"""
"""
Far too often during the Obama administration, attacks that had all the hallmarks of Islamist terrorism were never charged or labeled as terror attacks. Some of the many examples: The 2009 fatal shooting attack by Tennessee Islamic convert Carlos Bledsoe on a military recruiting office in Little Rock, Arkansas; the 2014 fatal decapitation attack by Oklahoma’s Alton Nolen at Vaughn Foods in Moore, Oklahoma; and the 2017 head-shot execution of a Denver transit security officer by Texas resident Joshua Cummings. Those and many other Islamist-inspired attacks were left to local authorities to charge under various state laws, such as murder.

Correct or not, critics often attributed Obama-era decisions not to charge extremism-motivated cases under federal terrorism statutes to a desire to downplay the Islamist threat -- and maybe also to reduce the number of terrorism attacks accrued under the Democratic Party’s watch.
[...]
After killing two soldiers at the Little Rock recruiting station, Bledsoe wrote Arkansas prosecutors demanding to be prosecuted as the Islamist terrorist he insisted he was, having radicalized in Yemen two years earlier and trained with al-Qaeda. The lead Pulaski County prosecutor pressing a regular murder rap against Bledsoe was quoted dismissing the claim: “If you strip away what he says, self-serving or not … it’s like a lot of other killings we have.”
[...]
New Jersey used its statute to charge Washington state resident Muhammad Ali Brown for one of four murders he committed in the name of Islamic jihad -- that of New Jersey native son Brendan Tevlin, a college student shot in the chest apparently at random. For whatever reason, the feds in Washington state never treated the Brown killings as terrorism. Yet Brown had stated that he did them as retaliation for American military forces killing Muslims in conflict zones, had a prior terrorism conviction in Oregon, kept journals lauding ISIS, and was on the terrorism watch list.
[...]
Arizona was another state that triggered its 9/11-era terrorism statute for the first time, in the 2016 case of Mahim Atif Khan. The 18-year-old was the target of an elaborate federal sting that found he was plotting to bomb an Air Force recruiting station in Tucson with a pressure cooker device. He had also reached out to ISIS for help securing firearms and bomb-making instructions. It’s not entirely clear why the feds chose not to prosecute what appeared to be a strong case. Khan received an eight-year state prison sentence on the state terrorism conviction, so it will join the ranks of jihadist terrorism incidents anyway thanks to the Arizona statute.
"""
https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/texas-juvenile-jihadi-shows-why-we-need-state-level-terrorism-statutes/
https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/texas-juvenile-jihadi-shows-why-we-need-state-level-terrorism-statutes/

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

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