An unnamed suspect attempted to destroy a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) facility in Meridian, Idaho, yesterday.
The would-be terrorist stole an ambulance and attempted to set it ablaze at a leased office in the city and fled the scene before cops could arrest him.
The attempted arson is one of a number of attacks on DHS facilities that leftists justify by claiming that destroying property is not violence.
News Conference
Police chief Tracy Basterrechea described the crime at a presser, noting that some information would not be released to protect the investigation into the attempted terror attack.
At about 11:10 p.m., the suspect stole a Canyon County Paramedics ambulance from a bay at St. Luke’s Meridian Medical Center. So far, investigators believe “the suspect drove the ambulance north through the parking lot and retrieved gas cans that had been staged in nearby vegetation,” Basterrechea said:
The suspect then drove the ambulance directly into the North Portico building, which houses Department of Homeland Security offices. Investigators believe the suspect poured an accelerant inside and around the outside of the ambulance.
Responding authorities apparently scared the suspect off before he could set the ambulance ablaze.
Basterrechea then attacked the propaganda that leftists broadcast to justify the destruction of property.
“We want to emphasize that this was a serious criminal act,” the chief said:
The theft and destruction of an emergency vehicle not only created risk to responding personnel, but it also temporarily removed a critical medical resource from the community.
There has been a lot of rhetoric surrounding the Department of Homeland Security leasing office space at this location, and comments in some social media, such as property damage isn’t violence, is absolutely false. This was absolutely an act of violence, and if the suspect had not been interrupted, there is no doubt this building would have been burned, putting the lives of first responders and others at risk.
Leftists: Property Destruction Not Violence
The claim that wrecking or destroying property is not violence surfaced during the nationwide George Floyd Hoax riots that caused between $1 billion and $2 billion in damage for which insurance companies paid claims. The destruction was the most expensive in American history, Axios reported.
As National Review’s Rich Lowry explained in an opinion piece at the time, prominent voices were happy to see cars and buildings either vandalized or destroyed by arson.
“The inventive, but completely absurd contention is that the destruction of property doesn’t qualify as violence, and, at the end of the day, isn’t such a bad thing, maybe even a salutary thing,” Lowry wrote.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, the bright bulb behind The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which passed off fake history as truth, offered this ridiculous claim:
Violence is when an agent of the state kneels on a man’s neck until all of the life is leached out of his body. Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence. To use the same language to describe those two things is not moral.
And David Remnick, the leftist editor of The New Yorker, “favorably quoted a co-founder of Black Lives Matter Global Network, who explained, ‘We don’t have time to finger-wag at protesters about property. That can be rebuilt. Target will reopen.’” Lowry observed:
An article in Current Affairs argued that applying the word “violence” to the destruction of property risks “making the term conceptually incoherent and — much more important — conflating acts that do very serious physical harm to people with acts that have not physically harmed anyone.”
As graffiti on a building in Minneapolis put it, “Merchandise can be replaced. Black lives can not.”
The police chief in Meridian does not agree. And as he suggested, falsely claiming that arson is not violence promotes it among the easily persuaded, as do the claims from top Democrats that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are Nazis and terrorists.
Other Insurrectionary Attacks
The facility in Meridian isn’t the first DHS facility to be attacked, and it won’t be the last.
Leftists have targeted two Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities in Texas.
On July 4, a cadre of Antifa terrorists attacked the facility in Prairieland, Texas. In October, a federal grand jury in the Northern District of Texas indicted two of the 11 individuals charged in the attack. That indictment was the first from the Department of Justice that fingered Antifa — a motley collection of deranged far-left goons and lunatics who have been waging war on ICE.
The seven-count indictment charges Cameron Arnold and Zachary Evetts with one count of material assistance to terrorists, three counts of attempted murder, and three counts of discharging a firearm to further a violent crime. One of the defendants in that attack is a former U.S. Marine.
On September 22, President Donald Trump designated Antifa as a domestic terrorist group.
On September 24, Joshua Jahn attempted the mass murder of ICE agents at their facility in Dallas. Firing with a rifle from a nearby rooftop, Jahn did not hit an agent, but did murder two illegal aliens before he turned the gun on himself. He had written anti-ICE messages on the bullet casings.
Last month, federal authorities charged a far-left loon in Oklahoma with threatening to murder ICE agents.
As well, officials have arrested multiple illegals for soliciting the murder of ICE and other federal agents. The drug cartels have created a three-tiered program of reward for information about or killing them.
Top DHS officials have repeatedly called upon top Democrats to stop vilifying ICE and other federal agents.
