winkler, a Pennsylvania native who recently returned to the region to start a landscaping company and a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.
Mr. Winkler lives not far from Hayden Lake, Idaho, where he once was among the followers of Richard Butler, a white supremacist and Aryan Nations leader who spent more than two decades proclaiming the inland Northwest to be the capital of a new white homeland. Mr. Butler died in 2004 after losing the 20-acre Aryan Nations compound in a lawsuit and losing many of his followers, as well.
More than 200 white supremacists were once based at Hayden Lake, but Mr. Winkler, echoing assessments by human rights advocates, said that “only a very small handful are still around.” He said his new group had about a dozen members. Several of them recently picketed taco stands in nearby Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and distributed racist, vulgar fliers at North Idaho College. The college now owns the Hayden Lake property and calls it a “peace park.”
“We believe in protecting ourselves, but we certainly aren’t going to advocate bombing people,” said Mr. Winkler, 32, adding that he had been interviewed by the F.B.I. about the bomb in Spokane, about 40 miles to the southwest. “That’s a pretty extreme measure even from our end. It’s going to be more of an under-the-radar person, a lone-wolf type.”
Always a lone-wolf, never an organized assault, even though the device was extremely deadly and far more sophisticated than underpants bombs or smoking SUVs made by idiots who would have failed high-school chemistry. Those guys, being idiots, were busted in days, if not immediately. Our own domestic terrorists? Smarter, much more dangerous. But you need to be afraid of brown people.
We have no domestic terrorism problem in the country, and you're either an unpatriotic loony if you say otherwise, or it's all the left's fault because Code Pink hurt George Bush's feelings.
Yes, we do have a domestic terrorism problem! All those noble teabaggers, pinnacles of white manliness are threatened by the beturbaned horde of effete latte-drinking liberals who are going to underpants bomb the noble conservative icon Martin Luther King, Jr.!
ReplyDeleteRight. It's all the left's fault, the right is never violent, the left is just as bad, the right has never hurt a fly, etc. etc. etc.
It's infuriating that there have been several incidents in the past few months that have evaded any front page coverage by the national media. Some are clearly terrorist acts, some are obvious 'apeshits', and some we just don't fucking know enough about yet because nobody's talking.
ReplyDeleteBut the one thing they apparently all have in common is that they're of domestic origin, not mooslim or radical immigrant. So they don't get national media. This is what you get (or, more accurately, don't get) when you have corporate control of the press in the hands of a very few, very powerful media conglomerates.