Georgia Patriot Plants Fake 'Muslim' Bomb To Warn World Of Muslim Threat

A Georgia wingnut has confessed to planting a backpack containing two partially completed pipe bombs in a public park last November, but he had an excellent reason: to raise awareness of the threat of radical Islam. Michael Sibley, 67, loves America so much that he was willing to fake a jihadist bomb attack, there not being any actual jihadis handy at the time.

Sibley left the backpack along a hiking trail on U.S. Park Service land in Vickery Creek Park in Roswell, Georgia, where it was found Nov. 4 by a woman hiking with her daughter. A bomb squad destroyed the backpack and the explosives at the site.

To add a touch of authenticity to his consciousness-raising exercise, Sibley left a bunch of cool stuff in the backpack: a Koran and a book called The Rape of Kuwait , so everyone would know it was a Muslim plot. In addition, he "wrote the name, ‘Mina Khodari,’ in the backpack because it looked foreign,” according to court documents. Protip to patriotic copycats seeking to fake an attack: real Islamic radicals would not blow up a Koran, though they would probably kill someone who did. Also, The Rape of Kuwait is a 1991 bit of agitprop about alleged Iraqi atrocities in that country before the first Gulf War, and was used to justify Operation Desert Storm. It's about as likely to be on a jihadi's reading list as The Big Book of Kosher Cooking. 

Also, to suggest additional attacks were on the way, Sibley tossed in a copy of the Atlanta Falcons' football schedule and a list of other potential targets, like hospitals, schools, and several Jewish "targets" in the Atlanta area. Your smarter terrorists would probably hold on to such a list for their own use, but maybe Sibley was role-playing an absentminded terrorist (soon to be a major motion picture starring Will Ferrell). The SPLC notes that at least one Jewish community center in Atlanta increased its security* after the backpack was found.

According to the FBI's affidavit in the case, Sibley stated in his confession:

[H]e is a "patriot" and he felt no one was paying attention to what was going on the world. Sibley felt if he placed the package in a Roswell Park then people would finally get that this type of activity could happen anywhere.

Sure, it makes about as much sense as traumatizing a six-year-old to teach him about "stranger danger," but at least we finally have the conspiracy theorist's ultimate wet dream: an honest-to-Allah false flag attack. Except that it was perpetrated by a wingnut to frame Muslims.

Unless, of course, Sibley himself is just a government double agent pretending to confess to being a rightwing loony, so that rightwing loonies look bad, in a double-false-flag conspiracy. Look for that spin on Infowars within the next few days, if it's not there already.

* A personal aside: When Kid Zoom was 3, we had him in daycare at the Jewish Community Center of Tucson. Following a bomb threat, the daycare started having occasional drills to get the kiddos ready to evacuate. The sight of a line of tiny little people holding their teachers' hands as they walked from the main building across a grassy lawn to a nearby office building was terrifying -- all I could think of was how convenient it would be for a deranged person to phone in a bomb threat and then get ready to start sniping. Thanks a lot, crazy anti-Semites. And no, we wouldn't have felt safer if the daycare teachers had been packing semiautomatic rifles. 

[ TPM / SPLC / WSB-TV ]