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APRIL 19 FOREVER DANGEROUS AFTER WACO, BOMB
Stuart News, The (FL) - Sunday, April 19, 1998
Author: Michael Hedges Scripps Howard News Service
“Possibly the danger on April 19 has abated because we know there will be heightened security at federal buildings. But April 19 remains the most important day of the year to the radical right.” - Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center
April 19 used to be marked as Patriot’s Day, when America began to set itself free with the first shots at Lexington and Concord in 1775.
But the day’s meaning has been forever warped by the fire and blood linking Waco, Texas, and Oklahoma City. It is now the day America holds its breath.
Federal law enforcement officials are reluctant to talk about an increased level of threat to government buildings today, the anniversary of both the fiery end to the Branch Davidian siege in 1993 and the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building two years later.
“We treat every day like April 19,’’ said B.J. Zapor, a spokesman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. “There have been changes throughout the system for the safety of employees.’’
One federal law enforcement official said every year since Waco there have been increased threats, some clearly bogus, others that have to be taken seriously, on that day.
“It is obviously something we don’t want to publicize to give any more nuts any ideas,’’ he said. “There are specific places around the country that will be in a raised state of alert that day based on threats.’’
The FBI is working on nearly a thousand domestic terrorism cases, a tenfold increase since the Murrah building blast, law enforcement officials said.
Some anti-terrorism groups warn that April 19 is still a key date for hate groups. “As we approach the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, we need to remember not just the lives that have been lost, but that extremist and race-based terrorism is on the rise,’’ said Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“Only luck and hard work by the authorities have prevented another Oklahoma City-type incident.’’
According to a study by the Southern Poverty Law Center, dozens of conspiracies have been broken up by federal authorities since Oklahoma City.
“Conspiracies hatched since the Oklahoma City attack have included plans to bomb buildings and bridges, assassinate public officials and civil-rights figures, invade Army bases, rob banks and armored cars, derail passenger trains, amass illegal weapons and explosives,’’ said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“Possibly the danger on April 19 has abated because we know there will be heightened security at federal buildings,’’ Potok said. “But April 19 remains the most important day of the year to the radical right.’’
(snip)
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RUDOLPH ‘RELIGIOUSLY DRIVEN’
State, The (Columbia, SC) - Sunday, June 15, 2003
Author: KEN GARFIELD Knight Ridder Newspapers
CHARLOTTE - The arrest of Eric Rudolph has evoked a frightening phrase: Christian terrorist.
The man accused of bombing two abortion clinics, a gay nightclub and an Olympic celebration in Atlanta wasn’t just a madman allegedly acting out of rage.
Police and experts on religious hate crime in America believe he was moved to act by his long embrace of a radical Christian movement that holds Jews, blacks and gays as less than human.
Rudolph reads the same Bible as the average worshipper in the pew on Sunday morning.
Only he was a member of a loosely knit congregation whose creed leads to violence - whose interpretation of God’s word allegedly drove him to set off bombs, then flee into the N.C. mountains.
“Eric Rudolph was quite clearly driven by wildly extreme readings of theology,” said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center. “He was essentially religiously driven.”
(snip)
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The IRS plane bomber: A left-wing nut
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (PA) - Sunday, February 21, 2010
The Left appears to be having great difficulty telling its Left from the Right .
It didn’t take long after Joseph A. Stack intentionally crashed his single-engine plane into an Austin, Texas, office building for the usual blather to begin that the actions of this disaffected software engineer were the work of yet another “ right -wing extremist.”
A lot of Mr. Stack’s rhetoric, left behind in a manifesto, could be taken directly from a tea party rally placard, went one line. Stack’s extremism represented the same kind of alienation exhibited by the tea party movement, went another.
And then there’s Mark Potok , director of the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center. Without challenge, fellow lefty and MSNBC host Chris Matthews allowed him to say Stack’s “ideas seem connected to at least some of the core ideas of the radical right .”
(snip)
It's still Ptriot's Day. And we we WILL set ourselves free of our erstwhile Marxist masters. One way or the other.
There’s probably NO group as racist
as the SPLC .. except for the current
administration.
They must use Jesse’s and Al’s mailing
lists to fundraise, and they’re all
so despicably lowdown dirty.
He was one of those Florida guys you occasionally encounter in the rural NC mountains, dealt drugs, still had what was described as a lucrative business growing and selling marijuana leading up to those bombings in Atlanta.
He came here like many of them eventually do only to wander back to Florida or off to parts unknown, but in this instance he came with his mother and siblings, after the death of his father, and so he remained. He was at least mentally adrift, though, with an empty, stoned head waiting to be filled with something, and it was.