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 |  Subject: Degenerate New York kike-lawmaker wants to treat beige supremacists like foreign jihadists  Sat Feb 22, 2020 5:16 am | |
| BROOKLYN — If all else were to fail in his fight against the threat of domestic terrorism, Rep. Max Rose offered an unconventional plan to protect the Brooklynites who had come to hear him speak at a Jewish community center: He’d stand on guard duty at their places of worship himself.
“Right in front of your church, and your mosque, or your synagogue,” the Army combat veteran said.
“I’ll do it,” Rose told the people who came out to this low-slung stretch of Ocean Parkway, where mosques and synagogues sit next to auto repair shops and fast food joints. “I’m a scary-looking dude, right?”
Short and bald, with eyes that fold into an intense interrogatory squint, the first-term congressman representing Staten Island and a narrow wedge of Brooklyn looks more like an outside linebacker than a first-term legislator.
The first Jewish lawmaker to represent Staten Island — and the first Democrat elected by the Republican redoubt in a decade — Rose has recently emerged as a leading proponent of treating white supremacists no differently than law enforcement treats foreign terrorists.
Rose wants the federal government to recognize that white nationalist groups like the Rise Above Movement and the Atomwaffen Division are as serious threats to American citizens as the Islamic State or al-Qaida. The FBI has also acknowledged that threat, recently deeming homegrown extremists a “national threat priority.”
For national-security-minded Democrats like Rose, however, the response to the threat has not been commensurate with its size. “This is extensive, it is global, it is frightening and it is not something we can afford to ignore,” says Rose, who in recent months has emerged as one of Washington’s most ardent supporters of expanded domestic terror statutes. He is among a growing number of Democrats who want the federal government to do a better job of identifying, tracking and ultimately prosecuting domestic terrorists.
Rose has two significant proposals. One, which would require congressional endorsement, requires the Department of Homeland Security to perform a “threat assessment” on foreign terror groups, which often have ties to domestic ones. While that may seem like a relatively minor point, it would represent a major advancement over the current state of affairs. The bill recently advanced out of the relevant committee.
Rose’s other proposal calls on the State Department to label transnational white extremist groups as foreign terrorist organizations. Such a label would effectively criminalize Americans’ ability to interact in any way with white extremists outside the United States, much in the same way that it is illegal to join or support the Islamic State. The State Department could make that designation on its own, without needing congressional approval. But it would need to justify adding groups to its terror list.
“Max Rose is right,” says Jason Blazakis, a terrorism expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and a former top official at the State Department. Blazakis says it is appropriate to treat white nationalist groups as transnational syndicates, a model that runs counter to the “lone wolf” mythology long associated with white supremacist violence. “Rose is asking the right question,” he adds.
Blazakis also agrees with Rose’s proposal to conduct formal assessments of these groups, arguing that federal departments like State and Treasury will be “stuck” in their dealings with race-motivated terrorists until the nation’s intelligence agencies are able to more freely collect the information that could lead those departments to levy sanctions or restrictions.
“The collection agencies need to spend more of their resources” on domestic terror, Blazakis says, pointing to the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the Defense Information Agency in particular. Threat assessments may not be the stuff of Jason Bourne thrillers, but they can keep Americans safe. (Blazakis later clarified that he would never want the CIA to engage in domestic surveillance, only to include white extremists in the work the agency does abroad.)
To underscore the threat of this global movement, Rose points to the relatively recent advent of the Base, a white supremacist group founded by an American living in Russia. “The Base” happens to be what “al-Qaida” translates to in English. And although the group’s founder appears to be based in Russia, his adherents have been arrested in Wisconsin and Georgia. According to the Anti-Defamation League, the Base touts “international locations including Australia, Canada and South Africa,” as well as “cells” in 10 U.S. states, from California to Minnesota to New Hampshire.
“There’s a global movement here,” Rose says.
The issue is also personal for Rose, a descendant of Eastern European Jews, who grew up in the brownstone-lined Park Slope section of Brooklyn. He attended the prestigious Poly Prep Country Day private school, then went north to Connecticut to just-as-prestigious Wesleyan University. Then he did something that most people with prestigious educations do not do: He joined the Army.
“When you grow up Jewish in New York City, you think everyone’s Jewish,” Rose said. That changed in basic training. “And for the first time, you are the first Jew that someone’s met.”
Rose served in the Army for five years and deployed to Afghanistan, where he was wounded by a roadside bomb. He left active service in 2013 with a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart and is now a captain in the Army National Guard.
Rose won his first political race in 2018, defeating Rep. Dan Donovan, who was the lone Republican to represent New York City in Washington. The victory made Rose the first-ever Jewish representative for Staten Island, whose members of Congress have tended to be Catholic. He was also a Democrat from a heavily Republican district that Donald Trump won easily in 2016.
Global issues are something of a departure for Rose, who in his first year as a House member hewed to the classic constituent-services model that has worked well for so many New Yorkers serving in D.C. A typical Max Rose press release touts his work on a new garage at a Brooklyn veterans’ hospital or on a proposed seawall for Staten Island.
Yet in a way, his crusade against white nationalists is in keeping with that keep-it-local sensibility. Rose in part represents one of the largest Yemeni populations in the United States, as well as many observant Jews. With their respective hijabs and black coats, both groups can easily be identified by those who might want to do them harm. And Rose thinks far too little is being done to protect vulnerable, visible populations like the ones in his district.
“We have to stop talking about free speech,” he says, an allusion to the First Amendment rights that white supremacists frequently invoke, as do the civil libertarians who may loathe racism but worry about threats to the Constitution. That unlikely nexus once provided a classic headline about the American Civil Liberties Union in the Onion, a satirical newspaper: “ACLU Defends Nazis’ Right to Burn Down ACLU Headquarters.”
For terrorism experts, legitimate civil liberties concerns should not conceal the magnitude of the threat. “We are not talking about freedoms given to us by the Constitution,” says Ali Soufan, the terrorism expert who, when he was at the FBI, sounded the alarm about Islamic fundamentalists ahead of the Sept. 11 attacks. Now he is working with Rose, issuing similar warnings about white extremists.
Some believe that such warnings are excessive and counterproductive, because federal law enforcement already knows how to identify and contain white supremacists. Among them is Michael German, a former FBI agent who is now a national security fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice.
“They are imagining a gap that doesn’t exist,” he says of legislators like Rose and Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who has called for a domestic terrorism law.
German says suggestions of an inadequate federal response to domestic terrorism are “ridiculous.”
German is the co-author of a 2018 report titled [url=https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/publications/2018_10_DomesticTerrorism_V2 %281%29.pdf]“Wrong Priorities in Fighting Terrorism.”[/url] There, and in other writings, he has noted that a domestic terrorism statute does exist and that it applies to 51 violations of the U.S. criminal code.
“I think it’s a mistake,” agrees another domestic terrorism expert, who requested anonymity because the not-for-profit organization he works for has not taken a public position on any of Rose’s proposals. “I see no evidence our problem is fundamentally related to the lack of investigatory powers."
He adds that “the most important caution is to protect the Constitution” and that federal law enforcement is perfectly capable of breaking up terror plots. As evidence, he alludes to last November’s arrest of 13 Atomwaffen Division members. “I need an FBI that does its job,” the expert says.
Arguments about domestic terrorism can easily descend into legalistic parsing; for Rose, the matter is more immediate. “People are afraid to go outside with their kippah,” he says, referencing traditional Jewish headwear. “People are afraid to speak Hebrew in public. People are afraid to go to synagogue.”
Given the rising rate of hate crimes in the United States, and the fear those crimes have engendered in people like Rose’s constituents, it is difficult to argue against the federal government’s doing more, with better tools at hand.
“I disagree they have everything they need. They need a better law,” says Blazakis, the Middlebury terrorism expert. He likes the Schiff plan because it would include oversight from a civil liberties board. “It matters in terms of the sentencing, it matters in terms of the symbolism,” Blazakis says, arguing that the world needs to see the United States treating white supremacists as harshly as it has treated Islamic radicals.
“If you’re brown in America,” Blazakis says, “you’re more likely to be labeled a terrorist than if you’re white.” That’s the case even as the fatalities inflicted by white supremacists have surpassed those of terrorists inspired by a warped vision of Islam.
The remedy Rose has proposed is to treat any American white nationalist group that associates with similar groups abroad as a foreign terrorist organization. The list of those organizations, which is kept by the State Department, now has 69 members and includes the likes of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and the Real Irish Republican Army. The designation gives federal law enforcement broad powers to investigate those who provide material support to such groups, but the list mostly comprises jihadist organizations.
That creates a glaring loophole for someone like Christopher Hasson, a Coast Guard officer from Maryland who stockpiled a veritable arsenal that he hoped to use in the service of killing members of Congress, justices of the Supreme Court and media figures. Hasson was inspired by Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian white nationalist who killed 77 people in Oslo and on an island summer camp in 2011. Breivik, in turn, had been inspired by Islamophobic groups in the United States, including ACT for America and the benign-sounding Center for Security Policy. Both are labeled as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Even though federal prosecutors branded Hasson a “domestic terrorist” in the court filings, that designation did not come with an attendant charge and was therefore only a rhetorical flourish. The charges against him involved possession of drugs and guns, and those were regarded as light enough, on their own merits, for the court to order his release. Prosecutors successfully fought that order, and Hasson was eventually sentenced to a 13-year-term.
Even so, the fact that his desire to commit what would have been an act of terrorism played no role in his sentencing suggested to many that something was amiss. Blazakis believes that if there were a domestic terror statute, Hasson would have faced a much longer prison term.
More: https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/a-new-york-lawmaker-wants-to-treat-white-supremacists-like-foreign-jihadists-100037274.html
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