"A Milwaukee man wanted to storm a Masonic temple with a machine gun and kill at least 30 people in an attack he hoped would show 'nobody can play with Muslims' and spark more mass shootings in the United States, federal agents said Tuesday after the man's arrest.
"Federal prosecutors charged 23-year-old Samy Mohamed Hamzeh with unlawfully possessing a machine gun and receiving and possessing firearms not registered to him. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney, Dean Puschnig, didn't immediately respond to a question asking why charges were limited to gun possession. Hamzeh's attorney, federal defender Ronnie Murray, didn't immediately return email and voicemail messages left after business hours.
"According to an FBI affidavit, agents were tipped off in September that Hamzeh planned to travel to Israel in October to attack Israeli soldiers and citizens in the West Bank. He abandoned those plans due to 'family, financial and logistic reasons,' the affidavit said, but refocused his efforts on a domestic attack.
"Hamzeh discussed his plans extensively with two FBI informants. The affidavit said the FBI started recording his conversations with the informants in October.
"Hamzeh and the two informants traveled to a gun range on Jan. 19 and practiced with a pistol. Afterward they took a tour of a Masonic temple in Milwaukee. The affidavit does not name the temple and Puschnig declined to identify it [...].
"Federal agents said that on Jan. 19 and into the early morning of Jan. 20, Hamzeh discussed his plans to attack the temple with the informants, telling them they needed two more machine guns — the group apparently already had one — and silencers. They planned to station one person at the temple's entrance while the other two went through the building, killing everyone they saw. They then planned to walk away from the scene as if nothing had happened."
To read the entire article, click HERE.
Angel Millar, author of the 2015 book The Crescent and the Compass: Islam, Freemasonry, Esotericism and Revolutions in the Modern Age, wrote the following analysis of this incident in a 1-27-16 article entitled "Understanding the Milwaukee Masonic Lodge Attempted Mass Shooting":
"I have already seen disbelief expressed by Freemasons that a Masonic
building would be targeted for what, by any standard, appears to be a
terrorist attack. However, there is both a long history of Jihadist
anti-Masonic propaganda, and attempts to attack Masonic buildings.
"The most successful attack so far came in 2004, when two Jihadist terrorists entered a Masonic building in Istanbul, Turkey,
and sprayed it with bullets. They then exploded several devices that
they had strapped to their bodies. However, one of the terrorist’s bombs
failed to detonate properly. Six people were injured, and a waiter was
killed, along with one of the terrorists.
"(CNN-Turk showed the surviving attacker being taken into hospital, shouting out 'damn Israel.' Notably, anti-Freemasonry is intimately tied with antisemitism in Jihadist ideology.)
"According to Istanbul’s governor Muammer Guler, eighteen suspects were
questioned after the attack, ten of which had been formally charged at
the time of his announcement. The bombers had been trained in Pakistan
and Afghanistan. 'We don’t know if they are al Qaeda camps,' Guler said, 'but the influence of al Qaeda in those camps is obvious.'
"In 2009, Syed Haris Ahmed was found guilty of making 'casing videos' of potential terror targets in the USA. One of the targets was a Masonic building in northern Virginia.
"Since it has never been mentioned publicly, I won’t give away too many
details, except to say that when I visited a Masonic building in 2002 I
was met with nervous-looking security guards at the entrance, and had to
be escorted around inside. When I asked ‘why?’ I was told that three 'Muslim gentlemen' had been found wandering the building, taking photos, and talking on a
cellphone. The call was later traced, by police, I was told, to a shop
selling Islamist anti-Masonic propaganda videos."
To read Millar's entire article, click HERE.
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