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Extremists for God and country

Undated file photo released by the FBI shows terror suspect Aafia Siddiqui.

Saturday’s hostage situation at a Dallas-area synagogue ended Saturday night with the hostages released unharmed and the attacker dead. He is still unidentified. The ostensible motivation for the attack was to gain the release from jail of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani woman convicted of attempting to kill U.S. soldiers. Islamic extremists have called for her release or for a prisoner exchange.

The Washington Post provides backstory (emphasis mine):

Siddiqui, who earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from MIT and a PhD in neuroscience from Brandeis University, was married with three children and living in the Boston area during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. She left her husband and returned to Pakistan in 2003, fearing that if she stayed in the United States, her children would be forcibly taken from her and converted to Christianity, according to a psychological report prepared for her trial. The report said that her thoughts were “replete with numerous conspiratorial ideas” and that “she also related a number of beliefs that appeared delusional.”

Siddiqui disappeared after her return to Pakistan. She was captured in Afghanistan in July 2008, when she was found with a flash drive containing documents on chemical and biological weapons, according to U.S. prosecutors. When FBI agents and U.S. military personnel were interviewing her in Afghanistan, she grabbed a rifle and opened fire on the Americans before she was herself shot. She was flown to the United States and convicted in federal court in New York of attempted murder for the attack.

The bolded section could apply to any of tens of thousands, perhaps millions, of Americans from coast to coast caught up in the Donald Trump cult. Trump might as well be their Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. “He’s a godly man,” one rallygoer said Saturday of Trump, the defeated president with the mafioso affectations.

It’s not clear if Siddiqui was recruited or simply caught up in a similar fervor. The Post asked in 2014:

Why would this mother, who spent a decade studying at the most prestigious U.S. universities, scribble plans detailing a “mass casualty attack” on the Empire State Building? Was she a terrorist mastermind or a victim of an over-aggressive war on terror?

For that matter, why would doctors and lawyers and architects participate in a violent insurrection?

The parallels are getting creepy. The Guardian takes notice. Rep. Mark Takano (D) of California has:

“Targeting of veterans by violent extremist groups is a problem and it could become a bigger problem if we don’t understand what’s involved and the dimensions of it,” Takano said.

Takano said the issue was bipartisan and the definition of extremism did not favor liberal or conservative. “We define extremism not by the content of the ideology of the group, but whether a group espouses, advocates, endorses or promotes violence as a way to achieve their ends,” said Takano.

But he was clear the current threat of veteran recruitment comes more from the extremist right.

“We are seeing that this violence is occurring to a far greater degree among rightwing groups, especially within the last six years,” said Takano. “As far as we can tell, rightwing extremist groups are the ones targeting veterans for recruitment. And there’s not really any evidence that we’re seeing that leftwing groups are targeting veterans,” said Takano.

Data shows violent attacks from rightwing groups in the United States are significantly more prevalent than from leftwing or international or Islamist terrorist groups. An analysis by the Center for International Strategic Studies, a non-partisan thinktank, looked at 893 terrorist plots and attacks in the United States between January 1994 and May 2020.

It found that “far-right terrorism has significantly outpaced terrorism from other types of perpetrators, including from far-left networks and individuals inspired by the Islamic State and al-Qaeda.”

The report also found that “‘rightwing extremists perpetrated two-thirds of the attacks and plots in the United States in 2019 and over 90% between January 1 and May 8, 2020.”

The 738 defendants charged in the 6 January attack on the Capitol include 81 with ties to the military, while five were active-duty service members. Air force veteran Ashli Babbitt was shot dead by police while attempting to break into the House chamber. Recently, three retired army generals wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post warning of the threat of a coup in the 2024 US election, saying it could succeed with the aid of rogue military elements.

We went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq under the pretext that we had to fight them over there so we didn’t have to fight them over here. Perhaps the Bush II administration should have more clearly defined “them.”

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