It was a grisly scene inside Apartment 3722 at the Hamptons, a gated community in Tampa, Florida.
One body lay face up on the floor, wedged between a wall and an air
mattress. A handgun was stuffed in a holster on the dead man’s waist.
The other body, clad in a black T-shirt and shorts, was slumped back on a
futon, a shattered and bloody iPhone on his lap. A police investigator
would later write that the two men had been “shot multiple times at
close range with an assault rifle.”
There were some obvious clues that this was no ordinary double
homicide. Tacked to the wall near the bodies was a large black-and-white
flag bearing the insignia of the Schutzstaffel, or SS, Adolf Hitler’s
elite paramilitary unit. On a nearby shelf was a black Stahlhelm, the
distinctive helmet worn by Nazi soldiers during World War II. There were
multiple copies of “Mein Kampf” and a prominent place was
reserved for “The Turner Diaries,” the infamous novel of race war in
America that has inspired generations of terrorists, among them Timothy
McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. A framed picture of McVeigh sat on a
dresser.
On that night in May 2017, the police quickly took two suspects into
custody and developed a rough outline of what had happened. One of the
suspects, Devon Arthurs, 18, said the victims were his roommates, and
members of a neo-Nazi group called the Atomwaffen Division. Arthurs said
that he’d decided to leave the group, and that he’d killed the men to
keep them from carrying out what he said were their plans for violence.
The second suspect detained by police, Brandon Russell, also lived in
the apartment. Russell told the authorities he’d just returned home
from a weekend of training with the Florida Army National Guard. And
then Russell revealed something that should have set off alarms among
federal investigators assigned to track the growing threat from armed,
violent right-wing extremists. He said, and the police quickly
confirmed, that the single-car garage attached to the apartment was full
of explosives.
Explosives experts from the Tampa Police Department and the local FBI
field office soon found components of a crude pipe bomb as well as
radioactive materials. The search turned up ammonium nitrate and
nitromethane, the mixture used by McVeigh to destroy the federal
building in Oklahoma City in 1995. There were sacks of explosive
precursors, including potassium chloride, red iron oxide and potassium
nitrate. There were homemade fuses fashioned from brass 5.56 mm rifle
cartridges. In a closet, they found two Geiger counters.
And there was a cooler with the name Brandon scrawled on the lid in
black marker. Inside, the investigators discovered HMTD — hexamethylene
triperoxide diamine — a potent, highly volatile peroxide-based
explosive. It has become a favored tool of terrorists both here and
abroad, who cook it up in small batches using recipes circulating on the
internet and in improvised weapons manuals.
At Tampa police headquarters, investigators put Arthurs and Russell
in separate interrogation rooms. They wanted to know about the killings,
about the neo-Nazi group and about the explosives.
Arthurs said the apartment had served as a nerve center for
Atomwaffen Division, a white supremacist organization of 60 to 70 people
that has spoken openly of its hopes of igniting race war in the United
States. If the authorities could access the group’s encrypted online
chats, Arthurs said, “it’d be easy to track down each member.” The
interrogation was videotaped, and a recording was obtained by ProPublica
and Frontline.
“The things that they’re planning were horrible. They’re planning
bombings and stuff like that on countless people, they’re planning to
kill civilian life,” Arthurs said. A detective asked if Atomwaffen had
drawn up a list of specific targets. “Power lines, nuclear reactors,
synagogues, things like that,” Arthurs replied.
“I’m telling you stuff that the FBI should be hearing,” Arthurs said, adding that he thought lives could be saved.
To this day, it is unclear if the FBI talked with Arthurs or what
steps it took to shut down Atomwaffen. The FBI declined repeated
requests to discuss the case. But this much is clear: Within months of
Arthurs’ warnings, Atomwaffen members or associates had killed three
more people.
Don’t call the victims of the Pittsburgh shooting martyrs.
Don’t say they’re in heaven. Don’t force Christian terms and imagery on them. They were ALL Jewish. Don’t call them saints. They were Jewish people who didn’t ask to be murdered by a Nazi.
Even if they had been Christian, being randomly shot by some evil fucker doesn’t make you a saint or a martyr…
Don’t call the victims of the Pittsburgh shooting martyrs.
Don’t say they’re in heaven. Don’t force Christian terms and imagery on them. They were ALL Jewish. Don’t call them saints. They were Jewish people who didn’t ask to be murdered by a Nazi.
“Attorneys for Kansas militia members who conspired to bomb a mosque and apartment complex housing Somali immigrants have asked the court to take into account at a sentencing hearing next month what they called President Donald Trump’s rhetoric encouraging violence.”
big fucking surprise but trump is blaming the temple for not having been armed lmao
“if they had some kind of a protection inside the temple, maybe it could have been a very much different situation” —trump in response to a reporter’s question about gun control
what is it gonna take for you freaks to realize that antisemitism is still real and is deadly, right now, in 2018
you all need to fucking reblog this no offense. especially if you aren’t jewish
source, and another source in which the synagogue says they do in fact have guards, but only on major holidays.
how far do people have to go just to survive, and how long is this going to go on until the blame is finally focused on antisemitism itself?
I have a hill to die on right here so im just gonna go off for a second. It wasnt until this year that i realized security is not a normal regular everyday thing for churchgoers. I never realized until this year that all the cameras and guards and cop cars and bag checks were for a reason. It was just how i grew up, thats just how it went. You checked in with the security desk, a guard would look in your purse or tallis bag and then youd be on your merry way. It never occurred to me that they were Actually Looking For Threats, its just always been a part of my religious experience.
We know people hate us. We know people want to kill us, that’s kind of our entire history.
Those people who were murdered didnt die because they were unprepared, they died because somebody wanted them dead.
אנחנו נתגבר ונשרוד גם את זה.
Also just for the record, the implication that being Not Christian means you should be prepared to die at any time is sickening. Fuck you.
The fact that the mail bomber had his house improperly foreclosed on by the company of Steve Mnuchin, then-banker and now-Trump’s Secretary of Treasury, is such a perfect encapsulation of how right-wing populism works. You provide cover for one segment of elites by scapegoating marginalized people and a competing segment of elites, who you claim are in cahoots with one another.
Right-wing populism a powerful enough ideological tool that you can literally get someone to join a cult of personality around a man even as he empowers someone who directly harmed them, simply by acknowledging the potential for the redirection of raw anger. The Trump administration literally, personally damaged the bomber’s life, but he likely never even knew it, never even knew that the man behind his foreclosure was now working with the man he idolized. Following the foreclosure, he was probably just angry at the prevailing system, but his anger had no structure, no ideology (it seems he wasn’t even politically active before 2016). In absence of a popular leftist systemic critique, the hard right was able to monopolize the response to anger among many white people, redirect it, and mold it in the shape of producerism. Rather than being led to realize the way the construction of power in society actually functions to disadvantage him along the lines of class while keeping him invested in the system with compensatory privileges along lines of race, gender, etc. (see Du Bois’ “wages of whiteness” argument [pg. 700-701 here]), he instead was led to follow the fraudulent right-wing alternative: that corrupt liberal elites were using their power to ruin his life through their promotion of “globalism,” multiculturalism, cronyism, etc.
Things like this always make me think back to an anecdote from Chip Berlet’s extremely insightful “Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close For Comfort”:
Posse [Commitatus] and [Christian] Identity organizers capitalized on the farm crisis of the 1980s. Rural America faced its worst economic slump in half a century, owing largely to unfair and inequitable policies by the federal government and private banks. While most of society ignored angry and desperate rural families’ legitimate grievances, far-right activists urged resistance and offered ready scapegoats, namely, the Jews who supposedly controlled the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Reserve. In the early 1980’s, Posse activists helped to split the influential American Agricultural Movement, while Identity theology and antisemitic conspiracy theories gained an alarming level of acceptance in rural America. One poll in 1985 found that in the farm belt 27 percent of respondents felt that ‘international Jewish bankers’ were responsible for the farm crisis.
Right-wing populism is an ideological mechanism which mobilizes people who are are wronged by elites to fight in defense of certain factions of elites rather than against the system of elites as a whole by redirecting their anger towards scapegoats who are perceived to threaten privileges that they hold along other dimensions than the one they were wronged on.
[Image: Two screencaps of a Facebook post that together read:
“Goy friend: You okay?
Me: No. I am not. Eleven of my tribesman are dead, having been murdered while praying to our God. Not just praying to our God, but killed in front of the Torah which we believe to the literal word of God. We treat the scrolls as if they were kings. We adorn them with crowns and breastplates. A bris was reportedly in progress when the shooting occurred. Eight days birth we conducted a bris. That’s this how we welcome a baby into the community and how we mark him with the sign of the covenant, a ritual that goes back roughly 3,000 years. It was such a Jewish place and time and it was desecrated with hate and violence.
Tonight, I am keenly aware that there are roughly 3 times as many people in the the US’s far right than there are Jewish Americans. The ADL said today was the worst act of violence against Jews in our country’s history. A Jewish friend of mine reminds me that this was not just antisemitism, but this was an anti-American attack. We were the first country to be founded with a specific belief in a secular democracy free of organized religion’s influence with a guarantee of religious freedom for all of its citizens. Not long after the ratification of our Constitution, President Washington sent a now famous letter of good will to the Jews of Providence, RI. (The irony of course being that Jews at the time did not have equal rights under state laws).
Two years after POTUS called Nazis “very fine people,” eleven Jews are dead. Many of friends are shocked, I am not. My grandpa taught me to always expect Jews to be at the receiving end of hate, anger, xenophobia and violence. This is our lot in life. This is why Jews to be at the receiving end of hate, anger, xenophobia and violence. This is our lot in life. This is why Jews must always stand up and speak up. Jews can not afford to forget that we will always be viewed as outsiders by nationalists and nativists.
Today was the natural and logical conclusion of Trump’s embrace of the deplorable. I listened to the President blame the victims saying we should have been armed. Tomorrow, I am going to hear another NRA idiot talk about how if Jews of Europe had been armed my kinsmen would have survived the Shoah. POTUS and later his son called for capital punishment despite that being against the tenets of the victims’ faith.
At nearly the same time I saw members of Britain’s House of Lords blame Benjamin Netanyahu, Likud, and Israel for the violence in Pittsburgh and rise in antisemitism. The left wing of Twitter has had so many horrendous takes that I can’t even talk about it. My leftist friends think today is a good day to debate Israel, it’s not.
Meanwhile CNN is saying nothing of value and Fox News is being particularly vile tonight. I am tired of being used as someone else’s political prop.
I was just on the streets of Philadelphia, people are celebrating Halloween as if nothing happened. Outside of my little bubble the world is still spinning. I am choking back tears. I am reading prayers, psalms and listening to music. I am trying to find comfort and solace. I am embracing my community via the internet. Meanwhile I can hear from my windows the drunken laughter and merriment of Philadelphia’s youth having a good time.
No. I am not okay. My community was attacked. My friends are angry, sad, and afraid. As for me, I am heartbroken. I am trying an failing to reconcile my faith in humanity, the absurdity of this world, and my sorrow regarding today’s events.
Also, idk where this came from. I never fancied myself much of a writer and I certainly didn’t meant to write this much. That is a lot of words.“]
The alternative social media network that was reportedly used by the suspect in the deadly shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue is now down.
Gab.com is a social network that touts itself as an alternative to Twitter and Facebook to give conservatives a platform for free speech. But it has also been criticized for providing a platform for anti-Semitism and white nationalism. The site has come in for increased scrutiny since the shooting.
As of Monday, the site displayed a message saying it had been “systematically no-platformed by App Stores, multiple hosting providers, and several payment processors.”
“We have been smeared by the mainstream media for defending free expression and individual liberty for all people and for working with law enforcement to ensure that justice is served for the horrible atrocity committed at Pittsburgh,” it said.
The platform’s future is newly in doubt because an account linked to Robert Bowers, the 46-year-old Pittsburgh resident charged in the shootings, wrote on Gab Saturday morning: “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.” HIAS is the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a Jewish nonprofit group that has the goal of helping immigrant refugees.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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