CALIFORNIA – A Californian man who threatened to kill all members of a Los Angeles area mosque and had amassed rifles, shotguns, handguns, high-velocity magazines and “thousands of rounds of ammunition” has been charged with making terrorist threats.
“When people make threats of this nature and they have the means to carry out those threats, it’s a very serious matter,” LAPD Cmdr. Horace Frank said Tuesday at a news conference, Los Angeles Times reported.
The announcement came after investigation into hate calls to the Islamic Center of Southern California.
According to Frank, Mark Feigin, 40, called the center twice last month, at one point threatening to kill its members because of his “hatred for Muslims and his belief that Muslims will destroy the United States.”
The first call to the Islamic Center came Sept. 19, when a man left a voicemail that was “peppered with vulgarity and espoused hatred toward the Muslim faith,” Frank said.
The next day, Frank said a man called again, threatening to kill the person who answered the phone along with other members of the center.
Arresting him in a traffic stop, police searched his Agoura Hills home and found several guns — rifles, shotguns, handguns — and thousands of rounds of ammunition, the commander said.
Feigin was charged with committing a hate crime and a misdemeanor count of making annoying telephone calls.
Though Feigin has a constitutional right to free speech, Frank said, “that right does not extend to making statements that threaten the well-being of others.”
“People make those calls all the time,” he said. “Where you cross the line is the threat to kill them. … That’s where free speech ends.”
Political Climate of Hate
For many American Muslims, threats by Feigin and others were a direct result of a political climate of fear.
“Unfortunately, in today’s political climate, such hate is not uncommon,” said Omar Ricci, a spokesman for the Islamic Center of Southern California.
“We get a call every once in a while. This particular call rose to a different level.”
The Islamic Center has increased security in the wake of the calls and the arrest, which Ricci said had shaken the community.
When Ricci saw photos of the guns and ammunition police found in Feigin’s home, he said he feared a “Columbine-type event,” referring to the Colorado high school shooting massacre in 1999.
“He could have very easily barged into our facility, with the innocent parishioners, constituents,” Ricci said.
“The worst comes to mind.”
Over the past months, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has been accused of fueling anti-Islamic sentiment, pointedly calling for Muslims to be prevented from entering the United States in December last year.
The rhetoric has made a surge in anti-Muslim attacks.
In a 2015 hate crime statistics report, 16.1 percent of 1,140 religious hate crime victims were Muslim, up from previous years, despite the fact that overall hate crime numbers among other religious groups were declining, the FBI said.