Were Snipers Homegrown or Al-Qaeda?
By Doug Patton
October 28, 2002

Ever since the capture of suspected snipers John Allen Mohammad and John Lee Malvo, Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. law enforcement authorities and the national media have gone out of their way to assure the public that the pair has "no known association with al-Qaeda or any other terrorist organization."

That may be true, but I doubt it, and so does the Rev. Al Archer, Director of the Lighthouse Mission in Bellingham, Washington, where Mohammad stayed for a time. Rev. Archer thought that it was rather suspicious for a homeless man staying in a mission to receive phone calls from travel agents and then take off on flights to places like Denver, New Orleans and the Cayman Islands.

"At the mission, not many airline agents call and ask for residents," Rev. Archer said after Mohammad was arrested. "I felt like he was part of an organization. I felt like he had some connection with terrorists. I said, 'he's got connections somewhere with somebody who's got money.'"

How was John Mohammad, homeless and with no visible means of support, able to be so mobile? Who was he visiting and why? Who was financing his little junkets? Was it al-Qaeda, or was it someone in Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, where John Allen Williams heard the doctrine that turned him into John Allen Mohammad?

Let us suppose for a moment that Mohammad was not associated with any terrorist organization. Let us suppose that he and his young accomplice were, in fact, working alone. Is America supposed to be encouraged by that news? Anyone paying any attention for the last year knows that there are al-Qaeda cells among us. We have an enemy living in our midst, capable of killing Americans at any moment. That fact is frightening enough.

But if, as we are being told, these two snipers are not working for or with any other person or organization, then the only alternative is that they are a new, homegrown variety of terrorist. That is an infinitely more frightening possibility, because it means that extremists espousing the tenets of this so-called "peaceful religion" have so inspired an American veteran of the Persian Gulf War that he has turned against his own country?

And if Williams/Mohammad can be so inspired to hate, then how many others are there, disgruntled, unbalanced, sitting in jail or being trained within our own military, filling their lives with loathing toward their country, waiting for the opportunity to strike out at innocent Americans?

If I were charged with the task of terrorizing Americans and simultaneously creating an environment that restricts their Constitutional rights, I can think of nothing more effective than the disruption caused by these snipers. Because of these shootings, people reoriented their lives over the last several weeks.

At the same time, a clamor is being heard in Washington for more gun control. It comes from the same demagogues who seize every conceivable opportunity to restrict our 2nd Amendment rights while ignoring the fact that this happened in the area of the country with the most stringent gun laws.

Consider that when the snipers showed up in the D.C. area, they were already armed and ready to strike. The innocent citizens of the area, however, could not have bought a gun for self-defense without first jumping through a whole lot of government hoops. In fact, within the Washington, D.C. city limits, it is illegal to even own a handgun.

Al-Qaeda or home grown? Inspired by extremists or sprung from the depravity of the human condition? Neither is an encouraging thought.

Once, the doctrine of International Communism was the connecting force for a network of ideological misfits around the world. Today, it is extremist Islam that inspires them, and their target is the same: America.