MN Mosque Bomber Pleads Gender Dysphoria

The leader of a small militia group that bombed a mosque in Bloomington, Minnesota, is asking a judge to be recognized as a woman and be given the low end – 30 years – of a mandatory sentence, instead of the life sentence being sought by prosecutors. Michael Hari, who is also said to be an instigator of a failed bombing of a women’s clinic, apparently had some experience in the construction or contracting realm, as he is said to have bid and failed to win a contract on Trump’s southern border immigration wall in 2016, after which time he became increasingly radicalized. He took to manifesto writing, maintaining in his White Rabbits Handbook that America is a white, Christian country, and that there is “no more anti-Christian religion, and no more anti-American philosophy on the face of the Earth than Islam,” while from his home in a small down in Illinois, he recruited disaffected young men from the adjacent rural community for his militia. In August of 2017 he and two recruits, both of whom later turned state’s witness, drove a rented pickup loaded with assault rifles, a sledgehammer and a 20-pound black powder bomb, to the Dar Al-Farooq Islamic Center in Bloomington, Minnesota. There they broke open a window and tossed the bomb into an empty office, while elsewhere in the building people were gathered for prayer. No one was injured but property damage was extensive. The bombing, according to prosecutors, was an act of terror intended to destroy the heart of a community, and to some extent it succeeded. “To this day,” prosecutors say, “the Dar al Farooq community feels unsafe gathering, praying, and bringing their families to the mosque.”

Hari’s attorney, in court documents, maintains that gender disphoria and right-wing misinformation gave rise to Hari’s “inner conflict” and led to the mosque operation. While forming the militia group and speaking of missions to Cuba and Venezuela, the attorney says, Hari “secretly looked up ‘sex change,’ ‘transgender surgery,’ and ‘post op transgender’ on the Internet.” Hari, who now wishes to be called Emily Claire Hari, was scheduled to be sentenced on September 13.