Jan. 2: Terror in New Orleans

The Bureau of Narrative Enforcement; The globalized intifada; 'We're sending you back to Europe'

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The Big Story

In the 1970 essay that launched gonzo journalism, “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” author Hunter S. Thompson, who has parachuted into Louisville to observe the drunken revelry surrounding the race, amuses himself by ribbing a good ol’ boy named “Jimbo” with an “evil fantasy.” Pretending to be a Playboy photographer with inside info from the National Guard, Thompson’s narrator grimly informs Jimbo that the Black Panthers, “white crazies,” and other assorted freaks are planning to riot at Churchill Downs. “We were told to expect shooting,” he explains.

The story has its intended effect on Jimbo, for whom the Derby is a yearly site of pilgrimage:

“No!” he shouted; his hands flew up and hovered momentarily between us, as if to ward off the words he was hearing. Then he hacked his fist on the bar. “Those sons of bitches! God Almighty! The Kentucky Derby!” He kept shaking his head. “No! Jesus! That’s almost too bad to believe!” Now he seemed to be jagging on the stool, and when he looked up his eyes were misty. “Why? Why here? Don’t they respect anything?”

Within the logic of the article, we’re supposed to laugh at Jimbo for believing that the freaks would know or care about his precious derby, let alone come to ruin it. But your humble Scroll editor felt a lot like Jimbo on New Year’s Day, when the news dropped that New Orleans city officials had rescheduled Wednesday night’s planned Sugar Bowl matchup between the University of Georgia Bulldogs and the Notre Dame Fighting Irish following a vehicle-ramming attack on Bourbon Street by a terrorist pledging allegiance to ISIS.

The implications for college sports are, objectively, the least important consequence of the attack. But for those of us raised in the cult of SEC college football, the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans is as integral to the New Year’s festivities as fireworks, champagne, or kisses at midnight. Its forced rescheduling due to jihad on the first day of the final year of the Biden presidency felt like an omen. Not even your precious red-state blood sport is safe from the freaks anymore. It’s almost too bad to believe.

Here’s what we know about the attack so far. At around 3 a.m. on New Year’s Day, the perpetrator, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, 42, a former U.S. Army staff sergeant and active reservist, drove a white pickup truck flying a black ISIS flag at high speed down Bourbon Street, the main thoroughfare in New Orleans’ French Quarter, running over pedestrians and killing at least 15 people. After crashing his car, Jabbar produced an assault rifle and engaged in a firefight with police, who killed him. Police subsequently discovered homemade bombs inside the truck and at several locations throughout the French Quarter, leading to speculation that Jabbar might have had co-conspirators, though none have been named or arrested. The FBI has ruled out the involvement of four individuals identified on Wednesday as potentially having helped plant the explosives, and while it initially said it suspected Jabbar was not “solely responsible” for the attack, the bureau announced Thursday that Jabbar “acted alone.”

We still don’t know much about Jabbar and his motivations, other than the obvious. A few hours prior to the attack, he posted videos to social media pledging his allegiance to ISIS and explaining that he had initially intended to murder only his ex-wife and children but changed his plans after having several dreams urging him to join the terrorist group. His personal life appears to have been troubled. He was twice divorced and, according to January 2022 divorce records reviewed by the Associated Press, had money problems: Despite earning a six-figure salary from Deloitte, he claimed to be $27,000 behind in payments on his house and to have accumulated $16,000 in credit card debt, in addition to losing $28,000 in 2021 through his real-estate company. The New York Post reports that at the time of the attack, he was living in a “squalid” Houston trailer park among mostly Muslim immigrants only blocks away from his mosque, the Masjid Bilal. The husband of one of Jabbar’s ex-wives told The New York Times that Jabbar had begun acting “crazy” in recent months, which he attributed to his recent conversion to Islam, but Jabbar’s brother told the Times that he had converted at a young age and had shown evidence of becoming increasingly devout as far back as 2015.

Our guess, based on previous supposedly “lone-wolf” ISIS attacks, is that Jabbar did not act alone and that his “dreams” were supplemented by contact with other ISIS militants, sympathizers, or recruiters, if not by connection to a full-blown network or cell. (For instance, Nidal Hasan, the U.S. Army major who killed 13 in a 2009 jihadist rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, had posted on jihadist message boards and corresponded with the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki prior to committing his massacre.) Naturally, suspicion will fall on the mosque, which reporter Paul Sperry and others have already identified as being a part of the Muslim Brotherhood network in the United States. Masjid Bilal is, according to its website, part of the Islamic Society of Greater Houston, a subsidiary of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the U.S. government’s prosecution of the Texas-based Holy Land Foundation (HLF) for fundraising for Hamas. Here’s Marina Medvin on X:

Indeed, on New Year’s Day, the mosque sent a statement to its members, writing that “the safety of our community is the most important thing” and urging them not to cooperate with media or law enforcement:

If anyone is contacted by the media, it is very important that you do not respond. If approached by the FBI and a response is necessary, please refer to CAIR and ISGH.

CAIR, of course, is the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which was also named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the HLF case. And we can see why they don’t want anyone to talk. On Thursday, the Middle East Media Research Institute published footage of a November 2023 sermon from the imam of Masjid Bilal, Dr. Elad Soudan, explaining that wherever the “Israelites” go, they “take control of the economy” and “seek corruption in the land.” This, according to Dr. Soudan, is why the Jews were persecuted in Europe and why the West supports Israel: so the Jews won’t come back.

One outstanding question is whether the New Orleans attack was connected to another New Year’s Day attack: the detonation of an explosive-laden Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas. That vehicle, like the white Ford F-150 used by Jabbar, was rented via Turo, a peer-to-peer car rental app, and the perpetrator (the sole fatality in this attack) was, like Jabbar, a U.S. Army veteran—in this case, an active duty Green Beret operations sergeant named Matthew Livelsberger, who served at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, at the same time as Jabbar.

Our guess is that the attacks are unrelated, despite superficial similarities. Livelsberger blew up a Tesla vehicle outside a Trump property, in what looks like a protest against the recent election results and the incoming administration. Jabbar, by contrast, appears to have followed the ISIS playbook familiar from the Christmas market and Bastille Day attacks in Europe, hitting a soft target on a holiday to maximize civilian casualties.

But what the twin attacks by U.S. military personnel share is resonance as fitting symbols of the Biden presidency: on the one hand, an act of deadly jihadist terror by a member of two subaltern identity categories (i.e., Black and Muslim) that the Biden Department of Defense spent four years courting and, on the other hand, another self-immolation by an active duty white service member apparently radicalized against the “Current Thing” in the liberal press—no longer Gaza, as was the case with Aaron Bushnell, but the impending fascist oligarchy of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. That these two attackers emerged from a U.S. military that spent the better part of three years hunting for nonexistent right-wing domestic extremists in its midst is, we hope, an irony that will not be lost on Scroll readers:

We’re not naive enough to believe that Trump will “solve” the problem of terror, but these twinned attacks—one Islamist and one leftist—coming on the last major public holiday of the Biden era can’t help but reinforce the already powerful impression that the sitting administration is a thoroughgoing failure: weak, inept, and malicious all at once.

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The Rest

→The FBI may be claiming that Jabbar acted alone, but we’ll be waiting for further information. Why? Well, there’s already been a parade of minor errors and mishaps on the part of the FBI. First, the special agent in charge from the New Orleans field office showed up at a Wednesday morning press conference—wearing a nose ring, in violation of bureau regulations—to declare that “this is not a terrorist event,” despite investigators having already discovered the ISIS flag on Jabbar’s truck. Then, a reporter from the New York Post arrived at Jabbar’s home in Houston before the FBI did.

But, more important, it’s because this is exactly the sort of thing the bureau has misled the public about for years, as Kyle Shideler explained in a July article for The American Mind. To cite a few of the most notable examples:

• After the Fort Hood shooting, the FBI declared that Hasan had acted alone and that his motivations were unclear, despite knowing of his communication with al-Awlaki. The U.S. government later ruled the shooting a case of “workplace violence.”

• Quoting from Shideler: “In 2014, Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez opened fire on a recruiting station in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The FBI announced the shooter’s motives as ‘unclear.’ It was subsequently revealed that the shooter had maintained a public blog where he discussed jihad, and Abdulazeez’s father had spent time on a terrorism watchlist.”

• After the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016, the FBI announced it was investigating whether the killer, Omar Mateen, was motivated by conflicted feelings of his own homosexuality—despite Mateen’s declaration of allegiance to ISIS and its leader in a 911 call and the complete lack of evidence that Mateen was gay or that he knew Pulse was a gay club.

Similar examples abound regarding violence by leftists against conservatives, including the bureau’s suppression of the manifesto written by the transgender Nashville school shooter, Audrey Hale, and its publication of an intelligence bulletin in the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt on Trump warning of “retaliatory acts of violence” by Trump supporters, which never materialized. As Shideler writes:

All of these incidents are a reflection of an FBI which is more interested in narrative enforcement than law enforcement. That narrative remains that, despite all evidence to the contrary, it is pro-Trump conservatives, rather than radical leftists or jihadist terrorists, who are the primary threat.”

Read the full article here: https://americanmind.org/salvo/eff-bee-why/

→In our Post of the Day, X user @AGHamilton notes that Jabbar’s attack follows months of flashing red warning signs about the threat of a fresh Islamist terror attack in the United States:

→And here was New York City on New Year’s Day:

That was a woman—presumably addressing Jews—saying, “We’re sending you back to Europe, you white bitches!” at a Wednesday protest in Manhattan organized by the Palestinian Youth Movement, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and the People’s Forum, all of which are nodes in the Chinese Communist Party-connected influence network of Neville Roy Singham.

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