April 15, 2009
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American Media — Stereotyping Again, Are We Now?
Last time I checked, most of our military men and women in Texas are Hispanic. I’d like to see how the KKK would take to having military right-wing “extremists” join their ranks. Get a grip, Washington Post. Look outside of your asshole, to see who is actually in the military these days. Maybe if you reporters actually served your country, instead of being so self-serving, you’d know who is in the military. And the FBI warns that a miniscule number of these military men are white and extremist. If one actually checked the statistics, (isn’t that a newspaper researcher’s JOB?), I’m betting that the percentage is comparable to that of the general population — which is to be expected in a volunteer military. Duh!
Federal agency warns of radicals on right Ms. Kuban said she did not know how long the new report had been in the making.
“The purpose of the report is to identify risk. This is nothing unusual,” said Ms. Kuban, who added that the Homeland Security Department did this “to prevent another Tim McVeigh from ever happening again.”
The Homeland Security assessment specifically says that “rightwing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to exploit their skills and knowledge derived from military training and combat.”
Jerry Newberry, director of communications for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, said the vast majority of veterans are patriotic citizens who would not join anti-government militias.
“As far as our military members go, I think that the military is a melting pot of society. So you might get a few, a fractional few, who are going to be attracted by militia groups and other right-wing extremists,” he said.
“We have to remember that the people serving in our military are volunteers, they do it because they love their country, and they believe in what our country stands for,” he said. “They spent their time in the military defending our Constitution, so the vast majority of them would be repulsed by the hate groups discussed in this report.”
The Homeland Security report cited a 2008 FBI report that noted that a small number of returning military veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have joined extremist groups.
The FBI report said that from October 2001 through May 2008 “a minuscule” number of veterans, 203 out of 23,000, had joined groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, the National Socialist Movement, the Creativity Movement, the National Alliance and some skinhead groups.
“Although the white supremacist movement is of concern to the FBI, our assessment shows that only a very small number of people with prior military experience may have an affiliation with supremacist groups,” FBI spokesman Richard Kolko said Monday when asked about the FBI report.
A 2006 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that monitors white supremacists like the Klan, said that white-power groups had an interest in the kind of training the military provides.
from http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/apr/14/federal-agency-warns-of-radicals-on-right/?page=3
