Brother of New Orleans Terrorist Speaks Out, Blames Attack on 'Radicalization, Not Religion'
By now, you’ve probably heard or read all about the background of Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the man who committed a terrorist attack in New Orleans that killed 14 innocents and ended with the terrorist dead.
I doubt I need to go into the particulars: He used a pickup truck flying an Islamic State group flag, had IEDs with him, was taken down by first responders, etc. This is not to re-inform you of any of that minutiae you could pick up by turning on any cable news channel and/or reading any news outlet, including this one.
However, how long did you think it would take before the establishment media started working the This Has Nothing to Do With Islam, Just Plain Old Extremism™ narrative? In the case of The New York Times, less than 24 hours — thanks to a quote from Jabbar’s 24-year-old brother Abdur Jabbar in an interview.
The quote, according to archived versions of a story regarding what we know about the deceased suspect, 42, came in an update at 10:28 p.m ET on Wednesday — a little over 18 hours after the attack happened on Bourbon Street, killing over a dozen New Year’s revelers and injuring dozens more.
“Mr. Jabbar’s brother, Abdur Jabbar, 24, said in an interview in Beaumont, Texas, where the brothers grew up, that they last spoke two weeks ago and that his brother did not mention any plans or a desire to go to New Orleans,” the Times reported.
And now the important part, as far as we’re concerned: “He said that they had been brought up Christian but that his brother had long ago converted to Islam. ‘As far as I know he was a Muslim for most of his life,’ said the younger Mr. Jabbar. ‘What he did does not represent Islam. This is more some type of radicalization, not religion.’”
We then seamlessly transfer to his military service, which his brother said was “a new outlet to get some sort of discipline.” Right, but let’s back up a second, because if this is the pull quote I think there’s something to be said about, I don’t know, pretty much everything regarding the nature of that pull quote regarding the role religion played in this.
First, it’s curious the Times didn’t feel the need to clarify the younger Mr. Jabbar’s religious faith, which is somewhat important in what progressives are so fond of calling “positionality” when he’s making this statement.
One assumes, given the lack of clarification, that he’s either still some sort of Christian or a non-practicer, although it’s kind of important given the background: If he’s a Muslim convert as well, that’d be nice to know, considering what he said takes on a different light if it’s being said as some kind of PC mealy-mouthed “In this house we believe…” kind of statement or as something coming from a believer in the Islamic faith.
For that matter, to what extent do they know each other, aside from the fact that they’re brothers and happen to have been brought up in the same city?
There’s an 18-year age gap in between them — not an insubstantial fact when reporting on this — and his brother seems somewhat clueless regarding reports that Shamsud-Din Jabbar posted substantially about his faith on social media in the previous several years and about his allegiance to the principles of the Islamic State group in the hours leading up to the attack.
But, yes, this is a technically correct — if wholly irrelevant — statement.
Obviously not all, most, or even a small minority of Muslims are going to arbitrarily ram pickup trucks into crowds full of innocent people in the name of religion. If that were the case, said “religion” would be proscribed by virtually any government on earth interested in self-preservation. That wouldn’t be religious belief, that’s psychotic delusion.
However, the vast majority of people who are going to arbitrarily ram pickup trucks into crowds full of innocent people in the name of religion — particularly in the West — just happen to be extremist Muslims. That fact may be inconvenient, but it doesn’t stop it from being a fact.
The two things are mutually exclusive, and one shouldn’t see any reason why we feel the need to say both in the face of an attack carried out by an extremist Muslim — but of course the Times does, because it fits the This Has Nothing to Do With Islam, Just Plain Old Extremism™ narrative, as previously stated.
Of course, the Times can’t say this themselves in a straight news, but they can sneak it in if the alleged attacker’s brother says it in an interview.
To say that there isn’t a religious element to the Islamic State group’s ideology is to ask us to throw away everything we know about that terrorist organization. Does it appeal to people who aren’t entirely balanced, mentally? Of course, as do all extremist religious ideologies.
Most of these ideologies aren’t going to take over wide swaths of the Middle East, say, or muster the resources to hijack four jetliners and crash three of them into iconic U.S. buildings, killing almost 3,000 innocent people.
The Islamic State group and al-Qaida, respectively, managed to pull those two off — and that’s excluding a series of other attacks in various places at various times too numerous to mention. Our government and/or our media spent the prior four years telling us that everyone from white supremacists to parents’ rights groups to traditional Catholics were extremist threats of some stripe absent 1) evidence they posed a clear and present danger or 2) compunction about linking whole groups to the extremist offshoots in their reporting.
But, when an extremist who reportedly pledged his loyalty to the Islamic State group and who committed a deadly terror attack with their flag flying behind his truck, note how quickly both the man’s brother and the New York Times, by association, quickly jump to note how they’re not really Islamic or even have anything to do with religion.
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