In Georgia town – mixed reaction to alleged militia plot

Homeland Security NTARC News | 11/7/2011

[T]he Waffle House booth often used by three local men arrested in a domestic terror plot was empty on a recent morning but the case that has unnerved this former textile town was on the minds of the breakfast crowd.

Linda Evert peered into her cup of coffee and shook her head in dismay over news that the men, according to federal authorities, were part of a militia group that planned to buy explosives and make a deadly toxin to carry out their attacks.

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[Here is the other portion of the article]

TOCCOA, GA (Reuters) – The Waffle House booth often used by three local men arrested in a domestic terror plot was empty on a recent morning but the case that has unnerved this former textile town was on the minds of the breakfast crowd.

Linda Evert peered into her cup of coffee and shook her head in dismay over news that the men, according to federal authorities, were part of a militia group that planned to buy explosives and make a deadly toxin to carry out their attacks.

“Where is all this anger coming from?” said Evert, who noted that one of the accused men once spent an afternoon in her basement repairing electrical sockets. “It’s really kind of creepy, knowing what I know now, that there are people in this town that belong to militias.”

A man sitting at the nearby counter, who wouldn’t give his name, offered a different view.

“I don’t condone violence,” he said without turning his head, “but the militias are not such a bad idea. The founders of our country didn’t trust the government either. And our government now is taking away our rights, one by one.”

A federal indictment returned last week described a murderous plot sounding more like the work of a villain in a James Bond novel than four weather-beaten, aging mountain men.

Toccoa residents Samuel Crump, 68, and Ray Adams, 65, were charged with conspiring to manufacture ricin, a toxin extracted from beans that is fatal if swallowed or inhaled.

Emory Dan Roberts, 67, also of Toccoa, and Frederick Thomas, 73, of nearby Cleveland, were charged with conspiring to possess an unregistered explosive and possession of an unregistered silencer.

While there is widespread revulsion over the accusations made against the four, the seeds of anti-government fervor can still sprout rage and paranoia in this isolated swath of Appalachia 95 miles from Atlanta.

Some people here say they can understand why their fellow residents, however misguided, join extremist movements out of a patriotic reaction to perceived tyranny.

“We’re living in a very negative and angry time,” said David Harris, a technical writer. “Maybe it’s that the great American dream isn’t happening for a lot of people.”

‘HIGHLY ILLEGAL’

All four men remain jailed ahead of a bond hearing scheduled for Wednesday, and none of their attorneys returned calls for comment.

The foursome’s inflammatory words, secretly recorded on tape and relayed back to the government by at least one informant who infiltrated the group, may be the prosecution’s most damning evidence.

There is a reference to Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, and vows to incinerate the buildings that house federal agencies such as the FBI, Internal Revenue Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, considered by militiamen to be their bitterest enemies.

According to the criminal complaint that led to their arrests, the men planned to disperse ricin along interstate highways, killing anyone exposed to it, whether or not the victims were federal employees.

“There is no way for us, as militiamen, to save this country, to save Georgia, without doing something that’s highly, highly illegal: murder,” Thomas was quoted as saying in the complaint.

Largely overlooked before 1995, violent militias became famous overnight after McVeigh, a member of a Michigan militia, set off a bomb that killed 168 people at the federal building in Oklahoma City, a crime for which he was executed.

One expert says she believes the horror of Oklahoma City served only as a temporary setback for the extremists who share McVeigh’s views.

“After the carnage in Oklahoma City, much of the militia activity seemed to subside,” said Eileen Pollack, author of “Breaking and Entering,” a novel about the militia movement. “But I knew the extremists were still out there.”

MIXED IMPRESSIONS

The outskirts of Toccoa, a Cherokee word that means “beautiful,” nearly touch the South Carolina state line. The city of 27,000 people used to be part of America’s textile belt until the industry moved its factories overseas.

On an autumn afternoon last week, the observatory at Toccoa Falls, one of the steepest in the state, teemed with families.

Shielding his eyes from the sky, resident Mack Evans groused to a reporter, “You want to ruin this beautiful day asking about those guys?”

Other visitors derided the men as “weirdoes,” “kooks,” “pot-bellied weekend warriors” and “all-American Osama’s.” Some dismissed the men’s railings against the government as nothing more than bravado.

Those who spoke up for the militias as a bulwark against the power and conspiracy in Washington were careful to draw a distinction between free speech and violence.

“People can see the handwriting on the wall,” said resident Paul Weir, accusing local and national law enforcement of “a Gestapo mentality.”

“It smells like what happened in Germany. Are we going to wait until the horses are all running down the street before we close the barn door?”

If the allegations against the four Georgia men prove true, it will be a stunning outcome in the eyes of Sheila Rayburn.

She said the Adams she knew was the burly man with a long, luminous white beard whom locals often called upon to play Santa at their holiday gatherings.

“He was just perfect, and the children adored him,” she said. “I can’t believe this is the same man who would blow up innocent people.”

(Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Peter Bohan)

Posted on 7 Nov 11 by National Terror Alert

Georgia city adopts sharia-compliant court screening policy

Posted on October 11, 2011 by creeping

…after an expletive-uttering hijabi waged legal jihad on the state. Will it take a bomb or smuggling of some other contraband for common sense to return? via Muslim woman, Douglasville settle lawsuit over her hijab  | ajc.com.

Douglasville has settled a federal lawsuit brought by a woman who was jailed over her Muslim headscarf.

“We think it’s a significant victory for religious freedom,” Azadeh Shahshahani, one of the attorneys representing Lisa Valentine in the case, told the AJC in a phone interview Friday.

“Obviously the manner in which Ms. Valentine was treated was inexcusable and unconstitutional,” said Shahshahani, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia. “We hope that through this settlement, no other people will be subject to this same humiliating treatment Ms. Valentine had to suffer.”

Douglasville agreed to adopt a new court screening policy that allows people with religious head coverings the option of being screened in a private area by a person of the same gender, the ACLU said in a news release. Persons with religious headgear will not be forced to remove them in public and can wear the coverings in court.

That policy mirrors a nonbinding recommendation to local courts made in July 2009 by the Georgia Judicial Council after widespread news reports of the Valentine incident.

Posted on 11 Oct 11 by Creeping Sharia

GEORGIA: Publisher of pro-Islamic text book claims to be getting many online threats

Posted: September 29, 2011 | Author: barenakedislam

Police are looking into a series of online threats made against a Georgia textbook publisher after a parent complained that one of the books promoted Islam and polygamy.

ORIGINAL STORY POSTED AT BNI:
georgia-middle-school-furious-parent-gets-sharia-friendly-curriculum-scrapped

TPM  The controversy began last week when Hal Medlin, the parent of a student at Campbell Middle School in Cobb County, Georgia, complained to the school about an assignment that he said “slanted positively” toward Islam. “Trying to relate this to school uniforms, which was the context they put it into, didn’t make much sense to me,” he told WSB-TV News.

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the part of the assignment in question was called the “letter from Ahlima”:

The assignment by a teacher at Campbell Middle School, which asked students to write on the issue of dress codes, included a fictional two-page letter ostensibly written by a 20-year-old Saudi Arabian woman. In it, the character writes approvingly of wearing the Islamic veil — and of her fiancé’s multiple wives and the superiority of Sharia Law.

The story was picked up by anti-Islam blogger Pamela Geller, which she called “grotesque.” “Misogyny, homicide bombing, Jew hatred, packaged in multi-culti tolerance of Islam, is being spoon fed to our young,” Geller wrote. (This doesn’t look like a death threat, but it is the truth)

And the publisher, InspirEd Educators, complained that a number of other bloggers made “terroristic threats” and that it has “received what the police have classified as hate email and phone calls, and the company and its staff have been threatened and discussed with threatening language on various websites and blogs.” (No threats were posted at BNI)

Local police say they are investigating the threats, which include one blogger’s comment that “there will be a blood bath,” according to WSB-TV.

An official for the publisher defended the lesson: “It’s important for kids to have some empathy for other people in the world. Some people think we’re trying to teach their children to be Muslims, and that could not be more ridiculous.” (A lot of schools are teaching about Islam in the classroom. Your kind of subtle pro-shari’a propaganda is exactly how they do it) 

Posted on 29 Sep 11 by BNI

Georgia Middle School Assignment Depicts ‘Positive’ Aspects of Shariah Law

• Posted on September 26, 2011 by Madeleine Morgenstern

A Georgia middle school adjusted its lessons after a father complained that his daughter’s homework assignment promoted Shariah law.

According to the Marietta Daily Journal, the assignment was supposed to teach students at Campbell Middle School about the pros and cons of school uniforms. It featured a letter from a woman who said she is “proud and happy” to be Muslim and to completely cover herself in public — and also that her husband could take another wife rather than divorce her if their marriage gets rocky:

“My name is Ahlima and I live in Saudi Arabia. … Perhaps two differences Westerners would notice are that women here do not drive cars and they wear abuyah. An abuyah is a loose-fitting black cloth that covers a woman from head to toe. I like wearing the abuyah since it is very comfortable, and I am protected from blowing sand. … I have seen pictures of women in the West and find their dress to be horribly immodest. … Women in the West do not have the protection of the Sharia as we do here. If our marriage has problems, my husband can take another wife rather than divorce me, and I would still be cared for. … I feel very fortunate that we have the Sharia.”

“I thought this was absurd,” parent Hal Medlin said. “[The teacher] was trying to compare Islamic rules of dress and how they compared to school uniforms, which I thought was a stretch. The principal and the [superintendent] agreed with me … but they wouldn’t agree with my premise that it put Islam in a positive light because of the [statements].”

Medlin, who described himself as conservative, found the statements on polygamy particularly egregious: “I understand that some Westerners condemn our practice of polygamy, but I also know they are wrong,” the assignment said.

“It’s promoting or positively depicting their belief that polygamy is fine, if that’s what they believe,” he told WSB-TV. “But I don’t know how you could possibly state that and not have any kind of disclaimer that this is what these people think, but not necessarily what all of us believe.”

Another part of the assignment lists the requirements for women’s clothing according to Islam, including that it cannot resemble the clothing of non-believing women and must protect women from the lustful gaze of men.

It states, “Islam liberated woman over 1,400 years ago. Is it better to dress according to man or God?”

“It represents Islam in a positive manner. That doesn’t offend me as much as the fact that it represents no other religions,” Medlin said. “To me, this material is being used the way it‘s used is like tearing a page out of text book and saying here’s the whole story.”

But Sharon Coletti, the founder of InspirEd Educators and the creator of the material, said she does not understand Medlin’s objection.

“This particular sequence is a two-day social studies lesson. They read this letter and then examine stereotyping. The next lesson is a compare and contrast on the role of women in the Middle East,” she told the Daily Journal. “Yes, the Muslim girl stereotypes Western women, but are there ways we stereotype Muslims? I have no idea what the objection is.”

“It’s important for kids to have some empathy for other people in the world. Some people think we’re trying to teach their children to be Muslims, and that could not be more ridiculous,” she said.

According to the Daily Journal, the teacher has since adjusted the material for the lesson. Dale Gaddis, a district area superintendent, acknowledged that it could have been taught in a better way but did not entirely discount the material.

“Teachers may select materials that aren’t always the best, which is not necessary in this case, but within the adopted materials, they have choices that they can make with how they present certain items,” Gaddis said. “It was in range of the teacher and the course, which had to do with the eastern cultures.”

Posted on 26 Sep 11 by the blaze