A Question of Balance
It sounded like a testosterone-fueled fantasy, the kind of bizarre imaginary world of feverish mayhem that might be embraced by some teenaged video gamer, as the Jewish newsweekly The Forward put it, or perhaps the ranting of a pudgy little nebbish of a man who had read one too many Tom Clancy novels.
Kristi Goldstein
Instead, it was the stark and darkly disturbing details contained in federal court documents charging the
Pinellas County podiatrist, along with his wife and a close friend and confidant, a dentist by training, with a raft of federal crimes.
It is a matter of some consternation to the Muslim community of central Florida that Goldstein and his two accomplices had gotten off comparatively lightly for their parts in what even prosecutors acknowledge was a hate-driven plot to murder perhaps scores of innocent people. None of the trio, not even Goldstein, the architect of the plan, were charged under terrorism statutes, or for that matter, under hate crime statutes.
It is no small irony, some Muslim leaders have said, that at a time when some in government had claimed a right since restricted by the U.S. Supreme Court to designate some accused plotters as terrorists, and to hold them for years if deemed necessary without ever filing formal charges against them, all three admitted conspirators in the Goldstein case received speedy hearings and comparatively lenient sentences.
Michael Hardee
On June 19, 2003, Goldstein, a nominal Jew by all accounts, was sentenced to 12 years and seven months in federal prison after pleading guilty to charges of conspiracy to violate civil rights, plotting to damage a religious facility and unlawful possession of firearms. A week earlier, his non-Jewish ex-wife, who now goes by her maiden name, Persinger, was sentenced to three years for possession of illegal bombs that her husband had hidden in the bedroom closet of their posh Seminole townhouse. In May of that year, Michael Hardee, a 50-year-old dentist, was also sentenced to three years and five months for his part in the conspiracy.
Although the bizarre case, which received little attention outside Florida, has run its course in the federal court system, nagging questions still remain.
Dr. Ira M. Sheskin
Among them,
The Forward posed these: "What led Goldstein, by all accounts an assimilated Jew, intermarried and living in what, according to a 1999 study by geographer Dr. Ira Sheskin of the University of Miami, is a typically assimilated Jewish community, a place where Christmas trees are not uncommon in nominally Jewish households, where the intermarriage rate is slightly higher than in many places, and where anti-Semitism is no more rabid than anywhere else in Florida, to take up arms as a self appointed avenger of the terrorist attacks of September 11 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon? What made this peripheral member of an average Jewish community decide to plot what has been described as a terrorist attack to make a statement 'for his people'? Even more troubling is this question: Was Goldstein a terrorist, and if so, was he treated differently than he would have been had he been an Arab or Muslim accused of a similar offense?"
