{"id":39493,"date":"2013-06-06T08:27:25","date_gmt":"2013-06-06T07:27:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/how-come-its-not-terrorism-when-a-white-guy-from-the-south-does-it\/39493\/"},"modified":"2013-06-06T08:27:25","modified_gmt":"2013-06-06T07:27:25","slug":"how-come-its-not-terrorism-when-a-white-guy-from-the-south-does-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/how-come-its-not-terrorism-when-a-white-guy-from-the-south-does-it\/","title":{"rendered":"How Come It's Not Terrorism When a White Guy from the South Does It?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is pictured in the Brooklyn borough of New York City on February 14, 2013. Bloomberg said Sunday he will invest $12 million in a nationwide ad campaign to counter the powerful US gun lobby and rally support for background <\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

June 5, 2013<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>
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In late May, a threatening letter<\/a>\u00a0laced with the deadly chemical ricin was sent from Shreveport, Louisiana<\/a>, to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg as a response to the mayor\u2019s outspoken support for stricter gun control laws. Two identical<\/a>\u00a0letters, also containing the lethal substance, were addressed to both President Barack Obama and the head of the Washington D.C. lobbying group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which is managed and funded by Bloomberg himself. <\/p>\n

The contents of the letters are clearly the work of a right-wing gun nut and read<\/a>as follows: \u201cYou will have to kill me and my family before you get my guns. Anyone wants to come to my house will get shot in the face. The right to bear arms is my constitutional, god-given right and I will exercise that right till the day I die. What\u2019s in this letter is nothing compared to what I\u2019ve got planned for you.\u201d <\/p>\n

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Despite lethally targeting civilians and non-military officials far from any active battlefield, no one is referring to these acts as terrorism. Not the press, not political pundits, not the intended victims. No one. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

In fact, Bloomberg himself was nonplussed by the whole ordeal, telling<\/a>reporters on May 30, \u201cI\u2019m not angry. There are people who I would argue do things that may be irrational, do things that are wrong, but it\u2019s a very complex world out there and we just have to deal with that.\u201d <\/p>\n

Yes, Mike, it is a very complex world. This world is so complex, in fact, that an easily identifiable act of terrorism<\/a>\u00a0isn\u2019t considered terrorism for one simple reason: it probably wasn\u2019t committed by a Muslim, but rather by some white guy in the South. <\/p>\n

Clearly, while white guys who send murderous mail are merely acting irrationally and doing something wrong, potential violence by members of the Muslim faith present a singular threat to our civilized society. So much so, in fact, that Michael Bloomberg himself believes our own laws and the bedrock of that very society are not good enough to defend against such a scourge to humanity. <\/p>\n

In April, following the horrific Boston Marathon bombing, Bloomberg declared that the American obsession with privacy, civil rights and basic freedoms were antiquated and trite when compared to the dire threat posed by hypothetical barbarian hordes of \u201cIslamists.\u201d <\/p>\n

At a press conference at the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, Bloomberg said<\/a>, \u201cThe people who are worried about privacy have a legitimate worry. But we live in a complex world where you\u2019re going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change.\u201d <\/p>\n

Yes, how complex it is. So complex that, although a 2010 study<\/a>\u00a0by Duke University and the University of North Carolina found that Islamic terrorism accounted for only six percent<\/a>\u00a0of all terrorist attacks in the United States between 1980 and 2005 while a 2012 analysis<\/a>\u00a0by the Center for American Progress reported that a whopping<\/a>\u201c[f]ifty-six percent of domestic terrorist attacks and plots in the U.S. since 1995 have been perpetrated by right-wing extremists,\u201d Michael Bloomberg has made it his duty to illegally spy on and harass Muslim communities in the New York Metro area. <\/p>\n

Bloomberg has presided over a massive, illegal covert domestic surveillance<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0ethno-religious profiling program<\/a>\u00a0that have targeted, alienated and traumatized<\/a>\u00a0Muslims throughout the Northeast, despite the fact that, following the September 11, 2001 attacks, more Americans have been killed<\/a>\u00a0in right-wing terrorist plots<\/a>\u00a0than by Islamic terrorists<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is pictured in the Brooklyn borough of New York City on February 14, 2013. Bloomberg said Sunday he will invest $12 million in a nationwide ad campaign to counter the powerful US gun lobby and rally support for background June 5, 2013 \u00a0| Like this article? Join our email list: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-39493","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39493"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39493\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}