The terrorist attack by an American citizen turned ISIS ambassador in New Orleans on New Year’s Day, which killed 14 and left 35 seriously injured, was about as predictable as an unfulfilled New Year’s resolution.
Problem is: New Year’s resolutions usually involve a nation without the self-discipline to lose weight. What happened in New Orleans involved those who possess outstanding self-discipline to follow through on their intentions.
In fact, they are recruited online and radicalized for this very purpose. We saw this on 9/11, and at the finish line of the Boston Marathon in 2013. It happened at a gay nightclub in Orlando in 2016, which left 49 people dead; a crowded New York City bike path in 2017, where eight were killed; a mass shooting in San Bernardino that left 14 dead in 2015; a car ramming and stabbing at Ohio State University in 2016, killing a university police officer; a pipe bomb explosion in a New York subway station in 2017.
Terrorism never went away. We just stopped paying attention. All throughout Europe, Islamists have imposed their will since the Syrian refugee crisis became the great Sharia-law multiplier that turned the continent into one big Call to Prayer. In addition to the recent Christmasmarket car ramming in Germany, such low-cost mass murdering weapons have been deployed in the U.K., France, Canada, Germany, and Belgium. Some included gas canisters or other explosives to intensify the damage. There was the 2007 Islamist attack in the Glasgow Airport in Scotland, and the 2016 Bastille Day attack in Nice, France, where 86 were murdered and 434 wounded. France has been especially targeted: remember the Charlie Hebdo rampage ten years ago this week, which featured an Islamist hit squad that wreaked terror across Paris in 2015.
In the United States, we clearly missed the signs. When it comes to Islamic extremism and its direct line to terrorism (sorry, Barack Obama, only you and Ben Affleck somehow cannot grasp the umbilical connection between Islam and terrorism), we have gotten very sloppy.
The outgoing FBI director, Christopher Wray, testified before Congress in April and specifically said that he feared the return of terror attacks. We have millions of unvetted illegal immigrants, a good number of whom with Islamist ties. We don’t have the slightest idea where any of them are. All we do know is that like-minded Islamists will seek one another out and lie low, the perfect position for sleeper cells.
Don’t expect to see them re-surface for their asylum hearings. The whole point of their American visitation is to get us to leave.
Islamist immigrants are the least of our worries. The assailant who rammed his pick-up truck into crowds of revelers on Bourbon Street was an American citizen who served in our armed forces! That is a far more troubling detail, but not at all surprising, either. Remember Major Nidal Hasan at Fort Hood in 2009, who murdered 13 of his fellow servicemen? Hasan was radicalized by the YouTube sermons of Anwar al-Awlaki, another American-born Islamist educated in the United States, who became a chief recruiter for al-Qaeda. He was killed in a drone strike in Yemen, but not before influencing thousands into a life of jihad, including the foiled “Shoe Bomber.”
What did you think was going to happen? Eventually, sleeper cells awake. We took our eyes off the ball because we were told that the ball was racist, and the FBI was on a DEI holiday party. A woke Secret Service just allowed two assassination attempts against a former president.
Eventually, sleeper cells awake. We took our eyes off the ball because we were told that the ball was racist, and the FBI was on a DEI holiday party.
We no longer start the day with color-coded terrorist warnings supplied by Homeland Security. Remember those? Thanks to the Biden administration, we fixed our gaze on the true problems plaguing America: white supremacy, inadequate diversity, racial inequity, and a shameful failure to show proper respect for nonbinary gender classifications.
Are terrorists “them” or “they”?
Our federal and state hiring systems now take those moral failings into account. Is that why the FBI at first confidently ruled out that New Orleans was an act of terror? Then they announced that there were multiple suspects. As for the New Orleans Police Department, how was a vehicle even allowed to jump the curb and barrel down the street in the early hours of New Year’s Day, at a time when terrorism is on the rise globally?
Our national security competency has regressed back to the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. Buckle yourself in, except if you are driving over a new bridge built with DEI initiatives in effect. You’ll want more freedom of movement, so you can jump out before it collapses.
We have had nearly 18 months of glorifying terrorists on campus. University professors openly profess their admiration for the October 7 massacre of Israelis. They shamelessly exhorted their students, and anyone else listening, that Hamas left them feeling “exhilarated,” and that even the decapitation of Israeli infants and gangraping of Jewish teenage girls was “awesome” and “heroic.”
Our public monuments have been desecrated with pro-Hamas graffiti, with keffiyehs masking the statues of American heroes, and not just mass-murdering Muslims and terrorist-praising progressives. Public throughfares have been blocked and Christmas tree lighting and college graduation ceremonies disrupted. We tolerated this mainly out of fear of provoking more violence, and based on a seriously fundamental misunderstanding of First Amendment freedoms.
Meanwhile, for all the anti-Israel agitation since October 7, the New Orleans terrorist auditioning for ISIS had nothing to say about Gaza. He described his reasoning as a “war between the believers and non-believers.” Obviously, he was an old-school, lone-wolf terrorist who hated Americans just as much as he probably hated Jews.
The very first moment American flags were being set on fire in Dearborn, Michigan, followed by “Death to America!” chants there and elsewhere, we should have finally realized: “Hey, maybe this isn’t just about the Jews. They hate us, too.”
The very first moment American flags were being set on fire in Dearborn, Michigan, followed by “Death to America!” chants there and elsewhere, we should have finally realized: “Hey, maybe this isn’t just about the Jews. They hate us, too.”
Yes, the “religion of peace” has always made peace with violence. Has anyone heard a single imam in America denounce the October 7 massacre in Israel? Any gathering of Muslims on street corners chanting: “Not in our name!” or “We reject terrorists!”? I fear there has been a lot of high-fiving in mosques this week in celebration of a wonderful New Year’s.
Shortly after the New Orleans terror attack settled into our consciousness, a man carrying an ISIS flag rallied a crowd in downtown Manhattan. Bourbon Street was still in shock, but in New York City, not far from the fallen Twin Towers, they called for a global intifada “by any means necessary.”
They mean what they say. Allah help us.
Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, essayist, law professor and Distinguished University Professor at Touro University, where he directs the Forum on Life, Culture & Society. He is the legal analyst for CBS News Radio. His most recent book is titled “Saving Free Speech … From Itself,” and his forthcoming book is titled, “Beyond Proportionality: Is Israel Fighting a Just War in Gaza?”
