Last week, two heavily armed men — part of a movement with a propensity for Hawaiian shirts and anarchy on American streets — got arrested and charged with supporting Hamas. On the surface, their support for the burgeoning “boogaloo” ideology, which seeks to encourage a second Civil War, should place them light-years away from an established overseas Islamist terrorist group. But this unorthodox extremism mash-up is a reflection of serious gaps in domestic terrorism law.
Authorities say Michael Solomon and Benjamin Teeter traveled to Minneapolis during the recent protests and began conducting armed patrols of the city with other members of the boogaloo movement. According to court documents, they engaged with an FBI informant they had initially met on Facebook, who presented himself as a Hamas member. In these meetings, Solomon and Teeter allegedly repeatedly noted their views that Hamas and the boogaloo movement, which also uses the spelling “bois,” shared similar anti-U.S.-government views and expressed their interest in acting as mercenaries for Hamas “as a means to generate cash for the Boogaloo Bois/Boojahideen movement,” saying they required funds “to recruit members and for the purchase of land for a compound to train.”
Read more: Washington Post
