Michigan man charged with threatening to kill worshippers at synagogue
A man from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula was arrested and charged on Friday, June 16, for allegedly threatening to massacre Jews at a synagoguge on March 15, 2024. That date will mark five years since Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand, in which a white supremacist killed 51 worshippers and injured 40 at two mosques during the Friday sermons.
Seann Pietila, 19, was arrested on Friday by FBI agents at a residence in Pickford, Michigan, and charged with transmitting a communication containing a threat to injure another.
It is alleged that on or about June 13, the FBI received a report that an Instagram account with the username finnishv64 was making threats to “commit a mass casualty incident” while messaging other accounts, according to a criminal complaint affidavit. Instagram provided a 210-page document of user information related to the finnishv64 account that included direct messages the account.
The FBI said they identified Pietila as the likely user of the finnishv64 account.
In Instagram messages exchanged with account _this_aint_me_88 (an account Pietila said belonged to a 16-year-old male located in New Zealand), finnishv64 expresses suicidal, anti-semitic and pro-Nazi sentiments. The two accounts also repeatedly mention Brenton Tarrant (who shot and killed 51 Muslims in New Zealand in 2019) and Payton Gendron (who killed 10 and injured 3 in a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, U.S., in 2022). Both attacks were live-streamed on Facebook and Twitch respectively.
The following Instagram message is from finnishv64 to _this_aint_me_88, in which Pietila allegedly wrote a threat to commit a mass shooting while livestreaming on Discord:
“I honestly didn’t know b.t [Brenton Tarrant] attacked more than one [mosque]. 💀 Seriously though, Fucking kikes ruin everything they touch. I’d probably do it on discord for people, so they could screen record and send it to others or post it online.”
Pietila’s residence in Pickford was searched by FBI agents on June 16 in which multiple items including firearms, gas masks and a Nazi flag were seized, according to the affidavit.
“Pietela’s home was searched earlier today [June 16], and law enforcement seized ammunition, magazines, a shotgun, a rifle, a pistol, various knives, firearms accessories, tactical vests, mask, a Nazi flag, a ghillie suit, gas masks, and military sniper/survival manuals.”
Pietela consented to a search of his phone, on which FBI agents found a list of equipment Pietela would use in a potential attack against the Shaarey Zedek Congregation, located in East Lansing, Michigan, according to the affidavit.
The affidavit states that Pietela was previoulsy a student at Lansing Eastern High School for the 2020–21 school year, and had moved to Pickford from his mother’s residence in East Lansing one week prior to his arrest in Pickford. Pietela was also previously a student at Pickford High School.
According to the affidavit, Pietela “told investigators that he did not intend on following through with the mass killings that he spoke about.”
Pietila is but another example of a resurgent far-right in the U.S. and other countries.
Last year in Michigan, Justen Watkins and Tristan Webb were both sentenced after pleading guilty to involvement in the Michigan-chapter of The Base, a neo-Nazi group that “believes society should be pushed to collapse so a white ethnostate can arise out of the ruins,” to quote the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The Base is alleged to have run “hate camps” during the spring and summer of 2020 in which members would train with firearms in preparation for an eventual race war, with the end goal of establishing a white ethnostate in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
And elsewhere in the U.S., although he seems unlikely to win the Republican nomination for president, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is fairly popular among many American conservatives. DeSantis oversaw the torture of inmates at Guantanamo Bay when he served at the black site as a junior officer, beginning in 2006.
And earlier this month, the New York Times published an article defending openly neo-Nazi forces in Ukraine such as the Azov militia, and that pointing out that Ukrainian forces unabashedly wear neo-Nazi iconography “risks playing into Russian propaganda.” The New York Times had no issue in calling Azov a “Ukrainian neo-Nazi paramilitary organization” in an article published shortly after Tarrant’s massacre of 51 Muslims (it has been speculated that Tarrant may have trained with Azov forces in Ukraine, based on the racist manifesto he published just prior to the March 2019 mass shooting).
Furthermore, in document obtained via a FOIA request by the nonprofit Property of the People in May 2022, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security voiced concerns about American volunteers returning from Ukraine after having fought alongside groups such as Azov.
“Ukrainian nationalist groups including the Azov Movement are actively recruiting racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist white supremacists (RMVE-WS) to join various neo-Nazi volunteer battalions in the war against Russia,” the document states. “RMVE-WS individuals in the United States and Europe announced intentions to join the conflict and are organizing entry to Ukraine via the Polish border.”
“What kind of training are foreign fighters receiving in Ukraine that they could possibly proliferate in US based militia and white nationalist groups?” the document states.
Seann Pietila obviously did not train with Azov forces, he clearly admired Brenton Tarrant, who is speculated to have trained with Azov forces when he visited Ukraine, as Tarrant mentioned in his manifesto. Neo-Nazis need to be resisted by any means necessary, whether they are isolated losers like Pietila, or paramilitary organizations that serve the interest of the U.S. military industrial complex, like Azov in the proxy war between the NATO and Russia in Ukraine.
As the contradictions in capitalist society continue to heighten and more and more people suffer through “once-in-a-lifetime” recessions, far-right groups will stick to their proven strategy of to pointing the blame at the “others” in society, be they Jews, Muslims, migrants, LGBTQ+ people.
The ideologies of reactionary groups must be resisted by the continued education of the working masses, with the aim of helping them attain class consciousness and understand their position within the capitalist system.
The individuals of reactionary groups must be resisted by whatever force proves necessary in preventing their acts of terrorism.