PERSONAL JIHAD
Sulejman Talovic, an 18-year-old Bosnian Muslim immigrant, was loaded with enough ammo to "inexplicably" kill dozens of victims — and he would have, if an alert off-duty cop hadn't returned fire and stopped him. Talovic still managed to methodically murder five and wound four others with a shotgun.
Witnesses say it was an act of coldblooded violence aimed at random victims — something otherwise known as terrorism.
According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Talovic attended Friday prayers at a mosque about a block from the mall.
Yet the FBI saw no religious motive, and quickly ruled out terrorism. Nor could it find anything to indicate terrorism in several other Muslim-tied cases since 9/11, including:
• A 30-year-old Muslim man, Naveed Afzal Haq, who went on a shooting rampage at a Jewish community center in Seattle, announcing "I'm a Muslim-American; I'm angry at Israel."
• An Egyptian national, Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, who shot two and wounded three at an Israeli airline ticket counter at LAX.
• A bearded 21-year-old student, Joel Hinrichs, who blew himself up with a backpack filled with TATP (the explosive of choice in the Mideast) outside a packed Oklahoma University football stadium not long after he started attending the local mosque.
• A 23-year-old student, Mohammed Ali Alayed, who slashed the throat of his Jewish friend in Houston after undergoing a religious awakening (he went to a local mosque after he murdered his former friend).
• The D.C. snipers — John Muhammad and Lee Malvo, both black Muslim converts — who picked off 13 people in the suburbs around the Beltway as part of what Muhammad described as a "prolonged terror campaign against America" around the first anniversary of 9/11, which he had praised.
• Omeed Aziz Popal of Fremont, Calif., who police said hit and killed a bicyclist there then took his SUV on a hit-and-run spree in San Francisco, mowing down pedestrians at crosswalks and on sidewalks before police caught up with him, whereupon the Muslim called himself a "terrorist."
• A 22-year-old Muslim, Ismail Yassin Mohamed, who stole a car in Minneapolis and rammed it into other cars before stealing a van and doing the same, injuring drivers and pedestrians, while repeatedly yelling, "Die, die, die, kill, kill, kill" — all, he said, on orders from "Allah."
. A Muslim cab driver run down two students, one Catholic and one Protestant, after a dispute over religion-injuring one badly in Tennessee.
• A 22-year-old Iranian honors student, Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, who deliberately rammed his SUV into a crowd at the University of North Carolina to "punish the government of the United States" for invading Iraq and other Muslim nations.
Described by other students as "kind and gentle," Taheri-azar was a student council president and a member of the National Honor Society in high school. He told the judge he was "thankful you're here to learn more about the will of Allah."
He wrote a letter to a TV station citing Quranic verses justifying his attacks.
Yet the FBI considered each of these cases as "lone acts" that could be done by "anyone".
But they weren't just anyone.
They were all young Muslim men.
Of course, the FBI can't treat all law-abiding young Muslim men as potential killers. But neither should the agency ignore this trend.
We're likely to see more of these seemingly random domestic attacks. They may seem isolated, but all have radical Islam at their nexus.
They're not "senseless" or "utterly inexplicable" or "impossible to rationalize," as the media intone. They are purposeful. These men think they are conscripts called up for a mission in a 1400 year old war.