On different occasions during 2014, Seattle, Washington resident Mohammad Ali Brown, who had been on the FBI's terrorism watch list, shot to death four young men - three of them in Washington State and one in New Jersey - for what he later confessed to local police was retaliation for American foreign policy in the Middle East. More specifically, his retaliation was in response to the counter-terrorism military campaigning that had taken "all these lives...taken every single day by America, by this government. So a life for a life." According to prosecutors much later, Brown viewed US military intervention in the Islamic world as an "evil" against which he had to act, according to British and American news reporting. It also was later revealed that Brown wrote in his diary that he had planned to follow ISIS and 'learn the way of jihadis' according to prosecutors in New Jersey working one of Brown's terror attacks.
Yet the American government never treated the Brown murders as acts of domestic terrorism as they are calling the Orlando massacre at the gay nightclub. And perhaps because media reporting of the Brown case was so scattered, episodic, and highly localized, most of us have never even heard of it in a way that would have afforded the nation an opportunity to comfort the families of the victims, who also were targeted because they were LGBT. Neither were the families given the benefit of a formal federal declaration as to WHY their loved ones died: the retribution of radical Islam. And lastly, when federal authorities declare an act of terrorism, full investigations tend to unfold for co-conspirators, foreign connections, lessons learned, intelligence failures and so on... Without a terrorism acknowledgement, it's unclear if this case ever prompted such all-important introspective treatment, or more importantly, rolled up other cocked and loaded Islamic extremists.
mo
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/forgotten-other-us-terror-attack-lgbt-todd-bensman
anyway, some black guy was accidentally killed so we'll focus on that for a bit.
