Brothers in Terror: Mohamad and Joe

By Ed Raymond
Staff Writer
At 8:46 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, Mohamad Atta flew an American Airlines passenger jet into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, starting an attack that killed 2,996 and wounded 4,763 people from around the world.
At 11:00 a.m. on Feb. 20, 2010, Joe Stack flew his Piper Cherokee PA-28 into an Austin, Texas building housing an Internal Revenue Service office, committing an attack that killed one and wounded thirteen. If I remember, Atta and his cohorts killed people from 88 countries in the Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, with a majority of them American citizens. Joe Stack killed one man and wounded 13, some seriously.

We already categorize Atta and his 18 followers that day as terrorists. But is Joe Stack a terrorist? Stack was primarily a tax protester, sympathetic to the nutty idea that Congress could not legally ratify the 16th Amendment, which allows the federal government to levy income taxes.

Others of his ilk have the nutty idea that paying taxes is strictly voluntary. Other tax protesters have the nutty idea that large groups of Americans are secretly excused from paying taxes. The Southern Poverty Law Center tracks right-wing extremist organizations and has been investigating tax protest groups for fifty years. The Center previously exposed a 1995 plot to blow up the Austin, Texas IRS office.

Stack claimed the federal tax code “stole” his savings and ruined his career as a software developer. He also blamed the now-defunct accounting firm Arthur Anderson for wrecking his business. Arthur Anderson was also blamed for leading “Kenny Boy” Lay and Enron down the bankruptcy path.
Nutcase Joe Wanted a “Church Tax Exemption”
One item in Stack’s background has not been given big play. Years ago he tried to call himself a “minister” and establish a “home” church so he would be tax-exempt. The IRS turned him down flat on this tax dodge–as they should have. We have too many “religious nuts” running around collecting and praying to the Almighty Dollar or rattlesnakes instead of Jesus Christ. We have to remember he also burned his home down before flying his airplane into the IRS office. (Doesn’t every bankrupt tax protester own an airplane?).

A terrorist is a person who is part of a larger cause, not a personal one. They want to attack, kill, and spread terror to a large group.  Scott Roeder, the killer of the late-term abortionist Dr. George Tiller, killed him so that all abortion doctors and assorted assistants would have to work under the constant fear that some other nutcase would put a bullet in their heads. Pro-life groups continue to support murder and attacks on abortion clinics even if abortion has been a legal procedure since Roe vs. Wade 37 years ago. So Scott Roeder is also a terrorist.

Stack was praised by some right-wing wackos in the Tea Party for his short flight. Some even called him a patriot—and a martyr! Stack killed Vernon Hunter, an ordinary guy who served in Vietnam but was not called a hero. His son Ken tried to put his father’s death in perspective: “People say Stack is a patriot. What’s he a patriot for? He hasn’t served the country. My dad did two tours in Vietnam, and this guy is going to be a patriot, and no one is going to say that about my dad??”

In my view, Stack was just another terrorist like Mohamad Atta and the hundreds of suicide bombers who have killed thousands of innocents across the world. I don’t know whether Stack was a “religious” person. When a person tries to tax-dodge his responsibility from helping his society by attempting to dodge taxes with the church tax-exempt scam, somehow he has missed the 2,000 Biblical references to help the poor.
Isn’t It About Time Religions Stop Supporting Terrorists?

Because of the killers in these movements, whether pro-life, political or both, every time a Catholic bishop or Protestant minister leads a howling pack of protesters to harass a clinic and its doctors, nurses, and workers, the pack knowingly brings fear with them. For what purpose? To close the clinic down with fear of the gun or bomb. Why do Muslim clerics encourage parents to supply sons and daughters as suicide bombers to a political cause? How many suicide bombers have been over 25? (How many atheists have donned suicide vests and belts to blow themselves and believers into minute body parts? (I haven’t heard of one.)

“Christians”  always issue press releases expressing sorrow any time an abortion clinic is bombed or a doctor or other worker is killed. Big deal. Most Muslim clerics don’t even bother to issue press releases when suicide bombers, often earning substantial payments for their families, blow innocent men, women, and children into vulture parts for political “victories.”

The Bible forbids suicide. So does the Koran. But both books are “interpretable.” The Koran says: “O ye who believe!...do not kill yourselves, for truly Allah has been to you most merciful. If any do that in rancour and injustice, soon shall We cast him into the fire!” That’s fairly clear, isn’t it? But here’s the wiggle room: “Nor take life–which Allah has made sacred-except for just cause…”  What is a just cause? Aye, there’s the rub. The Prophet Mohammad, according to Muslim clerics, forbids the harming of innocent bystanders in times of war. Supposedly this command includes trees and crops. But here’s the hooker: “Nothing is to be harmed unless the person or thing is actively engaged in an assault against Muslims.” Is a Christian or Jewish baby killed by a suicide bomb in a market “actively engaged” in an assault against Muslims? Hell, any amateur psychologist or Al Queda teenager can get around that one. The sad fact is we have nutcases and crazies aplenty on both sides of the religious–political wars.
Staring Into The Mirror of What We Have Become
New York Times writer Roger Cohen wrote a column called “The Narcissus Society” which, in short, states that we are not only tied up with ourselves, most of us have given up trying to function within a society that is governed by the pluto-corporatocracy that owns all of the politicians.

As an example, isn’t a corporation in a free market accountable to more groups than just its shareholders? Isn’t it accountable to the customers it serves and the workers it employs? But that isn’t true anymore. So many have bought into The Gilded Age-Ronald Reagan-Gordon Gekko theme of “greed is good” that we don’t care what happens to the society around us.

Perhaps we see this more in a Red state where the Arizona Legislature has cut taxes each of the last seven years. It has reached the point where Phoenix is cutting all softball programs for adults and kids although the programs were mainly supported by fees. The city council says it can’t afford to maintain the grounds. Phoenix is closing library branches and limiting hours in the ones that will stay open. The state has closed seven parks and is seriously considering closing all 31 unless they decide to privatize them or simply turn them over to suburbs to operate. The “no-new-taxes” legislature is trying to determine where they will find $2.6 billion to balance the budget. In a sense, as in the Greek Narcissus myth, we seem to have looked into the mirror of water and destroyed ourselves.
So Now We Have Tea Parties, Pee Parties, and Peter Parties
We don’t know how many different kinds of protest groups have formed following the summer eruption of the Tea Party. One branch is the Tea Party because it seems to be more interested in cutting and eliminating taxes than anything else. The original Tea Party folks in Boston objected to paying taxes without representation.  Our new tax protesters salivate over tax cuts or no-new-tax pledges made by irresponsible politicians. This group not only wants to drown all government in a bathtub, it wants to drain the water. 

By putting everything on an Uncle Sam credit card, Republicans have almost succeeded in destroying Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the economic security of the country. By not regulating Wall Street and the bankers, Americans have lost $17.5 trillion of wealth in the last two years. In Phoenix you can buy a 2007 $300,000 home for the 2010 price of $150,000. Over 25 percent of residential property here is underwater.

That is, the mortgage is greater than the present value of the home. People are walking away from property in ever-increasing numbers. We haven’t seen anything yet. Economists say that the commercial property disaster is going to hit us next. Two more banks failed yesterday—with many more to come.

Why didn’t the brilliant geniuses on Wall Street who developed credit default swaps, derivatives, and other financial crap figure out that when a banker provides a loan, somebody down the line actually has to pay off that loan. Seems simple, but greed is blinding. The Lurch administration put two wars costing well over $1 trillion, a prescription drug program estimated at $700 billion, and numerous defense projects on Uncle Sam’s credit card so our grandchildren can pay our debts. The Republicans drowned the government in Anti-Tax Grover Norquist’s bathtub.
But the first protesting Tea Party was eight years late. They watched without comment while the Crawford village idiot added over $7.4 trillion to our national debt and is responsible for $2 trillion more that Obama has to deal with. But all of a sudden they erupted from rural and suburban kitchens and from under rocks to yell, curse, insult, libel, slander, and spit upon the Obama administration faced with deficits created by an utterly incompetent Bush administration. When you have a minute, check why we are $ 12 trillion in the hole.
The Truthers and the Birthers
To summarize the intellectual level of the Arizona Legislature, 40 Republicans have signed on as sponsors to HB 2441, a bill that would require all presidential candidates to prove to the Arizona secretary of state that they are actually U.S. citizens born here. “Birthers” of the Tea Party here believe that Obama was born in Kenya instead of Hawaii, is a socialist-communist-pinko plant, and is a “lying African”, a play on the words “African Lion.”

A letter to the Arizona Republic summed up the attitude of the sane passing through the state: “We just wanted to advise you that we will not be visiting Arizona in the future. After reading that most of your legislators are birthers we have decided you are not smart enough to spend our money for state business. We are so sick of this stupidity.”

A spinoff from the Tea Party is the Pee Party, which is made up of followers of Ronald Reagan, that great budget balancer of the 1980s who never actually accomplished one. These are white people who believe that the trickle-down theory of economics actually works. It all depends what your definition of “trickle” is. In actuality, “trickle” means “tinkle”, meaning the pissants get pissed on by Wall Street and investment bankers, helping to make the rich-poor gap the biggest in the U.S. since the 1929 Crash.

A group of real nutcases make up the third major group associated with the Tea Party. This is what I call the Peter Party, made up of those who have to carry and expose guns in public for enhancement of their smallest physical attribute. What are these idiots thinking of when they walk around with .357s, .45s, and Glocks in tie-down holsters in bars, libraries, churches, and political events? Why did Matt Dillon force all gunslingers to hang them up or stay out of Dodge?

If you want to carry guns, volunteer for Iraq and Afghanistan. Then you will be ready to perform at any time, even way beyond 36 hours. (I wonder if they have to remove their holstered guns every four hours.)

Americans for Prosperity and Dick Armey’s Freedom Works, funded by the wealthy, right-wing Koch family, Metlife, Phillip Morris, and the Scaife family, are trying to take over the Tea Party groups.

It’s possible that Sarah Palin may be one of the most pragmatic of this whole bunch. She’s in it for celebrity money, like Bernie Maddoff and Willie Sutton. Actually, she is just another George Bush except for different parts. She may be just a little smarter than poor George, but like him, has never made a real effort to know anything. Certainly never enough to ever govern anybody else.

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