New Orleans Attacker Was No “Lone Wolf”

He's part of a pattern of Islamist extremist terrorism

Shamsud-Din Jabbar as seen in an FBI handout photograph.

The victims of the New Orleans New Year’s attack hadn’t even been buried before the FBI and the press were rushing to assure the public that he acted alone.

“New Orleans Attacker Likely Acted Alone, FBI Says,” is the headline over a Wall Street Journal story about which the Journal sent a news alert. “At this point, currently, we do not assess that anyone was involved in this attack except Shamsud-Din Jabbar,” the Journal story quoted Christopher Raia, deputy assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's counterterrorism division.

“New Orleans driver appears to be a lone wolf,” is the headline over a USA Today piece by John Bacon, Josh Myer, Trevor Hughes and Jorge L. Ortiz, an example of the The Editors Rule of Byline Inflation, which is that the reliability of any news article is inversely proportional to the number of reporters who have a byline on it.

The distinction the FBI and the press are trying to make is between attacks planned or ordered by an organization or a foreign government and those that are independently initiated or “homegrown.” But it’s something of a false dichotomy. By now, there have been so many “lone wolf” or “acted alone” attacks that you’d have to be unusually stubborn not to notice a pattern. The FBI also says that “an ISIS flag was located in the vehicle” that Jabbar used to carry out his deadly attack. The New York Times reports he was a convert to Islam and lived “in a Muslim neighborhood north of Houston.”

A 2015 Justice Department-funded study of “Lone Wolf Terrorism in America,” written by Mark Hamm and Ramon Spaaij of Indiana State University, included:

“Islamic extremist Carlos Bledsoe (Abdulhakim Mohammad) imprisoned for life in the Arkansas Department of Corrections in connection with the fatal 2009 drive-by shooting attack on the Little Rock Army recruiting center.”

“Islamic extremist Yonathan Melaku imprisoned for 25 years in the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) for a series of firearm attacks on Northern Virginia military installations in 2010 and the 2011 attempted bombing of Arlington National Cemetery.”

“Sami Hassoun imprisoned for 23 years in the BOP for an al-Qaeda related attempted bombing of a Chicago bar.”

“Islamic extremist Amine el Khalifi imprisoned for 30 years in the BOP in connection with an attempted suicide bombing at the United States Capitol in 2012.”

“Islamic extremist Quazi Nafis imprisoned for 30 years in the BOP in connection with the attempted bombing of the Federal Reserve Bank in 2012.”

It also mentioned the 2006 case of Mohammed Taheri-azar, who was convicted of attempted murder for driving an SUV into a crowd at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. And the 2006 case of Naveed Haq, who was found guilty of shooting six people in an attack on the Seattle Jewish Federation. And the 2009 case of Nidal Malik Hassan, who killed 13 people in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood in Texas.

And the case of Khalid Aldawsari, a Saudi living in Texas, who was convicted and sentenced in 2012 for one count of attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction in connection with his purchase of chemicals and equipment necessary to make an improvised explosive device. And that of Naser Jason Abdo, sentenced to life in prison for plotting an attack near Fort Hood.

One might also mention Sayfullo Saipov’s 2017 ISIS-inspired attack with a truck on the Hudson River bike path in Manhattan, which killed eight. And Omar Mateen’s 2016 attack on the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida, which killed 49.

Those are just the U.S. cases. The European ones also mount. No matter how much the New York Times rushes to explain those as a consequence of “mental illness” or “underlying mental health issues,” the patterns there are also apparent.

That’s not to say that all Muslims are violent terrorists or that all violent terrorists are Muslim. Yet the “lone wolf” and “acted alone” terminology serves to obscure the truth, which is that there is an ongoing problem of Islamist extremists plotting and in some cases executing terrorist attacks on U.S. military, government, and civilian targets.

The New Year’s attack on New Orleans makes sense in context. Part of the Islamist ideology is that the West—America, Israel, Europe—have become morally degenerate. So Israel’s Nova Music Festival, the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, revelry in the streets of New Orleans become targets by this supposed logic. Christianity is as much an enemy as Judaism, so a celebration of the new year—on a chronological timeline synchronized to the birth of Jesus—also becomes a target for the Islamists.

Improving American defenses against these threats will require the U.S. law enforcement and national security establishment to better understand the patterns. It’d help for the media to illuminate the problem rather than attack efforts to protect against it. The classic example here is the 2012 Pulitzer Prize that went to the Associated Press for an investigation of a New York Police Department “clandestine spying program that monitored daily life in Muslim communities.” Three of the four AP journalists who won the prize—Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, and Eileen Sullivan—subsequently landed at the New York Times. The NYPD was one of the few American law enforcement agencies that understood this threat well enough to defend against it, and it was motivated by the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and again in 2001.

No government effort to prevent attacks in a free society will be perfect. Constitutional protections of equal protection, free exercise of religion, and protection against unreasonable searches and seizures are all important. But a first step in defending against the next Islamist extremist attack on America is realizing that after dozens of these attacks and hundreds of casualties, calling each of the perpetrators a “lone wolf” confuses the issue rather than clarifying it.