ADL says it surfaced mosque threat linked to FBI arrest in Florida

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) said on Friday that it had surfaced threats against a mosque to law enforcement officials last month.

The suspect in the case, Giovanni Pimienta, 19, was arrested on August 11 in Florida. Authorities said he had threatened to “shoot up a mosque.”

He later told investigators that he had also discussed attacking a church.

Carla Hill, the vice president of research and investigation at the ADL’s Center on Extremism, told The Times of Israel that ADL researchers reported findings linked to the case with the FBI and South Carolina authorities on July 16.

Hill said the ADL reported Telegram users discussing weaponry and carrying out an attack, posting an AI video of a South Carolina mosque, and discussing an attack on a San Diego mosque in May.

The Center on Extremism said one of the users in the Telegram chat was “believed with a high degree of certainty to be Pimienta.”

The AI video showed two masked individuals dancing in front of a South Carolina mosque. Hill said the video was related to the True Crime Community, an online subculture whose adherents glorify mass killers.

Center on Extremism analysts have reported community members posting AI videos of past attackers dancing at the scene of their attacks.

Some True Crime Community members now appear to be creating similar videos, not of past attackers, but of themselves while they are plotting attacks, Hill said.

The ADL analysts also obtained a 61-page manifesto, which appeared to have been written by Pimienta, from the Telegram chat.

Hill said the manifesto included the words “Jew,” “Jewish,” or “ZOG” 185 times. “ZOG” stands for “Zionist Occupied Government,” a conspiratorial term common on the far right.

The Center on Extremism said the manifesto said that Jews were an “eternal enemy” and a “global parasite” that must be “cleansed” from the planet.

“It’s very much a throughline of their ideology — blaming Jews for everything, the need to cleanse the earth of Jews,” Hill said.

The manifesto was “dedicated” to individuals including the San Diego mosque shooters, who also espoused antisemitism online, despite attacking a mosque. Pimienta claimed online to have had a personal relationship with one of the San Diego shooters, Caleb Vasquez.

Pimienta lived in Venice, Florida, and worked as a cook at a Chipotle at the time of his arrest, an affidavit said.

Keeping Florida residents and visitors safe is FDLE’s mission and we take that charge seriously.

When Giovanni Pimienta was making threats of a mass shooting online, our agents conducted a swift and thorough investigation to thwart this man’s plot to harm our community.

You can… pic.twitter.com/kHX3Z1Jop8

— FDLE (@fdlepio) August 11, 2026

The FBI has not confirmed that the ADL information led to the arrest and does not comment on pending investigations, but details in the affidavit appeared to corroborate the connection.

The affidavit said that the threatening posts were “captured and reported” to the FBI, described evidence matching the ADL’s findings, and said that law enforcement first interviewed Pimienta on July 17, a day after the ADL reported the threat.

The affidavit said Pimienta had been conspiring with an individual in South Carolina.

He told investigators that he had used the AI platform Grok to write the manifesto, and had shared a “fantasy” online about taking hostages and executing people at a church.

The Center on Extremism said the case and other recent incidents “show that antisemitism, anti-Muslim hatred, misogyny, racism, anti-LGBTQ+ hatred, and incel ideology often coexist in the same worldview.”

“Extremists stitch together these grievances, often using antisemitism as connective tissue that binds otherwise unrelated hatreds together,” the center said.

Pimienta was charged with written threats to kill, threats to bomb or commit a mass shooting, and use of a two-way device to facilitate a felony, according to the affidavit filed earlier this month.