Why is FBI Manufacturing Reasons to Arrest Occupy Protesters, Ignoring White Supremacist Violence

[limpyhobbler]

By Natasha Lennard

Writing in Rolling Stone this week, Rick Perlstein looks at how the FBI regularly entraps and creates “terrorists” out of anarchists and activists, while comparatively ignoring violent white supremacist groups.

Using some recent examples, Perlstein paints a startling picture. He notes the arrest this month of a small group of self-identified anarchists, participating in Occupy Cleveland, who — strung along in an FBI sting — planned to blow up a large Ohio bridge. The target was suggested and (fake) C-4 explosives were provided by an FBI infiltrator. As Perlstein put it, the episode was one among numerous law enforcement schemes since 2001 in which “the alleged terrorist masterminds end up seeming, when the full story comes out, unable to terrorize their way out of a paper bag without law enforcement tutelage.”

Perlstein contrasts the Ohio arrestees with another recently arrested group: The American Front, a “known terrorist group” of Florida-based white supremacists who — without FBI encouragement — “took a break from training with machine guns for a race war in order to fashion weapons out of fake ‘Occupy’ signs which they planned to use to assault May Day protesters in Melbourne, Florida.” While anarchists, animal rights activists and Muslims pass muster as federal targets, organized hate groups do not.

...snip...

Perlstein notes that “the State is singling out ideological enemies” – and if federal sting targets are much to go by, the State’s position is clear: anti-capitalists, environmentalists and Muslims are threats; racists are not. We can respond by decrying FBI activity, and by arguing that their targets are not real threats. Or, we can take patterns of FBI activity more seriously and ask why anti-capitalists are more threatening than white supremacists. This line of questioning can likely be reduced to two questions, chanted again and again up and down the country when protest front lines are faced with lines of police: “Who do you protect? Who do you serve?”

http://www.alternet.org/rights/155495/why_is_the_fbi_manufacturing_reasons_to_arrest_occupy_protesters_while_ignoring_white_supremacist_violence_?page=entire

[aquart]

1. Tradition!

[TBF]

3. Truer than folks realize ...

Palmer Raids

The Palmer Raids were attempts by the United States Department of Justice to arrest and deport radical leftists, especially anarchists, from the United States. The raids and arrests occurred in November 1919 and January 1920 under the leadership of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Though more than 500 foreign citizens were deported, including a number of prominent leftist leaders, Palmer's efforts were largely frustrated by officials at the U.S. Department of Labor who had responsibility for deportations and who objected to Palmer's methods. The Palmer Raids occurred in the larger context of the Red Scare, the term given to fear of and reaction against political radicals in the U.S. in the years immediately following World War I ....

More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Raids

[aquart]

5. My grandpa went into hiding during the Palmer Raids.

He came in illegally through Canada, I think. FBI tried to toss him in the fifties. My uncle actually got his FBI file and they wasted a whole lot of time in surveillance of a minor red writer who couldn't resist women.

[TBF]

6. Interesting

I wouldn't be surprised if there is still alot of those files being kept. The Palmer DOJ of course functioned during the reign of a democratic president ... it doesn't just happen during the repug times (although the Patriot Act is a new low and that we can blame on GWB).

[scribble]

2. Oklanomans ...

... should be first in line to insist that white supremacists be investigated, considering the Oklahoma City bombing.

It is fascinating to me, that the FBI has almost completely ignored the white supremacist links to Timothy McVey (sp) and his cohorts. When they refuse to investigate these obvious suspects, they are just not keeping us safe.

This bombing is my Conservative irrationality benchmark: This is how far ideological Conservatives will go, to ignore reality when it comes to their own town and kills over three hundred of them in a terrorist attack. Oklahoma is apparently full of people like this, and the FBI apparently is full of people like this, too.

sc

[NC_Nurse]

4. Because they are more of a threat to entrenched interests. Most people can't relate to RW militants,

but Occupiers have struck a nerve. The 1% and big corporations are nervous about them.

[DLevine]

7. Bingo. n/t