Not long ago, a Texas native named Shamsud-Din Jabbar pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group on Facebook. Now, perhaps if he had been an election-denying vaccine skeptic, Jabbar might have gotten himself noticed by law enforcement. Instead, Jabbar was free to ram his rented Ford pick-up truck into a crowd on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, murdering 15 people. Jabbar, who had guns and explosive devices in his truck, was killed in a shootout in which he wounded two police officers.
Law enforcement officials and media, as is their wont, reflexively downplayed the Islamic aspects of mass murder. The lead agent in the investigation initially declared that the FBI did not consider the attack a “terrorist event.” There was a small problem, however, as Jabbar had flown not an Appeal to Heaven or Gadsden flag, but one of those black ones favored by Sunni terrorist groups such as al Qaida and the Islamic State group on his truck. The FBI was quickly compelled to walk back its claim.
It is perhaps understandable why the Justice Department, which has spent years obsessing about white supremacists, allegedly the greatest threat to our way of life; orthodox Catholics; pro-lifers; parents who oppose COVID-19 restrictions imposed by school boards; and candidates of the opposition party, somehow missed this man. But the prevarications about the nature of Islamic terrorism are not.
You might recall former President Barack Obama, who once promised the world that the future wouldn’t belong to those “who slander the prophet of Islam,” refused to refer to the most violent ideology in the world as “radical Islam,” instead using a slew of euphemisms to conceal reality. This has become the norm.
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As of this writing, I have learned much about Jabbar’s “checkered marital history” and “financial difficulty” but little about his radicalization at a mosque in Houston. Divorced men with debt typically do not, as most of you probably know, begin murdering infidels.
One suspects we will soon hear that Jabbar acted alone, as we did so many other Islamic terrorists. Just another member of the “United Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves and Isolated Extremists,” as Mark Steyn once quipped.
New York Times columnist Charles Blow, who is incapable of processing any event without making it about race, contends that the “really big problem” on the domestic terrorism front “is young white men.” There is no global “young white man” terrorism work. There is no prevailing “young white man” theology that imbues theological or ideological legitimization to murder. There is no “young white man” state that funds or spreads extremism and is trying to obtain nuclear weapons. The men and women who murder in the name of Islam, on the other hand, are part of a worldwide, ideological, and political movement.
Yes, it’s complicated. And while it’s important to understand the theologically disparate groups that operate in the Middle East, it is insufferably pedantic to act as if we have a great responsibility to worry about which faction is yelling “Abu Akhbar” before plowing a truck into a crowd or a plane into a building.
The broader goal of the Islamic State group fanboy Jabbar and the Oct. 7, 2023, “militant” who guns down the elderly at a bus stop in southern Israel is the same. Jabbar’s intentions align with those of Hadi Matar, the jihadi who attempted to murder novelist Salman Rushdie, still under a four-decade-old fatwa issued by the religious authorities of the Iranian regime.
In March 2024, Jabbar’s theological compatriots attacked Crocus City Hall in the suburbs of Moscow, murdering over 130 civilians. In 2023, Sunni Islamists from Gaza murdered over 1,000 Israelis and engaged in other atrocities. In 2019, a series of Islamic State group bombings struck churches and hotels in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, killing over 250 civilians. Then, of course, there is endless violence in places such as Nigeria, Mali, and Burkina Faso, where 600 people were massacred in one event this summer.
Imagine if Islamists such as Jabbar were constantly plowing trucks into crowds, blowing themselves up in pizza parlors, and stabbing children indiscriminately in the streets. That might give you an idea of what Israel has been dealing with for decades. Islamic extremism is the leading cause of conflict in the world. By one count, between 1979, the year marking the Islamic revolutions, and 2021, there were at least 48,035 Islamist terrorists worldwide, leading to the deaths of over 210,000 people. This number does not include the human suffering and repression caused by repression in the Islamic world.
And you can bet your life, if they could, Islamists would bring that here.
One of the likely reasons elites underplay these dangers is to manage Americans, who they seem to believe will break out into spasms of violence against Muslims after every terrorist event. It is absurd.
Christopher Hitchens once called “Islamophobia” a “stupid neologism” that “aims to promote criticism of Islam to the gallery of special offenses associated with racism.” The “Islamophobia” accusation is meant to play on the tolerant nature of most Americans to chill debate. “Islamophobia” conflates criticism of an illiberal, often violent, theology and political belief system with hatred of people.
When Trump suggested an impractical “Muslim ban” in 2016, barring immigration from nations with high numbers of extremists, leftists compared it to the restrictive quotas of Jews in the 1930s that doomed thousands to perish under Nazi rule. Of course, the difference, need it be said, is that those who practice Islam in Syria and Judaism in Germany are not the same. Islam is unique among the major faiths in its reticence to modernity and embrace of violence.
Muslims are, and should be, protected equally by Western values that everyone else enjoys. More than that, it is a civic virtue to live with others peacefully. But no one gets special dispensation from debate or reality. Most American Muslims live perfectly normal, peaceful, and quite prosperous lives. As smart as anyone else, they are surely aware that Islam isn’t the same as Presbyterianism merely because both are faiths.
A significant majority of Muslims around the world believe Sharia should be the law of the land, according to the Pew Research Center’s exhaustive study on the matter. This is something to strongly consider when thinking about our immigration policy. Thus far, we have been far more successful than Europe in assimilating newcomers from the Middle East. That trend is in danger as we not only stop expecting immigrants to embrace American values but reject them ourselves. Does anyone watching how our elite universities function believe that we are doing a good job raising Americans who value these tenets?
It has always been a mystery why the Left feels compelled to grade the world’s most pervasive illiberal ideology on a steep curve. But these days, many progressives have taken it further and begun championing the jihadi cause. Only days after the Islamic attack in New Orleans, hundreds of “pro-Palestinian” protesters blocked Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, chanting, “Long live the intifada!”
Some Republicans have tried to tie the New Orleans attack to our broken border. It’s not true. Jabbar was an American who earned a degree from Georgia State University, served in the Army from 2006 to 2015, and had a job at Deloitte, which only demonstrates that the threat of Islamism is global.
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Still, Jabbar’s attack is also an obvious warning as to why a rickety border is an invitation for another 9/11. Indeed, there have been numerous reports from the Biden administration about an “ISIS-affiliated human smuggling network” moving hundreds of people into the United States.
Of course, terrorism isn’t the most dangerous immediate problem for people in this country. There are more murders in New Orleans due to criminality in any given month than were from this terrorist attack. But Islamism is still one of our greatest menaces in the world. We shouldn’t be lulled into complacency or bullied into ignoring this truth.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
