California man tried to blow up mosque in Detroit suburb

Great summary. End thread.

 

Probably on accutane.

 

But can we be sure he never read the Bible or went to a Christian Church?




Just kidding. OK. Nutjob. Now Sarah Palin... The major Christian preachers who thought we deserved 9/11 due to the ACLU and gays...

 

Crazy people do crazy things. It has nothing to do with their religious beliefs or race. Then again, that's just the liberal establishment's opinion.

 

I don't mind the lack of coverage. Prevents other nutjobs from pulling off the same kind of crap.

They're easily susceptible to peer pressure...their peers at least.

 

I don't think the media was hiding it. There was plenty of coverage of this when it happened. The news faded, like most news, after a few days because (a) we found out that the guy was a nut job who made threats to the Veterans Administration office and George W Bush (probably others, too) and not just someone strictly anti-Muslim, and (b) there were more interesting things to report.

I would think that if the guy is not actually insane (i.e. should be institutionalized) and is an active member of some right wing organization, or even if he has a huge collection of Glenn Beck videos or what not, or was pictured at a Tea Party rally, there would be more news coverage. Otherwise, he seems like Jared Loughner, except without the actual people dead (actual dead people is more newsworthy than failed attempts).

 

First of all, this is from the Daily Mail. My first thought when I saw the link was this:

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Second, in the story itself, there's a mention of his religion from a...Detroit bartender. Not very conclusive, but that's the way the Mail likes to roll.

But last, putting in my two bits, a "terrorist" needs to have a political motivation to really earn the title. Otherwise it becomes another abused word. Causing moral panic isn't good enough, or we could add Ozzie Osbourne or some other bogey man to conservative parents to the list:

Timothy McVeigh, Osama Bin Laden, Yassir Arafat, Mao Zedong, Emiliano Zapata or Bobby Sands could all be safely called terrorists, whether we agreed with their methods or their goals or not... but none of them had much in common, except that their primary goal was political.

This guy? Probably not, unless you want to count striking the letter Q from the alphabet because the Shadow People from the Planet Zantor told him to as a political motive.

 

This is what I was thinking. I don't know if his bomb would have been effective or not, but I laughed when I saw he was using M-80s. When people are laughing at you, it's hard to be a respectable terrorist. I don't remember the details anymore, but I remember a couple of foiled Muslim plotters in England that looked so incompetent they were actually a disgrace to violent jihad. They made me feel the same way. You can't take the threat seriously when the execution looks this bad.

 

I think the lack of media coverage has to do with the fact that the guy was trying to blow up a mosque with FIRECRACKERS.

 

I was wondering that myself in regard to how much damage could be done with firecrackers.

Anyway consider how much coverage was made regarding that Muslim kid in Portland who wanted to blow up a Christmas parade or the Miami Seven. In both those cases the people didn't have anything that could do any damage, in fact they were set up by the FBI, but there was still national coverage about them.

 

He is Christian apparently. He's also a nutjob. He is definitely a terrorist. If we agree on that, we're cool.

 

Guy wanted to use a trunk full of these:

Spoiler

To blow up this:

Spoiler

Good luck. He would have been lucky if those fireworks even damaged the trunk they were hidden in.

 

Stick to the other forums with that nonsense. If you post in D&D you're either Team Muslim or Team US/Christian so get with a side, scour the internet for articles and get to posting!

 

Both of those incidents didn't involve real weapons because the terrorists were being supplied by the FBI in a sting. They didn't supply their own weapons and only bring M-80s. The Portland guy had several drums of what he thought were explosives and blasting caps. If the weapons were what he thought they were, the damage would have been devastating. The Liberty City Seven never even got to the stage of having fake weapons, but the reason they were big news is because the attorney general and the deputy director of the FBI were having press conferences about them. In the end, most commentators talked about how it didn't really seem like they could do anything and that the whole thing seemed ginned up by the FBI.

So those were stories for two different reasons. The Portland guy was a story because he only failed to cause massive casualties because he ended up getting the weapon from the FBI instead of someone else, so that was a real plot averted. The Miami idiots were a story because they were such idiots. Beyond the initial reaction when the top levels of government were having a press conference, it was people making fun of them and the FBI. The Liberty City Seven were a bunch of potheads talking about how they were going to take down the white devils by blowing up the Sears tower (which was only the target because one of the potheads had worked in Chicago).

Neither is really applicable to this joker. He is more like the guy that crashed his plane into the IRS building, only more pathetic. Like that guy it is a lone nut with no coherent ideology that is lashing out at targets that he may as well have picked by throwing darts at a politics section of the paper and never amounting to much of a threat because the plan was ill conceived from jump.