The plotting terrorist didn’t really expect to use the guns or the knife. “Hand to hand combat is unlikely,” he noted in his handwritten plans. The way he figured it, the bombs would be enough. Over the past several months, the terrorist had hoarded enough C4, constructed enough homemade explosives and brewed up enough kitchen-counter napalm to bring the building to the ground in an earth-shattering, apocalyptic storm of fire and death.

Yes, some hate crimes are more equal than others. Specifically, hate crimes perpetrated by nice Jewish podiatrists and dentists plotting to kill Muslims are more equal.

It is a matter of some consternation to the Muslim community of central
Florida that Goldstein and his two accomplices had gotten off comparatively lightly for their parts in what even prosecutors acknowledge was a hate-driven plot to murder perhaps scores of innocent people. None of the trio, not even Goldstein, the architect of the plan, were charged under terrorism statutes, or for that matter, under hate crime statutes.

It is no small irony, some Muslim leaders have said, that at a time when some in government had claimed a right since restricted by the U.S. Supreme Court to designate some accused plotters as terrorists, and to hold them for years if deemed necessary without ever filing formal charges against them, all three admitted conspirators in the Goldstein case received speedy hearings and comparatively lenient sentences.

And it goes without saying that if any of the conspirators know what Gitmo looks like, it’s from that article Vanity Fair did a few months back.

From the Jewish newsweekly The Forward, via Crime Library:

“What led Goldstein, by all accounts an assimilated Jew, intermarried and living in what, according to a 1999 study by geographer Dr. Ira Sheskin of the University of Miami, is a typically assimilated Jewish community, a place where Christmas trees are not uncommon in nominally Jewish households, where the intermarriage rate is slightly higher than in many places, and where anti-Semitism is no more rabid than anywhere else in Florida, to take up arms as a self appointed avenger of the terrorist attacks of September 11 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon? What made this peripheral member of an average Jewish community decide to plot what has been described as a terrorist attack to make a statement ‘for his people’? Even more troubling is this question: Was Goldstein a terrorist, and if so, was he treated differently than he would have been had he been an Arab or Muslim accused of a similar offense?”