In August of last year, a Bloomington, Minnesota Islamic center was attacked, someone throwing an explosive through the window, although there were no injuries.
On Saturday a bomb was thrown through the window of a Minnesota mosque. Touring the damage today, Gov. Mark Dayton called it "an act of terrorism."
Well just on Tuesday, the suspected bombers were arrested by authorities.
A Bloomington mosque was bombed last August by three Illinois men who traveled eight hours from their small hometown to terrorize Muslims in hopes of making them flee the country, according to the FBI.
The trio was arrested Tuesday in Illinois after one of them admitted to aiding the plot and also described his role in a failed effort to bomb an Illinois women’s health clinic months later.
Yep that’s right, they also attempted to bomb a women’s clinic.
Michael McWhorter, 29; Joe Morris, 22 and Michael Hari, 47, are charged with “using an explosive device to maliciously damage and destroy” the center in the predawn hours of Aug. 5, using a PVC pipe bomb allegedly fashioned by Hari.
So yeah, I get that there were some big developments on Tuesday and Wednesday that took up a lot of reporting.
But come on, we actually have terrorists who committed crimes and violence on American soil, caught and about to face justice. Why is the mainstream media not making a bigger deal about this? Why are their mugshots not scrawled across the evening news? Why is the President, who would likely take to twitter to claim credit for catching a groovy wave, not devoting tweets, releases, and press conferences to publicizing and applauding the capture of these dangerous and heinous terrorists?
Ah. About that.
He claimed it was Hari’s idea to target the mosque and that the men didn’t intend to kill, according to an FBI terrorism task force officer’s affidavit, “but they wanted to ‘scare [Muslims] out of the country’ ... because they push their beliefs on everyone else.”
“McWhorter also said they committed the bombing mainly to ‘show them hey, you’re not welcome here, get the [expletive] out,’ ” the affidavit continued.
So, in case it needs to be spelled out, this is exactly the type of rhetoric used by extremists we might consider part of the alt-Right. People who Trump insists some of which “are good people.”
In YouTube videos, Hari called the group the “White Rabbit Three Percent Illinois Patriot Freedom Fighters Militia.” White rabbit appears to be a reference to the “Follow the White Rabbit,” conspiracy theory, which you can read about here. Three percentersis a reference to the claim that only 3 percent of colonists fought against the tyrannical British government during the American Revolution and it is a term often used by anti-government milita groups.
If that was the end of it, that should be a huge story and newsworthy in itself. But it goes even further than that.
Minnesota blogger Greg Laden and friends offer some insight on the alleged ringleader, Michael Hari.
Illinois contractor bidding to build Trump’s border wall — with a tourist draw
Michael Hari, who recently launched his own global security firm from tiny downstate Clarence, wants to build President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful wall” on the Mexican border and believes he can do it better, and for billions of dollars less, than more established contractors.
A former sheriff’s deputy who most recently ran an agricultural food safety certification business, Hari is among more than 200 vendors interested in winning the mammoth and controversial construction project.
So not only is Hari an alleged terrorist, but also recently in the global security business, hoping to score a contract for Trump’s big, beautiful border wall.
If that seems like an incongruous occupation for someone who had previously also run an “agricultural food safety certification business,” then perhaps you might be right...until you see what else this has led Hari to do.
Food safety auditor calls FSMA unconstitutional
The owner of food safety auditing company Equicert is suing the government to declare the Food Safety Modernization Act unconstitutional.
Michael Hari is also seeking an end to U.S. Department of Agriculture food safety audits.
His suit, filed Feb. 14, calls the FSMA unconstitutional because “it holds farmers liable for food safety conditions which they cannot control and have no knowledge of or responsibility for causing,” according to a news release from Hari.
How the Trump administration responds to his claims will be a “test of how committed the new administration is to eliminating unfair and anti-business and anti-agriculture regulation and legislation,” according to the release. The FSMA was signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2011.
Setting aside the terrorism (can you imagine that?), let’s just try to digest the type of human being we have here.
We have a person who very sincerely seems to adhere to the Trump anti-immigrant, alt-Right doctrine. Yet this same individual simultaneously regards Trump’s administration as one perfect for fleecing. Quite the flock you have cultivated there, Donno.
But yeah, remember that bit we just set aside, about the terrorism? How about a side dish of kidnapping as well.
He did have experience, however, with being on the lam: "I was an illegal alien for almost a year in Belize," he told the newspaper.
Hari was convicted of child abduction in 2006 after taking his 13- and 15-year-old daughters to Mexico and Belize, apparently in fear that he would lose custody of them to his ex-wife. He was tracked down, returned to the U.S. and sentenced to 30 months' probation, according to the Champaign News-Gazette.
I would like to say...I hope he sits behind bars for years…
But these days, we might just need to settle with...not making him the next member of Trump’s Cabinet.