The Terrorist Did Not Act Alone on New Year’s Day

By Phyllis Chesler

Why are so many journalists so invested in the delusion that terrorists—even lone terrorists—are acting alone? Is such a falsehood meant to make us feel safe? Or is it rendering us defenseless, blind, unable to see all the variations of 9/11 until it is too late?

Radical or Political Islam—Islamism if you will—is at war with infidels and with dissident Muslims. Yes, such a war may seem surreal, unbelievable, but that does not make it untrue. Jabbar himself was concerned with possible news headlines which might fail to understand that he was a warrior in the “war between the believers and the unbelievers.”

Staff Sargeant Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, who car rammed innocents in New Orleans on New Year’s Day, WAS backed by ISIS and by the Qu’ranic verses about violence. (He apparently left this particular page open in his trailer). Some might say that he was backed by the IDEA of ISIS, an idea which empowered and enlarged his own sadism and murderousness; it unleashed, legitimized, magnified, his rage; a death cult of his own, larger than himself.

God! I wonder what his two ex-wives might have to tell us. His children too. Perhaps they’ll say that he was quiet, removed, “not there;” perhaps they’ll say that he was violent.

I am not saying that Jabbar was mentally ill. He knew what he was doing. He planned it carefully. He was a mass murderer. Had he not been stopped he might have become a serial killer. He latched onto ideas that are out there in the universe—ideas which are both denied and yet glorified by the same media that insists that “there is nothing there to see” except our own “Islamophobia” and racism.

Would we want to psychiatrically diagnose the members of Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas, the Taliban? Is knowing that who they are and what they do is pure evil—not enough?

What did Jabbar learn, what did he see when he was deployed to Afghanistan, even in a non-combat position? What evil might have seeped into his mind? The rape of children, the slaughter of innocents, the infernal, eternal feuds, endemic to the country? The triumphant rise of the barbarian Taliban?

Jabbar was backed by all the Americans who spent their time, post 10/7, demonstrating in favor of exterminating the Jews, abolishing post-Enlightenment values; by all those young infidel women who misguidedly donned headscarves (hijab), as if this demonstrated their anti-racism, and not their mindless sexism. Even after Jabbar’s New Year’s Day terrorism, people demonstrated in favor of “Intifada Revolution Now” in Times Square, in my own city.

Jabbar was also backed by his mosque which, according to some sources, advised their congregants not to talk to the media but to refer reporters to CAIR—the Council on American Islamic Relations, an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation litigation; CAIR raised funds for Hamas, Iran’s proxy, the human demons who carried out the 10/7 strike against peaceful civilians in southern Israel.

Israel, we always get back to Israel. It is ground zero in the fight against terrorism. It is always, always, blamed for fighting back against it, which it has done rather brilliantly since 10/7. I only hope that that United States learns this lesson and learns it well.

First published in Phyllis’ Newsletter