On Sunday May 30, 2009, in Wichita, Kansas, Dr George Tiller, a specialist in late-term abortion procedures, was murdered in the foyer of his church during a service.
On Monday, June 1, 2009, in Little Rock, Arkansas, Private William Long was murdered and Private Quinton Ezeagwula was wounded outside a military recruiting station.
Dr. Tiller’s ‘suspected’ murderer, 51-year old Scott Roeder, faces “possible first-degree murder charges, according to the Kansas City sheriff’s department.”
Private William Long’s ‘suspected’ murderer is 23-year old Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad (formerly known as Carlos Leon Bledsoe). Muhammad was apparently being investigated by the FBI’s Joint Terrorist Task Force since his return from Yemen (after his religious conversion).
Muhammad was “not part of a larger group or part of a conspiracy” (according to Lt. Col. Thomas F. Artis of the Oklahoma City Recruiting Battalion) but was nonetheless driven by “political and religious motives” (according to the Little Rock police) and will be charged with capital murder and 16 counts of committing a terroristic act.
So Scott Roeder is facing one count of murder (and two counts of aggravated assault) whilst Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad/Carlos Bledsoe is being charged with murder and sixteen counts of terrorism?
In 1996, when Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad was 11 year-old Carlos Leon Bledsoe, Scott Roeder was a 38 year-old member of the anti-government Freemen group and was charged in Topeka for having bomb components in his car (for which he served 16 months in jail and 8 months on probation before the conviction was overturned on appeal due to issues with the search of his car).
Roeder was known to Morris Wilson, a commander of the Kansas Unorganized Citizens Militia in the mid-1990s, who said “I’d say he’s a good ol’ boy, except he was just so fanatic about abortion. He was always talking about how awful abortion was.”
According to CNN, Roeder’s associates describe him as a regular participant in anti-abortion demonstrations in Kansas City and Wichita—a characterization corroborated by one worker at the Kansas City Central Family Medicine clinic, who said that Roeder was “hard to miss” because of his height. Roeder had been interrupted several times trying to disable the locks of the clinic with epoxy, but was never convicted. Another employee of the clinic memorized Roeder’s license plate number.
Roeder has spent at least the last 8 years physically interfering with Dr Tiller’s legal and medically necessary practice with the explicit or tacit support of a network of “pro-life” religious organizations that have been pandered-to and encouraged-by the GOP, the Catholic Church and influential media personalities who have been calling abortion providers “mass-murderers” for the past 30 years or more.
And then, convinced of his ‘moral’ duties Roeder succeeded in killing Dr Tiller where others before him had failed.
Over the past 8 years Carlos Bledsoe, along with a growing number of Americans that has become a majority in the past two years, apparently became aware of the constant killing, mass arbitrary incarceration and torture of non-Christian human beings—babies, children, women and men—by a US military under orders from a wholly Republican and Christian government; and presumably convinced of his own ‘moral duty’ decided to side with the Muslim faith and then ‘protest’ by murdering a new Army recruit as blameless as anyone for the actions of the organization he’d just joined.
Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad/Carlos Bledsoe apparently acted on his own volition and without any 30 year-long explicit or implicit support from issue-specific organizations propped-up by a major political party, or exhorted to action by any media personalities with long standing social and business relationships with the same.
Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad appears to have been driven to an act of murder solely by the brief evolution of private personal convictions.