THANE ROSENBAUM (JewishJournal.org 6.1.25)
The terrorist attack by an American citizen turned Islamic State 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.
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, leaving 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 car ramming in Germany, such low-cost mass murder weapons have been deployed in the United Kingdom, 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 10 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 that he feared the return of terror attacks. We have millions of unvetted illegal immigrants, a good number of whom have 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
