Man who threatened 'South Park' creators gets 25 years in prison

Just to remind people, there are ways to send direct messages to both Comedy Central and Viacom if you're serious about making yourself heard about 200 and 201 and Super Best Friends. The arrest & conviction doesn't make the return of those episodes any more likely on its own; the matter unfortunately goes deeper than that. Even if it's a short & pithy message, it can't hurt to let them know that people haven't forgotten.
 
A terrorist is a someone who commits and act of terrorism. That doesn't include making vague threats and reposting publicly available information. Did he actually commit a terrorist attack of some kind that I didn't hear of? If not, the guy's merely a wannabe. He should be punished, but 25 years is ridiculous. Even Trey and Matt would agree with that.
 
Think about all of those false alarm calls towards 911. Even if the calls might be a prank, the firemen or police officers are still obligated to check it out.

In the meantime, an actually emergency could occur and not be attended to because the folks in question are pursuing a false alarm.

I tend to think the same thing applies to making a threat of this nature. He may be all talk, but valuable time and resources are spent going after this guy in the first place.
 
I say its BS because if he was in some christian terrorist group he probably would have got off, but since hes "the enemy" he gets a ridiculously severe punishment.
 
That's a textbook definition. A practical definition would expand on that to define what "threats" means. Most people would think of terrorist threats as direct, credible threats that are clear and represent a real danger, such as hostage-taking or a bomb threat. Most people would NOT think of terrorist threats as some guy making vague, though incendiary, statements on a website without any credibility or show of actual danger. At no point did this guy's words represent any real danger towards anyone. An no, the off chance of someone possibly being "inspired" by his words to go out and do something doesn't count. If that were the case, you'd have to arrest the people who run pretty much every KKK/Aryan Nation/White Supremacist website out there, as they say the same type of things, often including well known public figures like President Obama, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, etc in their rantings.

So the "threat" he supposedly made were no real threats at all. Also the fact that Comedy Central was yellow enough to treat them as actual threats does not make them so. So no, it's not terrorism.
 
Twenty-five years for a non-violent crime is absurd. Even if he was threatening such online, he didn't actually hurt anyone. I'm all for punishing people, but I think this his sentence is much too severe.
 
Bingo. If organizations like your average White Supremacist group or the Westboro Baptist Church aren't going to jail for 25 years because of the vile (and often times very much threatening) garbage they spew, then neither should this guy. Can't have it both ways.

Granted of course he SHOULD get some form of punishment, but let's not anyone kid themselves; the only reason he's getting the legal equivalent of a sledgehammer to the face instead of a slap on the wrist is entirely due to the abject petrifying horror that the specter of 9/11 still inspires throughout much of North America. As an overall society, we've far from gotten over that and are mentally and emotionally still kinda going through the "curled in a corner in the fetal position whilst sucking our thumb and thinking happy-happy thoughts" phase. It shows blatantly in the kinds of legal bias you see in cases like this: threaten someone's life in a general sense, and it gets treated like a misdemeanor. Threaten someone's life using anything that reminds anyone in the slightest of anything even tangentially related to 9/11, and the panic button is instantaneously pressed and we're all but ready to lynch someone.

I'm sure as hell not saying that what this guy did wasn't horrible or that he shouldn't face any kind of punishment for it; but this is blatantly overkill, and we can't completely freak out like this from now till eternity every single solitary time the words "Islam" and "terrorism" are used the same sentence. What NightSpirit said earlier was right on the money: this guy's clearly just a "wannabe". He's an idiot teenager, not a threat to national security. If we're gonna put a nitwit like him away for 25+, we may as well do the same to every other idiot teenager that says or does something monumentally stupid (not entirely a bad idea now that I think about it, but that's neither here nor there). People that have committed far worse crimes that were directly responsible for ruining and/or ending lives have gotten off with lighter sentences than this. This wasn't justice being carried out or anyone's safety being protected: this was some loudmouthed schmuck being made an example of in a matter that is still very much a hot-button political issue.

I guarantee you that if this same kid pulled this same crap in the 80's or 90's, the most he'd get is he'd have to pay an extremely severe fine, maybe (maybe) do some fairly light jail time, followed then by so many months worth of counseling and community service, whereupon he'd then get sent home where mom and dad would ground him for a year and take away his keys to the family Chevy. I'm not trying to downplay how horrible 9/11 was or how much of a very real threat jihadist terrorists are; I'm not even saying that some of the events of the last decade shouldn't have in any way lit a fire under our butts to up our national security measures. But when we get to the point of locking up our own kids for half their lives just for saying and doing something idiotic, it by all means ought to give us pause and think for a second about how far we're taking this and how much we're letting that horrific tragedy in downtown New York 10 years ago get to us and change us for the worse.

We dearly, dearly need as a country to calm the hell down. If the main goal of Islamic Fundamentalist terrorist groups was to inspire fear within us as a nation, then we may as well wave a white flag and surrender now because they've already long ago won that particular fight.
 
Name one Christian Terrorist group.

I'm not about to say Christians (as a whole) aren't responsible for some dumb things, but there's certainly no "Christian Terrorist group". Or at least there's no terrorist groups that claim their religion compels them to do what they do.
 
Ku Klux Klan. They killed thousands of African-Americans in various acts of brutality since 1865. They seek to create a White Christian theocracy in America where non-whites and non-Christians have no civil rights. That's ONE example of a Christian terrorist organization that has committed numerous atrocities over a long period of time.

Today, there's many more newer groups with far more numbers and far higher levels of organization that represent a real threat, which the KKK really doesn't anymore today. Google the words "Aryan supremacy", "white nationalist", or "neo-Nazi". These groups are far more active throughout Europe today than they are in America, but they're still a serious threat to many people and cultures.
 
Back
Top