Islamist terror plot to attack white nationalists: See the death spiral of a two-headed monster

Monday’s arrest of a radical Islamist who is also a U.S. military veteran in Los Angeles, on charges that he plotted to attack a planned white nationalist rally in Long Beach, marked the second major terrorism arrest in Southern California in three days, following Saturday’s attack by a white nationalist on a synagogue in Poway.

It also represented the latest step upward in the death spiral of violence in which white nationalists and radical Islamists have become entwined—with ordinary innocents, as always, caught in the crossfire.

The FBI arrested 26-year-old Mark Stevens Domingo of Reseda after an undercover officer posing as a bomb maker delivered him a promised package with a fake bomb, and charged him with providing material support to terrorists.

According to court documents, Domingo allegedly wanted retribution for the Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque attack by a white nationalist terrorist last month, and told the informant he was willing to become a martyr.

“There must be retribution,” the criminal complaint reported he wrote online. It also says he voiced allegiance to ISIS.

The rally in Long Beach that he intended to target with an IED was originally scheduled by United Patriot National Front on Sunday. However, the supposed event’s far-right planners utterly failed to show up, meaning that any bomb most likely would have victimized the anti-white nationalist protesters who did show.

Monday’s arrest also fits into the larger context of Islamist domestic-terrorist attacks in the United States over the past decade, during which cases involving far-right extremists have outnumbered those attached to radical Islamists by almost two to one. Nearly half of all Islamist cases, in fact, involved pre-emptive arrests of suspects by authorities working a sting operation, as this most recent arrest was.

Domingo’s case provides a stark contrast to the arrest in February of a Coast Guardsman named Christopher Hasson who was discovered, after being busted for drug dealing, to have been plotting a series of major domestic terrorism attacks. In spite of that, Hasson is not being charged with terrorism, and may be released before trial. (It’s worth noting, though, that the main problem prosecutors face in charging Hasson is that domestic terrorism with no international connection is not a federal crime, even if it clearly should be.)

However, the most striking aspect of this latest arrest is how it manifests another dimension in our new age of sequential terrorism in which one act inspires the next, as intended: The inspiration occurs not just within the same ideological system, but between the two enemy combatants—both far-right extremists of different kinds, who are radicalizing online in almost identical arcs.

from Daily Kos http://bit.ly/2GXLsxJ