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By Michael D. Roberts |
When Muhammad came home from the war he found real difficulty to find a job. His personal life was a mess. His attempts at marriage twice - had failed. This only added to his anger and hate. He started to live all over America and soon fell into devising his own immigration racket to make money. To him that was the system of capitalism. But Muhammad still nursed a burning hatred of a country that he felt did not do right by him.
He was still very poor, reduced tio living in homeless shelters, sporadically employed, without hope, and disillusioned about what the future held for him. Muhammad was a very, very dangerous loser. He thought that his being a veteran and all would have been appreciated and so rejected by society he decided to get back that society for having forsaken him. He was a man consumed with hate and so he used the training that Uncle Sam had given (they taught him how to kill) to deadly use in a domestic setting. Urban guerilla warfare he was thinking.
So John Allen Muhammad decided to teach America a lesson. He's the second Gulf War veteran to snap and really get murderous. Timothy McVeigh was the first. He just blew up a federal building with hundreds in it killing 250 people. Before Osama bin Laden's Kama Kaze pilots struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, McVeigh was America's most successful mass murder. He too was disillusioned and full of hate. Only he did not turn to Islam.
The media immediately glorified Muhammad's deadly exploits in much the same way that it rewrote the history of Jesse James one of America's first terrorists. They called the killings the work of "a sniper." But the man was a terrorist, plain and simple. Hell, he terrorized a whole nation and killed 10 people in three weeks. Three were lucky to escape, Muhammad must not have had his coffee fix that morning, and his shaking hands made his aim a bit off. So he didn't blow off three heads, so what? 10 out of 13 ain't so bad, you know.
As parents, police, children, priests and john public at large cringed in fear, one of the largest manhunts in modern U.S. history unfolded, and home grown terror was never acknowledged by the pundits on the news for one simple reason. The media thought that the killer was white after a bevy of experts gave his profile as a "white male, in his 30s, possibly an ex-soldier." Yes, there are no white terrorists. Had these same people got wind of the fact that Muhammad was black then the labels would have come gushing forth. He would have been a monster or worse.
Tim McVeigh was the best example of domestic terrorism that the U.S. has ever had. He comes close to the so-called Uni-bomber. But at that time terrorism was not the correct political buzz word. So they called a man who killed a whole lot of innocent men, women and children "the Oklahoma Bomber." And a man who killed by sending bombs in the mail was called "the Uni-Bomber." What a load of horse's manure! McVeigh and the Uni-Bomber were two examples of domestic terrorists. They were stone, cold sadistic killers even if they were white.
Muhammad is no different and the social problems that spawned and continue to spawn the McVeighs of the world are still very much present in American society today. Unless the problems of poverty, unemployment, racism, unjust laws, and judicial bias are not addressed the "chickens will come home to roost" every time. Besides prosecuting Muhammad to the fullest extent of the law, lawmakers must try to decide what made him snap. They must work to address the sense of abandonment that many, many veterans feel after they are sent out to do their patriotic duty.
America is getting ready to send poor people's children to die in the hot, arid deserts of the Middle East. It's not the children of Colin Powell, John Ashcroft, Don Rumsfeld et al who will be doing the dying. It's not Tony Blair's children in England who will be fighting. It's going to be poor, working class men and women who will be "cannon fodder." For all the cries of patriotism, and the love for "our men and women in uniform," the only love is about fighting wars on behalf of the ruling elite. You can bet you last dollar that the children of Enron and Tyco's bosses will not be fighting any war.
It is this kind of double standard that festers among many veterans. After fighting and dying, many feel that they have been had, hoodwinked and bamboozled ( to use Malcolm X's words) by an administration that sent them in harm's way for reasons other than fighting America's enemies. While a few privileged people benefit from the wars, the poor who lose loved ones are for the most part shoved aside, despised and shunted into a sub-culture of poverty, disease and want. Does anybody wonder why some of these people get so consumed with hatred?
I abhor any act of terrorism and I think that John Muhammad should get his just desserts. But I also think that we need to take stock and try to determine just how many walking time bombs that is in our midst before another one goes off and innocent people get hurt. But we never learn because by next week the sexiness of the John Allen Muhammad story will be lost only to be replaced by another one that will guarantee a larger TV viewership. So in the quest for ratings and obscene advertising dollars we'll soon be treated to another TV soap opera.
We're a gullible people and out political leaders know that. So they feed us set of concocted sauce that only helps to give us political diarrhea. They will make the correct sounding noises about terrorism while pretending that "this does not happen here." Until the next time and the next. When the hell will we ever learn?