"Jewish terrorists get off light in US. Why don't these terrorists get shipped to Gitmo? Why did Professor Sami Al-Arian get into more trouble for what he SAID (thought crimes!) than these people got into for what they actually DID? Do we have two sets of laws? One for Muslims and one for Jews?" Our comment: What makes a "nominal Jew" a murderous Jewish fanatic? Probably the fact -- like so many -- that his "Jewishness" and attendant Judeocentric victim obsessions were never really "nominal." Also, central to this story is the omnipresent dual standard -- one for Jews, and a stricter one for non-Jews, a foundation that has been an enforced by the Jewish Lobby and become an intrical part of modern Judeocentric society in the West.
THE DR. ROBERT J. GOLDSTEIN STORY. A Question of Balance,
Court TV's Crime Library, February 2005
"It sounded like a testosterone-fueled fantasy, the kind of bizarre imaginary world of feverish mayhem that might be embraced by some teenaged video gamer, as the Jewish newsweekly The Forward put it, or perhaps the ranting of a pudgy little nebbish of a man who had read one too many Tom Clancy novels. Instead, it was the stark and darkly disturbing details contained in federal court documents charging the Pinellas County podiatrist, along with his wife and a close friend and confidant, a dentist by training, with a raft of federal crimes. 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 [Robert] 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. On June 19, 2003, Goldstein, a nominal Jew by all accounts, was sentenced to 12 years and seven months in federal prison after pleading guilty to charges of conspiracy to violate civil rights, plotting to damage a religious facility and unlawful possession of firearms. A week earlier, his non-Jewish ex-wife, who now goes by her maiden name, Persinger, was sentenced to three years for possession of illegal bombs that her husband had hidden in the bedroom closet of their posh Seminole townhouse. In May of that year, Michael Hardee, a 50-year-old dentist, was also sentenced to three years and five months for his part in the conspiracy. Although the bizarre case, which received little attention outside Florida, has run its course in the federal court system, nagging questions still remain. Among them, The Forward posed these: "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? ... There was a similar case in 1997 involving Harry Shapiro, a Kosher butcher from the similarly assimilated city of Jacksonville. Shapiro was sentenced to 10 years in prison for a 1997 plot to bomb a conservative synagogue to prevent former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres from speaking there ... Nor did Goldstein personally stand out as a particularly nationalistic Jew. In fact, as fellow physicians told the BBC not long after Goldstein's arrest, the nondescript little doctor didn't really stand out at all. As the Associated Press reported in a March 2, 2003, story on the arrest, friends and neighbors generally regarded Goldstein as "a regular guy who manned a suburban podiatry practice and tooled around in a black Porsche Boxter," purchased with the proceeds of his $144,000-a-year practice ...When police arrived, they found Kristi Goldstein outside the couple's townhouse, visibly agitated, declaring that her husband had threatened again to kill her and that he was holed-up inside with a large cache of weapons. The authorities responded with restraint. For 30 minutes, police calmly tried to coax the podiatrist out of his fortress-like townhouse, a place he had booby trapped, secured with what the BBC described as "trip wires and scanned by security cameras." Finally, Goldstein surrendered, and his wife, still upset, gave police permission to search the townhouse. What they found was mind-boggling, even by the standards of weapon-friendly central Florida. The way prosecutors later described the scene, they found a staggering arsenal of weapons, nearly 40 properly licensed guns including revolvers, a 50-caliber sniper rifle, and semi-automatic assault weapons, enough to outfit a platoon of commandos. There were armor-piercing rockets, 25,000 rounds of ammunition and homemade napalm. There was a stash of explosives as well; hand grenades, a five-gallon "gasoline bomb" with a timer attached, and a significant amount of homemade C4, a powerful plastic explosive. In all, there were more than two-dozen bombs crammed into the cozy townhouse, four of them stuffed into the Goldstein's bedroom closet. It was a large enough cache of explosives that it could easily have leveled the townhouse and beyond, if Goldstein had decided to push the plunger, an agent for the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms said. What's more, Goldstein had also collected the components for making many more, not to mention the sizable library of how-to manuals and bomb making recipes he had amassed ... The truth was the guns were the tip of iceberg. In addition to the weapons and the explosives, authorities discovered a list of 50 local mosques and Islamic centers, along with what would come to be known as Goldstein's "mission template," an 11-point, three-page plan detailing the plans for his attack. By the time of his arrest, Goldstein had chosen his target from the list of 50. It was to be the Islamic Society of Pinellas County Mosque and Cultural Center ... Goldstein, who had never been a particularly observant Jew, had suddenly found himself swept up in a wave of cultural fervor and was prepared to become a soldier of solidarity with the victims of terrorism in Israel. According to the Associated Press, Goldstein "wanted to make a statement for 'his people' because of ongoing hostilities between Israel and the Palestinians in the Middle East. ... There was, [Goldstein's lawyer Myles] Malman said, no question that Goldstein planned to destroy the mosque and community center the "physical building" as Malman put it. But Malman said he was convinced that the rest of the plan, the detailed plot to gun down or knife victims as they ran for their lives, was all a fantasy. "He never actually planned to do that," Malman insists ... Goldstein's plan, prosecutors were quoted as saying at the time, involved "real people, real locations, real bombs." His target was not an individual Muslim, but "an entire population of people" ... The question arises: If prosecutors really were as convinced as they claimed that Goldstein was not only a legitimate threat to an innocent group of people, but that he was motivated by political and ethnic feelings, why, particularly after the events of 9-11, was he not charged with terrorism? ... Goldstein himself, the architect of the conspiracy and a self-styled Rambo, was sentenced, after he finally entered a guilty plea in April 2003, to 12 years and seven months in federal prison. To members of the local Islamic community in Pinellas County and beyond, the comparatively lenient treatment that Goldstein and the other defendants received smacked of a double standard. It was, they said, unimaginable that despite the vast array of weapons seized, despite the damning documents, federal authorities decided not to level terrorism charges after Goldstein pleaded guilty only to possessing the bombs. Even before the verdict was handed down, that sparked a burning controversy in Florida. Ahmed Bedier, a spokesman for the local chapter of the Council for American Islamic Relations and a regular worshipper at the targeted mosque, told The Forward that he wondered whether federal prosecutors would have been more inclined to prosecute Goldstein and his accomplices under terrorism statutes a move which would have doubled their sentences if they had been Muslim. "That's the question we've been asking all along," says Bedier. "His acts fit the definition of terrorism regardless of who's committing it." In fact, Bedier contends, there are many in the Muslim community in Florida who noted with bitter irony a marked difference between the way federal prosecutors handled the Goldstein case and the way the feds handled another alleged ethnically motivated plot, the case of 20-year-old Imran Mandhai, of Hollywood, who was charged under terrorism statutes in 2002 after authorities determined that he was plotting to blow up a National Guard Armory and a power station. As in Goldstein's case, Mandhai had concocted his plot as part of an ethnic and politically motivated paramilitary campaign, authorities alleged. In the Mandhai case, authorities claimed that the goal was to trigger a jihad, and in October 2002, Mandhai was sentenced to 11 years and eight months. In fact, that sentence was a disappointment for federal prosecutors, however, who had hoped to use the sentencing guidelines contained in the terrorism statute to send Mandhai to prison for up to 191-anda-half years."
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