Biden Puts the DEI in the Death Penalty

 A racist shooter is getting the death penalty while the 9/11 mastermind is getting a pass.

Over the summer, the Biden administration warned 9/11 family members that it was negotiating a plea deal with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the attacks, and four other Al Qaeda terrorists directly involved in the plot to murder thousands of people in America.

Biden had previously freed Mohammed al-Qahtani, the 20th 9/11 hijacker, and Zuhail al-Sharabi, another hijacker for an expanded version of the 9/11 attacks, along with an Al Qaeda ally who plotted to smuggle nukes into America and still another terrorist who plotted to blow up gas stations in Maryland, among others of the ‘worst of the worst’ still being held in Gitmo.

No wonder that Biden ducked out on the 9/11 commemoration to avoid facing family members.

While Biden’s people are trying to cut a plea deal for the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, they have, for the first time, demanded the death penalty for another killer.

Payton Gendron’s massacre of ten people in a Buffalo supermarket was not the only such supermarket mass killing. A year earlier, Ahmed Al-Issa, a Syrian Muslim immigrant, had opened fire in a King Soopers supermarket in Boulder, Colorado, and killed ten people. The case quickly vanished from the news (although the Washington Post did inquire whether the Arab Muslim mass killing of Americans could somehow count as “white male violence”.)

Instead of trying Ahmed in federal court in a death penalty case, the Biden administration was only interested in trying and executing Payton. Why? According to the Justice Department, “Gendron, a white male, committed a mass shooting attack targeting Black people.” (The racial capitalization here comes from the DOJ.) “Gendron’s motive for the mass shooting was to prevent Black people from replacing white people and eliminating the white race.”

Gendron’s mass shooting was not even the worst recent racist supermarket shooting

In 2019, Patrick Wood Crusius shot up a Walmart in El Paso, killing 23 people in order to stop Latinos from taking over America. In early 2023, the Justice Department announced that it wouldn’t pursue the death penalty.. In January 2024, around the same time that Biden decided to seek the death penalty for Gendron, it ruled out the death penalty for Anderson Lee Aldrich who had shot up a gay bar and killed 5 people. It was never clear whether Aldrich was gay or hated gay people, but the DOJ did hit him with 55 hate crime charges. Still no death penalty.

Murdering 5 people in cold blood (or 1 person) whatever the reason ought to be a fast track to a lethal injection. But Attorney General Merrick Garland froze all new death penalty cases on taking office and has so far only signed off on one of them because of entirely racial reasons.

Supermarket shooters, whether they’re white, black or Muslim, should all face the death penalty. So should any number of mass shooters, including Nicolas Cruz, the Parkland high school mass murder who killed 17 people, almost all of them children and teenagers, who was spared the death penalty in 2022 by a soppy jury who chose to value the killer’s life over that of his victims.

The Al Qaeda terrorists we collected in Gitmo, should have been culled a long time ago.

Instead, Biden’s rules are that if you’re a Muslim who kills thousands of Americans, you get a plea deal, if you kill ten, you vanish from the news, and if you kill 17 Latinos, you’ll get some of the book thrown at you, if you’re a black man who kills other black men, you’ll get ignored, but if you’re a white man who kills black people, only then will you finally qualify for the death penalty.

That’s putting the DEI in the death penalty. It also violates the Constitutional protections against handing out different penalties based on the races of the victims of the perpetrators. Civil rights legislation, the basis for federal prosecutions, is already constitutionally dubious, but even it does not allow for picking and choosing which minorities have lives that matter more.

In Muslim countries, the value of a human life depends on the victim’s race, sex and religion.

In Saudi Arabia, for example, killing a Muslim man used to require paying a blood price of 100,000 riyals, 50,000 for a Muslim woman or a Christian man, 6,666 for a Hindu man and 3,333 for a Hindu woman. (This was among the clauses supposedly due for reform by MBS. It’s unclear if this occurred, but similar laws exist across the Muslim world in places like Pakistan.)

America is not supposed to work that way. Unfortunately under Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, an acronym that can just as easily be rearranged to spell DIE as the familiar DEI, it does.

Biden’s plea deal with 9/11 terrorists is a profound betrayal, not just of his constitutional duties and our national values, but of promises made during the Obama-Biden administration by both Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would be executed.

Like so much else, those were lies.

Instead the Biden administration warned that, “the Office of the Chief Prosecutor has been negotiating and is considering entering into pre-trial agreements” that could “remove the possibility of the death penalty.” And it’s hard to imagine any such agreement that wouldn’t

Kill 2,996 people for Islam and you get life in prison, but kill ten people because you’re a racist and you get the needle.

9/11 family members have grown old and died waiting for justice. Meanwhile a corrupt coterie of terrorist sympathizers have kept the wait going to rot the system from within while finding every possible way to help America’s enemies.

A week after the anniversary of 9/11, a military judge struck the name of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a friend of the lead hijacker Mohammed Atta, who helped form the Hamburg cell at the heart of the 9/11 attacks, on account of a supposed “mental illness”.

According to his lawyers, the “key facilitator of 9/11” was so traumatized by “torture” that he has trouble sleeping because “invisible forces” make his bed vibrate and “sting his genitals”.

And the souls of 2,996 murdered people take a backseat to al-Shibh’s stinging genitals.

The Biden administration and its DOJ operatives are not pacifists who would never take a human life. As the Buffalo supermarket shooting case shows, they’re willing to demand the death penalty when the killer has done something sufficiently evil in their eyes.

Killing 2,996 people for Islam doesn’t meet that standard. Neither do most mere murders. Massacring children won’t meet that bar or even massacring Latinos or gay people when the motive is at all in question. Only exactly the right kind of racism merits the death penalty.

That’s why the Biden administration is freeing Al Qaeda killers. They may be terrorists, but they’re not racists. On 9/11, they massacred Americans of all races, sexes and orientations in the ultimate expression of diversity. And just to add equity, 2,435 were white, and 286 were black, making 9/11 a form of anti-racist DEI rendered in bodies falling from the sky.

If only Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had shouted a racial slur, he could be on death row now.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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