A story that dropped off the radar several years ago is back in the news.
NEW YORK — An Islamic extremist was given 10 life sentences and another 260 years in prison on Wednesday for killing eight people with a truck on a bike path in Manhattan and severely injuring 18 others.
“The conduct in this case is among the worst if not the worst I’ve ever seen,” said U.S. District Judge Vernon S. Broderick. He cited the unrepentant nature of Sayfullo Saipov, who, given a chance to speak, said the tears of victims and family members in the courtroom were small compared to the blood and tears that those in the Islamic faith have suffered.
Saipov’s sentence came after a jury in March rejected the death penalty for the Uzbekistan citizen and onetime New Jersey resident, leaving him with a mandatory life prison sentence for his Oct. 31, 2017 slaughter of tourists and New Yorkers.
Other countries are definitely sending us their best! “A former long-haul truck driver, Saipov moved legally to the U.S. from Uzbekistan in 2010 and lived in Ohio and Florida before joining his family in Paterson, New Jersey.”
Saipov’s first name, “Sayfullo” means “sword of Allah.” But don’t you dare notice that, you Islamophobe!
The jury couldn’t reach a unanimous verdict on the death penalty, so the prosecutors argued for the strongest possible sentence, which the judge accomodated. We the People will now support this mass murderer for the rest of his life while he spreads the Islamic faith to his fellow prisoners. Fortunately, he’ll be incarcerated in Colorado’s Supermax facility, the most secure federal prison in the U.S., so he won’t be able to do (much) more damage to our society.
I’ve warned for a long time (at least a decade) that Islamic extremism is a very real threat to our country. There have been several jihadi attacks within the United States since 9/11, our politicians have imported tens of thousands of Muslims, and our FBI, DOJ and local law enforcement refuse to acknowledge the threat that Islamic extremists pose to our society.
It is true that there have been relatively few jihadist attacks in recent years and, in fact, the number of general terror attacks in the U.S. have decreased significantly since 1970 with a slight uptick in the last couple of years.
However, there have been enough that we should be paying attention, especially with regard to Islamist terrorism. Note that not all the killings I list below are mass murders. Some of them are “honor killings” that have shown up in America in the last fifteen years.
January 1, 2008: Yaser Said murders his two daughters, 18-year-old Amina Said and 17-year-old Sarah Said. He shot them to death because, as Muslims, they brought disgrace on his family because of their western lifestyle that included dating non-Muslim boys. The murders are considered an honor killing.
July 6, 2008: Pakistani-born Chaudhry Rashid admitted to strangling his daughter, Sandeela Kanwal, because she “disgraced his family by seeking a divorce from an arranged marriage to her cousin.” The murder is seen as an “honor killing.”
February 12, 2009: Pakistani-American Muzzammil Hassan brutally stabbed and beheaded his wife, Aasiya Hassan, in Buffalo, NY. because six days earlier she had filed for divorce. In a bit of irony, Mr. Hassan “founded Bridge TV in 2004. The American-Islamic station was designed to combat the negative stereotype of Muslims post-9/11. His wife was its general manager.” The murder is considered an honor killing.
November 2, 2009: Faleh Almaleki runs down his daughter, Noor Almaleki, as she walked across a suburban parking lot to a Mexican restaurant with a friend. “Local police characterized the incident as an attempted ‘honor killing’ — the murder of a woman for behaving in a way that ‘shames’ her family.” The Almalekis immigrated in the mid-1990s from Basra, Iraq to Phoenix, Arizona. The murder is seen as an honor killing.
November 5, 2009: Maj. Nidal Hasan killed 13 members of the military at Fort Hood. “Attorneys for the victims … said that the alleged shooter’s admission this week that he gunned down his countrymen to defend the Taliban proves that the assault was a terrorist attack and not, as the government has implied, ‘workplace violence.'”
December 25, 2009: The “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab—who was trained and directed by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula—smuggled a bomb aboard a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam. The device failed to go off, “but AbdulMutallab became enveloped in a fireball that spread to the wall and carpeting of the plane.” He later admitted that “‘I carried with me an explosive device to avenge the killing of innocent Muslims,’ adding that the failed plot was in retaliation for ‘U.S. tyranny and oppression of Muslims.'”
April 14, 2010: Tawana Thompson Larry is killed, along with three others, by her husband. “The suspected gunman told police Allah had told him to kill family members. The man’s sister told reporters at a vigil outside the home that her brother had recently been reading passages from an Islamic text that led him to believe he should kill someone.”
May 1, 2010: Faisal Shahzad managed to place a car bomb in Times Square undetected after training with the Pakistani Taliban. The device did not detonate properly. When he was sentenced to life in federal prison without parole, he said he would “sacrifice a thousand lives for Allah.” Reminded by the judge that he’d sworn an oath of allegiance to the US when he became a citizen, Shahzad replied, “I did swear but I did not mean it.”
April 15, 2013: Two brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, ethnic Chechens from southern Russia who had been in the U.S. for about a decade, targeted the Boston marathon with pressure cooker bombs, killing three and injuring more than 260 people. In one report, “a picture has emerged of the older one as someone embittered toward the U.S., increasingly vehement in his Muslim faith and influential over his younger brother.”
September 25, 2014: Alton Nolen “inflicted a brutal, ISIS-style punishment on colleagues he tried to convert to Islam — cutting one woman’s head off with a 10-inch fillet knife. Jurors also convicted Nolen of assault and battery with a deadly weapon for attempting to behead a second co-worker at the Vaughan Foods plant in Moore, a suburb of Oklahoma City. Nolen’s attorneys say he’s mentally ill and believed he was doing the right thing because of his delusional misinterpretations of the Quran.”
December 2, 2015: Tashfeen Malik and her husband, Syed Farook, massacred 14 people at an office Christmas party in San Bernardino, California. “Farook was born to Pakistani parents in Chicago on June 14, 1987, but the family moved to Southern California when he was a child, and he attended La Sierra High School in Riverside, where he joined a campus club for Muslims.” This report says Farook and Malik “were clad in tactical gear and armed with handguns and two assault rifles purchased by his childhood friend, Marquez. The couple sprayed the room with as many as 75 rounds before fleeing.”
June 12, 2016: Omar Mateen killed 49 people and wounded 53 more in a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. He called 911 during the attack to pledge allegiance to ISIS and mentioned the Boston Marathon bombers, according to a U.S. official. Mateen’s parents came from Afghanistan; Mateen was born in New York City.
October 31, 2017: Sayfullo Saipov runs down pedestrians on a New York City bike path using a rented Home Depot truck, killing eight. Prosecutors said he had two cell phones with 90 videos of propaganda about the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and 3,800 images related to the terrorist group.
December 6, 2019: Mohammed Alshamrani, a 21-year-old second lieutenant in the Royal Saudi Air Force and a student naval flight officer, opened fire in a Pensacola, Florida naval station classroom building, killing three sailors. Alshamrani was killed after two deputies exchanged gunfire with him. The murders are considered an act of terrorism.
March 22, 2021: Ahmad Al-Issa, a Syrian Muslim immigrant from Raqqa, Syria, killed ten Americans by shooting them to death inside a supermarket. He “spent much of his time in America accusing his classmates and everyone around him of being ‘Islamophobes’. He repeatedly got into furious confrontations with the Americans whom he claimed were disrespecting his Islamic religion.” In the latest news about this case, the courts will hear arguments this month about Al-Issa’s mental fitness to stand trial.
April 2, 2021: Noah Green described himself as a “Follower of Farrakhan.” Green hit two police officers with his car and rammed a security barrier, then was shot and killed by law enforcement after he exited the vehicle and drew his knife. “However, the path has been thwarted, as Allah has chosen me for other things,” Green wrote on his Facebook page.
December 31, 2022: Trevor Bickford is charged with federal crimes in connection with his efforts to wage jihad by killing U.S. Government officials and his knife attack on three NYPD officers in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. “I wanted to kill an officer in uniform,” Bickford allegedly told police, according to the criminal complaint. “I saw the officer and waited until he was alone. I said ‘Allahu Akbar.’ I walked up and hit him over the head with a kukri. I charged another officer but dropped the knife and I tried to get the police officer’s gun but couldn’t.”
These are some of the attacks that we know about since 9/11.
Apart from attacks like these, we should also be watching for other signs of Islamic separation from American culture. Democrat congresswoman Rashid Tlaib swore her oath of office on the Koran, as did Ilhan Omar. Tlaib’s mother came from the West Bank, Omar came with her family from Somalia. We should also be watching certain cities, such as Hamtramck and Dearborn, MI, where Muslims make up more than 40 percent of the two cities in the Metro Detroit region. We should also pay attention to Minneapolis, home to 70-80,000 Muslims, which just became the first major city to “allow broadcasts of the Muslim call to prayer at all hours, becoming the first major U.S. city to allow the announcement or ‘adhan’ to be heard over speakers five times a day, year-round.”
Not all Muslims are terrorists, of course; in fact, the vast majority seem to practice their religion in peaceable ways. But we should be wary, especially with the invasion through our southern “border.” Every day that our border stays open, it’s possible more migrants enter from terror states. No one knows who is coming in, but every now and then, an extremist pops off and people die.
Seems to me we would want to prevent that.
