Pattern Recognition: We’ve seen the terror in New Orleans before

Every time a jihadist terror attack takes place in America, it seems as though we’ve forgotten everything we have learned. We turn on our televisions and we hear the same set of circumstances being relayed to us, time after time. Pundits and media talking heads act surprised at each element of the terror plot is revealed (with glacial slowness) by federal authorities.

So it is with Shamsud Din Jabbar, the New Orleans jihadist attacker who killed at least 15 people, and injured many more when he drove an F-150 into a crowd of innocent people at a New Year’s Eve celebration.

The FBI’s initial declaration that it was unsure if the attack was terrorism, even while commenters on X posted screenshots of Din Jabbar’s ISIS flag was nothing new. The FBI has a long reputation, going back at least as far as the 2009 Fort Hood shooting, of rushing to declare no terrorism nexus in cases which are obviously jihadist terror attacks.

The use of a truck to mow down unbelievers (as Din Jabbar reportedly videotaped himself saying was his intent) is a long-established tactic of jihadist terror. Some have pointed out ISIS released a 2018 Dabiq propaganda article calling for jihadists to “Hit them with a Truck: Kill them all”, or 2016 vehicular attacks in Berlin and Nice. Less people remember Al Qaeda’s Inspire Magazine called for Truck attacks in 2010, featuring a photo of a Ford truck and a title “The Ultimate Mowing Machine.”

But how many remember Mohammed Reza Taheri-Azar? Taheri-Azar was an Iranian-born, naturalized citizen who in 2006 attempted to run over students on the campus of University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Taheri-Azar told police he wanted to follow in the footsteps of 9/11 hijacker Mohammad Atta and to “avenge the deaths or murders of Muslims around the world.”

The attack led Middle East historian Daniel Pipes to coin the term “Sudden Jihad Syndrome” to describe Muslim believers who, without any seeming connection to a terrorist group, commit terrorist atrocities. Today the U.S. government uses the euphemistic “homegrown violent extremist” to describe the same event –as though there is something uniquely American about murdering non-believers in the name of Allah.

Or consider that the deceased terrorist’s mosque, Masjid Bilal in Houston, Texas, urged its congregants not to talk to the FBI or media and referred inquiries about the jihadist in their midst to the  Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), and the Islamic Society of Greater Houston (ISGH), the mosque’s oversight body –even as videos of the mosque’s imam spouting hateful rhetoric against Jews was revealed.

Since its founding in 1993, CAIR has presented itself publicly as a benign Muslim American “civil rights organization.”  From that time to this, however, the United States government has known that CAIR actually is an entity founded by the Muslim Brotherhood, in order to support the terrorist group Hamas, a group officially designated since 1994 as a terrorist organization, and which killed thousands of innocent Israelis on October 7, 2023.   In 2016 the Center for Security Policy republished trial testimony and wiretap transcripts showing CAIR was created as a front for terrorism.

Following the New Orleans attack, Center for Security Policy Senior Fellow Dave Reaboi later showed on X.com that the Houston mosque had ties to the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), a group which the government has shown with “ample evidence” to have participated in a conspiracy to fund Hamas. He additionally documented that the Islamic Society of Greater Houston’s policies and procedures document openly discussed the distribution of charity funds for use in Jihad. And as Middle East Forum’s Sam Westrop reported, the mosque had held fundraisers for groups suspected of funding terrorism.

The New Orleans case is reflective of a long-established pattern of some mosque leaders tailoring certain messages for their congregants and much different ones for the other members of the communities in which they are located. For example, after the San Bernardino attack in 2015, the Islamic Society of Orange County’s religious director was brought in to disassociate the mosque with the jihadists who killed 14 people. That man, Muzzamil Siddiqi, was past president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), NAIT’s parent organization.

When, in 2015, 24-year-old Muhammad Yusuf Abdulazeez opened fire on a Chattanooga, TN Marine Recruiting station, killing 4 Marines and 1 sailor, it was local police who ended the terrorist rampage.  Abdulazeez attended the Islamic Society of Greater Chattanooga (ISGC), which was linked to NAIT, and which had published documents authorizing charity fundraising for jihad. At the time, the FBI claimed they did not know the motive for the jihad attack, despite the terrorist texting a friend the Quranic verse, “whosoever shows enmity to a friend of mine, then I have declared war against him.”

The Chattanooga terrorist’s attack surpassed the 2009 Little Rock, Arkansas Recruiting Office attack, conducted by Carlos Bledsoe, who had been affiliated with the Muslim Students Association (which itself spawned ISNA), and attended the Islamic Center of Nashville, which shared a post office box, with ISNA.  That tragic story of what led to the Chattanooga terrorist attack was told in the documentary “Losing Our Sons,” which inspired lawmakers in Tennessee and several other states to pass “Andy’s Law”

“Andy’s Law” creates a civil cause of action against terrorists and those who support them and is just one of many laws designed to help states protect their citizens from terror as the federal government has failed.

Perhaps the best example of the FBI’s pattern of missing ideological and organizational ties to terrorism is the case of the Tsarnaev brothers, who committed the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.  They were regular attendees of the Islamic Society of Boston, whose founder Abdurahman Alamoudi was a convicted Al Qaeda terror financier. The notorious mosque has spawned literally dozens of Al Qaeda and ISIS-linked terrorists since its founding. (Alamoudi was also a “Goodwill Ambassador” for the U.S. State Department and created the Islamic chaplaincy program for the Department of Defense. Notably Din Jabbar served in the U.S. Army)

When asked by then Congressman Louie Gohmert about whether the FBI was aware of the mosque’s troubling connections to terrorism, then FBI Director Robert Mueller could only say that the federal agents had done “outreach” there.

In almost every other specialty of law enforcement investigation or intelligence analysis, a high premium is placed on the ability to recognize patterns and pick them out as signal among the noise. In American counterterrorism however, at least on the federal level, those who champion connecting the dots have sometimes found themselves “purged” –because they followed the evidence where it led.

And so increasingly, many law enforcement officers and intelligence analysts have never been presented with the case studies and evidence documented here (and we have only scratched the surface). Increasingly, many officers and analysts don’t have such background. Many weren’t alive even during 9/11, weren’t active in their careers during the Boston Marathon bombing, or have never heard of the Holy Land Foundation trial, the largest terrorism finance case in American history, from which much of the evidence against CAIR, ISNA, and NAIT was developed.

Part of our mission at the Center for Security Policy has been to preserve those dots, and to help good investigators see these patterns, so that they can work to prevent the next New Orleans, Chattanooga, San Bernadino, Boston, Little Rock, or Chapel Hill.