The "real" terrorist enemy.

On the eve of the 10th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, ABC News reported that a secret FBI report "identifies 22 domestic terror organizations as the current subjects of 338 active FBI field investigations." "The Aryan Nations, and other white supremacist groups, are cited in the report for hate crimes, fire bombings, threats via mail, as well as robberies and murders," noted ABC. "The National Alliance, one of the largest neo-Nazi organizations in the world, is subject to 51 investigations alone."

Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University-San Bernardino, insists that neo-Nazis and other "right-wing extremists" (a very elastic category) are "ticking time bombs.... They're in their bedroom accessing bomb-making information on the Net, and accessing hateful rhetoric which empowers them.... The Interact is where law enforcement should be looking, because that is where the next Timothy McVeigh probably is right now."

Actually, given that McVeigh was in the first Gulf War, it's just as reasonable to speculate that the next McVeigh could be stationed in Iraq, learning from the federal government--rather than from the Internet--the crucial killing skills needed to carry out acts of domestic terrorism. It's also worth recalling that federal agencies like the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms had informants and provocateurs planted in the various Aryan/white supremacist groups that played a role in the OKC bombing. (See "Elohim, Terror, and Truth" in our March 31, 1997 issue.) For reasons left unexplained, the Feds did nothing to defuse those "ticking time bombs" in timely fashion, and 168 U.S. citizens died as a result.

For leftist "watchdogs" of Levin's ilk, practically any critic of the federal government should be considered an embryonic Timothy McVeigh. Immediately after 9/11, Levin told the Christian Science Monitor that Osama bin Laden and "Right-wing" critics of the federal government share "a rigid philosophy on how society should be ordered. Both want their own homeland, hermetically sealed, where they can practice their own exclusionary, religion-based social order."

Foreign terrorist threats come and go, but for the leftist "watchdogs" the real enemy is always the same.