Publius' Forum

-By Nathan Tabor

By now, most of you have probably heard about the “crazy” in San
Francisco who drove his black Honda SUV into 14 people, killing one.
This wasn’t an isolated incident last Tuesday, the unfortunates crossing
at a single intersection, for instance. Twenty-nine year old Omeed Aziz
Popal, just recently returned from Afghanistan, first struck and killed
a man in the early afternoon before heading back out somewhat later to
continue his spree.

There is no doubt that what Popal did was deliberate. One witness
described hearing the Afghani scream "I'm a terrorist, I don't care" as
San Francisco police led him away after his arrest. But according to a
SF police spokesman, the series of attacks was not an act of terrorism,
the same claim later affirmed by the department's command staff. No one
has been able to answer, however, how such a conclusion could have been
arrived at so quickly.

If this sounds eerily familiar, it is. Just last March, an Iranian
immigrant drove an SUV into a crowd of people at the University of North
Carolina, running over nine people. Despite the fact that this man
boasted that “Allah gives permission in the Quran for the followers of
Allah to attack those who have raged war against them...” and later sent
a letter to a NC television station to reiterate his claim, Solomon
Bradman, chief executive officer of the Miami-based Security Solutions
International, commented that this attack didn’t really look like an act
of terrorism since, “he did a lousy job of it.”

Maybe I didn’t get the memo, but I didn’t know that certain standards
that had to be met – aside from the perp actually admitting his motive
and his religion – in order to simply blow off an action that has all
the signs of being an actual act of Islamofacist terrorism, with a lame
comment. Was the benchmark somehow set on 9-11 that we have to have
thousands of people die before it’s actually called what it really is?

How about the attack last month by a lone gunman at the Jewish
Federation Center in Seattle? I’ll give you just one guess as to what
the religion of this Pakistani is (HINT: Not a Quaker). Naveed Afzal
Haq, whose father is the founding member of an Islamic center near
Seattle, is…that’s right, Muslim. Daddy’s center is affiliated with
Saudi-financed Wahhabist organizations, but we’ll just ignore this
additional bit of revealing info. The FBI has decided, instead, to call
this incident a “hate crime,” not an act of terrorism, adding that there
was "nothing to indicate [that] he is part of a larger organization."
I guess I missed the memo
on this too, because apparently you must belong to a group (like a chess
club?) in order to be declared a “terrorist.”

Now I’m not a terrorism expert, by any means. I’d like to think that I
can leave these sort of things to the experts to sort out, but there’s
something very unsettling when law enforcement officials and other
governmental agencies who are supposed to be paying attention to all of
this, connecting the dots if you will, try to instead play the “lone
gunman” theory.

Daniel Pipes of the New York Sun calls these sudden acts of violence
“Sudden Jihad Syndrome,” a phrase he coined after Mohammed Reza
Taheri-azar decided to run down people at the University of NC.

Sudden Jihad Syndrome is certainly a catchy little phrase, but let me
narrow it down to what it really is… Islamofacist terrorism, and the
people who are supposed to be protecting us from all of this had better
start acknowledging that that is indeed what it is.