Happy Independence Day.
If you’re an Iraq War veteran, outspoken Obama critic, anti-illegal alien, and gun owner, then you’re already an Enemy of the Obama State.
A new study funded by the Department of Homeland Security characterizes Americans who are “suspicious of centralized federal authority,” and “reverent of individual liberty” as “extreme right-wing” terrorists.
Hot Spots of Terrorism and Other Crimes in the United States, 1970-2008 (Scribd), the study was produced by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland. The organization was launched with the aid of DHS funding to the tune of $12 million dollars.
While largely omitting Islamic terrorism – the report fails completely to mention the 1993 World Trade Center bombing – the study focuses on Americans who hold beliefs shared by the vast majority of conservatives and libertarians and puts them in the context of radical extremism.
The report takes its definitions from a 2011 study entitled Profiles of Perpetrators of Terrorism, produced by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, in which the following characteristics are used to identify terrorists. (pages 9-10 of report)– Americans who believe their “way of life” is under attack;
– Americans who are “fiercely nationalistic (as opposed to universal and international in orientation)”;
– People who consider themselves “anti-global” (presumably those who are wary of the loss of American sovereignty);
– Americans who are “suspicious of centralized federal authority”;
– Americans who are “reverent of individual liberty”;
– People who “believe in conspiracy theories that involve grave threat to national sovereignty and/or personal liberty.”
I read the report, and there’s very little focus on Islamic terrorism, which has produced considerable bloodshed in the past decade. No mention of the “Occupy” thugs and their crime wave, either. Except for the rapes, assaults, vandalism, theft, and assorted other felonies in the name of “social justice”, they’re just like the Tea Party, right Janet?
Related posts:
http://sfcmac.com/the-tsas-new-security-threat-white-middle-class-americans/
Some additional background on the report. First the authors.
Gary LaFree is the director of START (Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism: deemed a Homeland Security Center for Excellence) and professor of criminology at Univ of MD. Bianca Bersani is an assistant professor of sociology at UMass-Boston. Both are centers for liberal thinking. My guess is that Bersani did the vast majority of the “work” under the “supervision” of LaFree. Assistant professors are usually fresh off of a grad degree, filled with wet ideas, looking for a wall that they might stick on.
LaFree has written a book called Losing Legitimacy where he discusses factors that increase crime, among them political distrust, economics, family disintegration. He also has a number of articles on correlations between race and crime.
First off, the paper does not include data on attempted terrorist attacks. That means that all of the Islamic (or any other group) terrorist attacks that were foiled by the FBI were never recorded for analysis in this paper. In the beginning of the paper, they indicate that there were more than 2,600 terrorist events from 1970 to 2008, but I cannot resolve the tabulation of the data in their discussion with that number. In the paper, the authors attempt (through some resolve to sooth their intellectual integrity) to reconcile diverse data collected over 1970 to 2008 with changing definitions of terrorism for categorizing the data in different databases.
Frankly, the paper is composed with much academic prose but horrifically stricken with holes in their data and flawed collection methods. The authors appear to have done their best to limit data to a highly skewed definition and structure a mathematical model to fit a liberal political hack job agenda.
Fuck Obama
Fuck Holder
Fuck Napolitano
May they all rot in hell.