CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: New Age Of Enlightenment: Hanukkah stabbing suspect searched ‘why did Hitler hate the Jews,’  Mon Dec 30, 2019 8:20 pm | |
| WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. — More than a month before he charged into Hanukkah celebrations with a machete, prosecutors say, Grafton Thomas used his cellphone to search the Internet: “Why did Hitler hate the Jews.”
That query — entered three more times over the following weeks — was just one red flag authorities found when they combed Thomas’s belongings, officials said. There were more online searches, for temples “near me.” There were journals with the words “Nazi Culture” on the same page as a Swastika and a Star of David.
The discoveries detailed by an FBI agent would bring Thomas to court Monday on federal hate-crime charges, a day after he was charged with attempted murder in the stabbing that wounded five people at a rabbi’s home in New York’s Rockland County. The 38-year-old defendant answered routine questions, telling a judge he was “coherent,” before shuffling away slowly, feet shackled, to be held without bail.
Thomas’s family has said the suspect has “no known history of anti-Semitism” and attributed any responsibility in Saturday’s rampage in the New York suburb of Monsey to “profound mental illness.” But a criminal complaint points to Thomas’s handwritten journals and online history as evidence that the man sought to target Jews in an assault that quickly renewed fears of rising violence against Jewish communities.
Thomas, a resident of Greenwood Lake, N.Y., did not enter a plea for the latest charges at his court appearance in White Plains, and his attorneys did not respond to inquiries on Monday. He pleaded not guilty on Sunday to five counts of attempted murder and one count of burglary; with Monday’s filing, he also faces five counts of obstructing the free exercise of religious beliefs by attempting to kill with a dangerous weapon and causing injuries.
Even before Monday’s charges brought a potential motive into focus, many officials and community leaders had denounced anti-Semitism and expressed concern about a spate of attacks on Jewish residents. Saturday’s stabbing was 13th anti-Semitic incident in three weeks in New York state, the governor said, calling the Monsey stabbing “domestic terrorism.” Earlier this month, four people were fatally shot in what officials called a targeted attack on a Jersey City kosher grocery store.
Authorities found Thomas within hours of the attack, driving with blood on his clothes in a car that smelled of bleach.
The suspect’s browser history showed queries related to Nazis, Jews and synagogues dating to at least Nov. 9, according to the complaint filed in Manhattan by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. A day before the stabbing, the complaint says, Thomas accessed an article on New York’s decision to ramp up police presence in multiple Jewish neighborhood amid fears of anti-Semitic violence.
Journals discovered in Thomas’s home also include anti-Semitic statements, an FBI officer writes in the federal complaint. One of them questions “why [people] mourned for anti-Semitism when there is Semitic genocide.”
Thomas’s family sought to dispel accusations of anti-Semitism in a statement released Sunday through a lawyer, saying he was not a member of any hate groups and “was raised in a home which embraced and respected all religions and races.”
The family pointed to Thomas’s “long history of mental illness and hospitalizations,” adding that attorney Michael Sussman plans to seek a mental health evaluation.
“We believe the actions of which he is accused, if committed by him, tragically reflect profound mental illness,” Sussman said, for which “Grafton has received episodic treatment before being released.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/12/30/monsey-stabbing-grafton-thomas-suspect/
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Anarcho-Capitalist, AnCaps Forum, Ancapolis, OZschwitz Contraband
“The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.”-- Max Stirner
"Remember: Evil exists because good men don't kill the government officials committing it." -- Kurt Hofmann |
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