These three self-explanatory links are copied here for my record.
First is from Reuters. Thanks to Khalid Diab whom I follow via Twitter, whose Washington Post article also appears below.
"Federal prosecutors said the three suspects were members of the neo-Nazi group The Base."— Khaled Diab (@DiabolicalIdea) January 17, 2020
Do you know what the Arabic for The Base is?
It's al-Qaeda.
So these neo-Nazis are quite literally homegrown American al-Qaeda!!!https://t.co/6G6K82ZVjd
Alleged neo-Nazis caught with assault rifle charged ahead of Virginia gun rally
Julia HarteGREENBELT, Md. (Reuters) - Three suspected members of a neo-Nazi group appeared in a Maryland court on Thursday to face federal charges after the FBI arrested them for carrying an assault rifle and planning to incite violence at a gun-rights rally in Virginia.
Their appearance in the U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, Maryland, came the day after Virginia Governor Ralph Northam declared a state of emergency banning any weapons around the grounds of the state capitol in Richmond.
He said investigators had seen groups making threats of violence ahead of the gun-rights rally planned at the legislative building for Monday.
Federal prosecutors said the three suspects were members of the neo-Nazi group The Base, a small militant organization dedicated to committing violence against minorities and obstructing authorities from learning about their activities. When Lemley and Mathews were arrested, they smashed their cellphones and dumped them into the toilet before submitting to federal agents, Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Windom said.
Standing calmly before Judge Charles Day, Lemley wore a T-shirt and pajama pants, while Mathews sported camouflage pants and a bushy blond beard.
Both men answered “yes” when the judge asked if they understood the charges against them, which include transporting a firearm with intent to commit an offense. They answered “no” when asked if they were under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
Lemley and Mathews remained in federal custody due to their alleged firearms violations. The judge decided to detain Bilbrough after prosecutors said the 19-year-old defendant might go into hiding or try to flee the country since he had repeatedly expressed a desire to travel to Ukraine to fight with “nationalists” there.
Bilbrough’s defense attorney denied that his client posed a flight risk, noting that he lived with his grandmother and lacked a passport.
The judge set the three defendants’ detention hearings for Wednesday.
The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have been sharply criticized for not focusing enough on the threat of far-right extremism following a spate of attacks on synagogues and a 2017 white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Heads of both of those agencies have said in recent months that they were taking the threat more seriously.
Several thousand gun rights supporters are planning a large rally in Richmond, Virginia’s capital, on Monday in response to the newly Democratic-controlled state legislature’s push to stiffen gun laws.
Virginia, where Democrats took control of the legislature by promising stronger gun laws, has become the latest focal point for the contentious American debate around the right to bear arms. Many gun-rights groups contend the U.S. Constitution guarantees their ability to possess any firearm. Those opposed say gun laws would help lessen the number of people killed by guns each year.
The three men are accused of interstate commerce of weapons, harboring illegal aliens, an alien in possession of a firearm and ammunition, and aiding and abetting. The FBI also said in the court filing that the men had attempted to manufacture DMT, a powerful psychedelic that is an illegal drug under federal law.
While federal authorities can bring criminal terrorism charges against those suspected of working on behalf of foreign extremist groups like al Qaeda, they lack those tools when pursuing affiliates of domestic extremist groups, whose views are protected by the free-speech clause of the U.S. Constitution.
The men were in possession of what looked like a fully automatic rifle, according to an FBI agent who watched the men fire the weapon at a gun range.
Shortly after firing the weapon on Jan. 2 at a Maryland gun range, Lemley told Mathews, “Oh, oops, it looks like I accidentally made a machine gun,” according to the court document.
Lemley and Mathews lived together in Delaware, while Bilbrough resided in Maryland. Mathews illegally crossed over the border into the United States in August, the court document said.
Reporting by Julia Harte in Greenbelt, Maryland, Brad Brooks in Austin, Texas, Mark Hosenball and Andy Sullivan in Washington and Gabriella Borter in New York; Editing by Scott Malone, Jonathan Oatis and Tom Brown
Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Of crusaders and jihadis
Khaled DiabDespite their conviction that they are polar opposites, white supremacists and Islamist extremists share much in common, including a hatred of minorities and the enemies within, a persecution complex, and nostalgia for past glories.
Monday 25 March 2019If a terrorist were to claim that their attack was intended to “add momentum to the pendulum swings of history, further destabilising and polarising Western society,” you might be excused in thinking the perpetrator was an Islamic extremist. But these are the words of a white supremacist and crusader.
In the confused and contradictory manifesto reportedly penned by Brenton Tarrant, the 28-year-old Australian white supremacist who stands accused of perpetrating the deadly mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, the self-described terrorist asserts grandiosely that his killing spree sought to “incite violence, retaliation and further divide between the European people and the invaders currently occupying European soil,” even though the attack was carried out about as far away from European soil as it is possible to get in the inhabited corners of the world.
Tarrant also wrote that he hoped that his actions would “Balkanise” the United States “along political, cultural and, most importantly, racial lines”. This would, in his twisted vision, hasten the destruction of the current order and enable the creation of a white, Christian utopia on the smouldering ruins of multiculturalism.
The Australian extremist’s nihilistic fantasy of revolutionary change from within echoes that of many jihadis and Islamist extremists. For example, combating the “near enemy,” i.e., the enemy within, is a central pillar of the ideology and political programme of the Islamic State (ISIS) and partly explains why fellow Muslims were the largest target, in numerical terms, as well as indigenous minorities, of the self-proclaimed caliphate’s murderous rage.
These two hateful ideologies — white supremacy and radical Islamism — may regard themselves as polar opposites, but their worldviews resemble one another more than they differ. Both are paranoid, exhibit a toxic blend of superiority and inferiority towards the other, are scornful of less extreme members of their own communities and are nostalgic for an imagined past of cultural dominance.
Islamists are often in the habit of vilifying their secular, liberal and progressive compatriots and co-religionists as culturally inauthentic mimics and fakes, at best, and as sellouts and traitors, at worst. “The enemies of Islam can deceive Muslim intellectuals and draw a thick veil over the eyes of the zealous by depicting Islam as defective in various aspects of doctrine, ritual observance, and morality,” railed Hassan al-Banna, the founding father of the Muslim Brotherhood, in 1936.
This conviction that local liberal elites are aiding and abetting the enemy by betraying their own culture and people is also a common refrain amongst white supremacists, neo-Nazis and the Alt-Right. Such a belief is the root of Tarrant’s absurd assertion that “NGOs are directly involved in the genocide of the European people.”
It also highlights why the Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik — whom Tarrant wrote that he admired — chose to attack the “near enemy” by murdering participants at a Workers’ Youth League Summer Camp, people he vilified as “cultural Marxists,” instead of the more obvious target of Muslims or other minority groups whom he also hated. (A watered-down version of this discourse is becoming popular in more mainstream right-wing and conservative circles, as epitomised in the growing demonisation of leftists, intellectuals, academics and journalists, whom President Trump regularly and dangerously brands as the “enemies of the people.”)
A contempt for “Western” modernity is another trait shared by Islamists and the Christian far right. “The Europeans worked assiduously in trying to immerse (the world) in materialism, with their corrupting traits and murderous germs, to overwhelm those Muslim lands that their hands stretched out to,” believed al-Banna. Unintentionally echoing the founding father of political Islam, Tarrant is convinced that the West has become a “society of rampant nihilism, consumerism and individualism.”
This disdain for many aspects of modernity translates into an overwhelming yearning for a supposedly more glorious and pure past and a nostalgia for bygone imperial greatness when the world was at their command — for the days of European empires or Islamic caliphates.
In his manifesto, Tarrant oozes victimhood, equating the perceived erosion of privilege with oppression, rather like Islamists in some Muslim-majority countries who regard any concessions to minorities or women as a sign of their own supposed repression. He appropriates the language of occupation, anti-colonialism and the oppressed, despite living in a society founded by European settlers.
Although Tarrant claims to be undecided about whether he is a Christian, he couches his manifesto in Christian imagery and justifies his crimes in religious terms, like his jihadi equivalents. Not only does he quote Pope Urban II, who initiated the First Crusade, but the attacker warns that: “We are coming for Constantinople and we will destroy every mosque and minaret in the city.”
Tarrant claimed that his actions were motivated by the urgent need to avert a supposed “white genocide,” a popular myth in far-right circles which maintains, absurdly, that there is a conspiracy in motion to kill off the white race. Outlandish conspiracy theories are common fodder in both far-right and Islamist circles, including anti-Semitic tropes about the world being controlled by a cabal of secretive, wealthy Jews.
The appropriation of the anti-colonial language of the oppressed shows how white supremacy has developed an inferiority complex since its peak in the 19th century, when the West pretty much ruled the rest. In place of the white man’s burden of yore, many on the far right now feel they are regarded as the burden.
This claim of resisting foreign occupation and oppression is a common refrain in contemporary white nationalist circles. Despite claiming that whites were the “the pioneers of the world,” Richard Spencer, the poster boy of the Alt-Right movement, lamented — in the notorious Washington speech during which he made a Nazi salute — that “no one mourns the great crimes committed against us. For us, it is conquer or die.”
“We are experiencing an invasion on a level never seen before in history,” Tarrant asserted dubiously in his manifesto, even though his victims were worshippers at a mosque, not an army massing at the border. “This crisis of mass immigration and sub-replacement fertility is an assault on the European people that, if not combated, will ultimately result in the complete racial and cultural replacement of the European people.”
“[There] are no innocents in an invasion, all those who colonise other people’s lands share guilt,” the Australian terrorist claimed. In this, he echoed Osama bin Laden, who described 9/11 as an act of “self-defense,” declaring that “if killing those who kill our sons is terrorism, then let history be witness that we are terrorists.”
Extremists may believe in a monumental battle between the Christian West and Islam, but the reality is the cross-border conflicts in this world are predominantly clashes of interests, not of ideologies.
There are, however, ideological clashes within our individual countries and “civilisations” — between pluralists and progressives, on the one side, and puritans and fanatics, on the other.
If the extremists prevail, they will rent apart their own societies supposedly to protect them against the perceived enemies from within and without. We must use all the social, economic, political and intellectual tools at our disposal to avert such a catastrophe.
This article was first published by The Washington Post on 16 March 2019.
Who is U.S. neo-Nazi group 'The Base'?
(Reuters) - The FBI has arrested three suspected members of an armed neo-Nazi group known as The Base that hopes to start a race war in the United States, officials said on Thursday.The arrests came just days before a gun-rights rally in Virginia that was expected to draw thousands of people.
Here is how the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), a non-profit, non-partisan organization that tracks extremist groups, and the Anti-Defamation League, characterize the group:
- The Base is an “accelerationist group that encourages the onset (of) anarchy and so it can then ‘impose order from chaos.’” The CEP says The Base seeks to train members to fight a race war and draws inspiration from the book “Siege” by the neo-Nazi James Mason.
- The Base was launched by Norman Spear, also known as Roman Wolf, in 2018. The CEP said both names are believed to be pseudonyms. The Base’s members portray themselves as vigilante soldiers defending the “European race” from a broken “system” infected by Jewish values, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
- The Base has organized training camps around North America on weaponry and military tactics and distributed manuals for “lone-wolf terror attacks, bomb-making, counter-surveillance and guerrilla warfare.”
- “The Base,” is the English translation of al Qaeda, although it is not clear if that was intentional and if there are other similarities between the two.
- The network is also present in Europe and Australia, CEP said. Although members mainly organize online, it’s real-world presence has increased, the Anti-Defamation League said.
Reporting by Maria Caspani and Mark Hosenball, Editing by Frank McGurty and Cynthia Osterman
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