Four arrested for New Year's Eve bombing plot.

 

The FBI announcing the arrests in front of pictures of the suspects. Fox News/AP.

A plot involving a terrorist threat on New Year's Eve has been disrupted by the FBI. Fox News. Four suspects were arrested and they were members of the far left Turtle Island Liberation Front (TILF) group. The group is anti-capitalist, anti-colonialism and pro-Palestinian. The four members had begun building bombs and had a plot to target several locations in Los Angeles. A fifth member of TILF was arrested in New Orleans for a separate plot. The targets were Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents as well as US companies. The attacks were to occur on New Year's Eve to maximize the impact of the attacks and hamper response. 

My Comment:

Most media is calling these people pro-Palestinian. This is true but it wasn't a primary motivation. These people are far-left loons, they believe they are anti-capitalist and anti-colonialism. Along with "free Palestine" they also said "free Puerto Rico" and, even more puzzlingly, "free Hawaii". These are left wing accelerationists, they want the system to fall through violence so they can have their left wing utopia afterwards. 

That is, quite frankly, insane. Bombing campaigns are not going to  rally support to left wing causes. Indeed, it is likely to do the exact opposite. Had this plot succeeded it would have turned a lot of people against the far left, even considering how many people are against them in the first place. 

Their ideology is incomprehensible to me, largely because I have always thought he colonialism narrative was always nonsensical. People have been conquering territory for as long as there have been people. That hardly means that the conquering people are uniquely evil, or that the conquered are somehow morally correct no matter what. They are all just people and there were good and bad people on both sides. The extreme black on white thinking is not at all related to reality. And I think the whole thing is just rooted in racism. 

How serious was this threat? I'd say it was a serious threat. The suspects had started to make explosives and while there was a real chance that their home made bombs wouldn't even work, it's very possible that the backpack pipebombs they were trying to make would have worked. And they were going for actual casualties, they wanted ICE agents to die and I think there was at least a chance that they would have been able to pull it off. 

They made the classic terrorist scumbag mistake and that was letting the FBI infiltrate them. The FBI had an informant in their organization and they were able to detect and prevent this plot. It's unclear how advanced their bomb making and weapons collection would have gotten if they hadn't been infiltrated. It's always hard to tell if these folks were actually competent except when it came to detecting the FBI or if they just morons that never would have been a threat anyways. 

Either way, it's another example of the left wing going nuts and it comes at a fairly disturbing time. We did just have the shooting at Brown University which may have been a left wing attack as well. And, of course, the Bondi Beach shooting I covered yesterday. That one was radical Islam, but given that these guys were pro-Palestinian too, it's another example of how one minor war in the Middle East really stirred up the crazies.