“Islam convert shot dead after ax attack on NYPD cops,” the New York Post reported yesterday, in a story that got lost in the wild, the innocent, and the Ebola shuffle last night:
A hatchet-swinging psycho with Islamic militant leanings turned a busy Queens street corner into a scene of bloody chaos Thursday, chopping a rookie cop in the back of the head and slicing a second officer on the arm before two other officers shot him dead.
In opening fire on the madman, cops accidentally wounded a bystander, authorities said.
Officer Kenneth Healey, 25, had just four months on the job when Zale Thompson, 32, of Queens — a “scholarly” but “weird” recent convert to Islam — fractured the back of the cop’s skull with one swing of a blue-handled hatchet at about 2 p.m. in Jamaica.
As Mark Steyn has written, they all seem like weird losers — right before the bomb goes off, the AK-47 starts spraying bullets, or the hatchet starts swinging:
That’s certainly true of the Fort Dix jihadists who took their terrorist training DVD to the local audio store to be copied. It was also true of the Islamists arrested in Toronto last year for plotting to behead the Prime Minister, one of whose cell members had a bride who wanted him to sign a pre-nup committing him to jihad. The Heathrow plotters arrested while planning to blow up U.S.-bound airliners included a Muslim convert who’d started out as the son of a British Conservative Party official with a PG Wodehouse double-barreled name and a sister who was a Victoria’s Secret model and ex-wife of tennis champ Yanick Noah.
But then Mohammed Atta and the 9/11 gang would have seemed pretty funny if you’d run into them in that lapdance club they went to before the big day where the girls remembered them only as very small tippers. Most terrorists are jokes until the bomb goes off.
I quoted that passage by Mark in my post in late August concerning the fellow named “Douglas McAuthur McCain,” who was born in Illinois, raised in Minneapolis, moved to San Diego — and given a name by his parents that honors (phonetically at least) two prominent American fighting men, of course eventually joined the military.
Not ours, but ISIS in Syria, where he was killed on the battlefield.
Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, the Ottawa terrorist, had a similarly strange background. As Glenn Reynolds noted, he was the “son of a jihadist and a Social Justice Warrior:”
Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, the slain 32-year-old suspected killer of a Canadian Forces soldier near Parliament Hill, was a labourer and small-time criminal – a man who had had a religious awakening and seemed to have become mentally unstable.
Mr. Zehaf-Bibeau was born in 1982 and was the son of Bulgasem Zehaf, a Quebec businessman who appears to have fought in 2011 in Libya, and Susan Bibeau, the deputy chairperson of a division of Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board. The two were divorced in 1999.
“That’s a toxic blend,” Glenn drolly quipped.
Then there was the woman beheaded in a food distribution warehouse in Oklahoma by her coworker last month the proverbial “recent convert to Islam,” a town where another beheading was near-simultaneously threatened by another apparent convert to, well, two guesses.
Speaking of toxic, is it just me, or does it seem like freelance one-off Islamofascist terrorists are slowly increasing in number in North America? A favorite cliche of the left is addressing a problem’s “root causes” — are we doing anything to address any of the root causes of this issue?
Join the conversation as a VIP Member