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Trump’s Refusal to Acknowledge Far-Right Extremism Isn’t Just Wrong — It’s Dangerous [PSMag.com]

 

In April of 2015, Robert Doggart was arrested for allegedly planning to destroy a mosque in the town of Islamberg, New York. While he lacked weapons, the New York Daily News reports that Doggart “allegedly went on right-wing online forums and openly talked about using AR-15 assault rifles to attack Muslims because he believed the small upstate community was an extremist training camp.” Despite Doggart’s convictions, there is no evidence to suggest that Islamberg, a Muslim-majority community founded in the 1980s, has ever harbored terrorism. It was Doggart’s Internet activity that led to his arrest by New York law enforcement.

But Doggart, a 65-year-old Tennessee man, isn’t necessarily classified as a terrorist in the eyes of the law.

While Doggart was found guilty on Thursday of planning to attack Islamberg (the charges included “one count of solicitation to commit a civil rights violation, one count to commit arson of a building, and two counts of threat in interstate commerce”), he escaped without being branded as a domestic terrorist. The Daily News reports that he’ll escape terror charges thanks to “a gap in the law,” as attorney Tahirah Amatul-Wadud told the paper: “[T]here is nothing on terrorism unless it’s connected to a foreign element. You won’t see the KKK charged with domestic terror even though that’s what they do.”



[For more of this story, written by Jared Keller, go to https://psmag.com/trumps-refus...0af4c2575#.stu67ecp3]

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