Is the perp a religious zealot?
"The guts of the manifesto are five “objections” to the kind of political violence Allen was about to attempt — objections that Allen goes on to provide “rebuttals” to, in a format that harks back to the scholastic technique famously employed by Thomas Aquinas in his “Summa Theologiae.” The first objection reads: “As a Christian, you should turn the other cheek.”
The biblical reference here is to
Matthew 5:39: “But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Allen’s “rebuttal” is:
Quote:Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed. I’m not the person raped in a detention camp. I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. I’m not a schoolkid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration. Turning the other cheek when *someone else* is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.
This tracks — up to a point — St. Augustine’s important “
Letter to Publicola,” which justifies killing in self-defense so long as it is in defense of others and claims that Matthew 5:39 does not “make us neglect the duty of restraining men from sin.”
Allen’s fifth objection is also biblical, from
Matthew 22:21: “Yield unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.” Allen’s “rebuttal” — that as long as U.S. officials “do not follow the law, no one is required to yield them anything so unlawfully ordered” — is in line with a tradition of Christian argumentation against New Testament injunctions to obey the government that dates back to the Middle Ages. " (LLM)
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Did the perp expect 'death by cop'?
Before the sign-off from “Cole … ‘Friendly Federal Assassin’ Allen,” the manifesto offers thanks to a range of people, beginning with “my family, both personal and church, for your love over these 31 years.”
All this is consistent with what we know of Allen’s religious
past — his upbringing in a theologically conservative Protestant church, his leadership of the Christian fellowship at Caltech during his years in college. What it doesn’t prove is that his apparent violent intentions resulted from religious zealotry." (LLM)
