The Metropolis

A nation of shopkeepers: making money on terror

Chuck Ansbacher | Thursday 10 March, 2011 15:21

Any day now, we’re going to stop equating terrorism with Islaminc extremism. Can you feel it in the air? I can, and I’m not even being facetious. It seems with every passing day, we’re faced with yet another eye-opening example of the dangers we face in our weird new world, and how they’re not really that weird or new at all.

In the past two days, four cases of terrorist related activity have been revealed to us. And guess what — nobody involved has been brown.

The one that hits closest to home is this guy Terrence Brown. He’s been charged with selling terrorist handbooks on the internet — thousand-page manuals on a variety of topics, ranging from how to make a letter bomb to materials culled directly from the al-Queda training manual. Over the past five years, he’s made millions doing this. MILLIONS.

He claims to have no terrorist bent; he’s just a savvy businessman tapping into a hot, under served market. But motive doesn’t matter in this case. As far as we’re concerned, dude’s a terrorist. He deserves to be treated as such.

The other cases I’m talking about have all taken place in America, and if any of them had been committed by someone with a hyphen in his first name, they’d all be front page news.

Instead buried deep in today’s New York Times is a story on a 36-year-old man named Kevin Harpham, and how he’s been arrested in connection with a failed MLK Day bombing attempt in Spokane, Washington that literally nobody has heard a word on. He’s a member of a neo-Nazi group, former Army, and is being charged with attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction. No, not a truck full of fireworks like that guy who tried to blow up Times Square. A weapon of mass destruction — the kind even Sadam Hussein didn’t have.

And then there’s this Peter King clown, the former IRA boosting New York congressman who is now holding racist hearings on the radicalization of Islam in America. Here’s what Mr. King once had to say about about a group which, whether you agree with their cause or not, definitely used terrorist tactics in an attempt to achieve them:

We must pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who this very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry

Replace “British” with American, and “Belfast and Derry” with “everywhere in the world,” and you just quoted every single Islamic extremist King is now crusading against.

And last, there’s this day-ruining video from a recent Tea Party demonstration in Orange County, California. If the root word in “terrorism” is “terror”, this video wholly embodies it. Because mother of God, these images will literally give you nightmares.

Yelling the most hateful, disgusting, ignorant bile you could ever conceive of, this group of flag waving maniacs targeting a fundraiser for homelessness and hunger — that happened to be at a mosque — is the worst thing. Ever. You can only imagine what FOX News would be talking about right now if a group of brown people were yelling anything remotely equatable at a group of Christians.

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