At first glance the story looks like a Leftist propagandist’s dream: a rookie NYPD cop who just graduated from the police academy on Friday was at work in Time Square on New Year’s Eve when he and another police officer were suddenly and savagely attacked by a machete-wielding white man. Surely the perpetrator is one of those white supremacist terrorists that Old Joe Biden and his handlers keep telling us constitute the biggest terror threat the nation faces today, right? He must have been wearing a MAGA hat and screaming “This is MAGA country” as he attacked the cops, right? Well, not quite.
To be sure, the photos that have become available of the suspect, a 19-year-old Trevor Bickford, do buttress the impression that this is some denizen of Middle-Class America (Bickford is from Wells, Maine) who snapped after two years of lies, authoritarianism, and misrule from the Biden team. In photos taken from his mother’s Facebook page, Bickford is fresh-faced, smiling, clean-cut, and to all appearances seems to be a normal, well-adjusted American. In some, however, Bickford is pictured sporting a kufi, and according to the New York Post, “police are probing whether the suspect is a recently radicalized Islamic extremist.”
Bickford doesn’t seem to have any criminal record, but according to the UK’s Daily Mail, “the FBI in Boston do have an open case on him,” and “he is on a ‘guardian list’ because of his radicalization.” So he was on a “guardian list,” but no one seems to have been doing any guarding: Bickford was free to travel to New York City with an 18-inch machete and attack two cops without anyone noticing or lifting a finger to stop him. Was the FBI too busy hunting for actual “white supremacists” to take any significant notice of Bickford? Were FBI agents too busy coordinating “election crimes” to bother with an earnest young convert to Islam with a machete? According to the New York Post, “Bickford’s aunt notified authorities because he apparently made statements to her indicating a desire to go fight in Afghanistan, police sources said,” but hey, let’s get this new gender chart up in all the FBI offices!
The Daily Mail noted that “the attack happened just outside of the high-security zone where thousands of revelers were screened for weapons as they prepared to ring in 2023.” A police source said wryly: “No backpacks or umbrellas in Times Square. They forgot to mention machetes.” The Daily Mail added that “both officers were slashed in their heads, including the rookie cop who suffered a skull fracture along with an 8-year veteran who had a head laceration.” Bickford may have been aiming to stab both officers in the neck, as per the Qur’an’s dictum, “When you meet the unbelievers, strike the necks” (47:4).
Related: NYC: ‘I Killed Two Police Officers and My Religion Made Me Do It’
Bickford attacked both officers without provocation, apparently in the cause of jihad against non-Muslims, although true to form when it comes to Islamic jihad attacks, officials stated that Bickford’s motive was unclear. Yeah, sure it is. The Daily Mail noted that New York authorities are “looking into whether the suspect had previously posted what they called jihadist writings online and then possibility traveled to New York City to target police.”
In various Facebook posts, Bickford’s mother gushes over him, praising him to the skies and calling him an “old soul.” That’s all heartwarming, but it’s also clear that she and the others around this young man were warmly welcoming of his conversion to Islam, which apparently took place relatively recently. It would have been the height of poor taste, to say nothing of “Islamophobic,” to raise questions about the new convert’s knowledge of and attachment to Islam’s teachings mandating warfare against unbelievers. For over two decades now since 9/11, Americans have been conditioned to think either that such teachings don’t exist or that it is rude to discuss them, as only a “tiny minority of extremists” take them seriously. But the primary lesson of Trevor Bickford’s New Year’s Eve attack ought to be that a young twenty-first-century American can imbibe these teachings easily and be moved to act upon them, and not be stopped even for a second by the claims that “all religions have their extremists” or that “Islam properly understood teaches peace.”
Yet American authorities remain in resolute denial about the nature and magnitude of this problem, which only ensures that there will be many, many more Trevor Bickfords.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member