In San Francisco on Wednesday, a man named Ajmal Amani, screaming “Allahu akbar,” charged at police with a large kitchen knife and was shot multiple times with a handgun and beanbag projectiles. Amani had previously threatened to kill a man in his residential hotel with the same large knife and later died of his wounds. Amani was, according to the Associated Press, “a former Afghan interpreter for U.S. special forces who had been shot several times during more than five years of service and struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder.” That is a tragedy, but it’s also a warning: how many of the tens of thousands of unvetted Afghans who have been brought to the U.S. by Old Joe Biden’s handlers are a similar threat?
The police video should be required viewing for all the “Defund the Police” advocates, as it shows calm, cautious, and careful police officers being charged unprovoked by Amani, who continues to invoke Allah even after he charges the officers and is shot. Nor was this the Afghan refugee’s first run-in with the law: according to the AP, he “was charged with assault with a deadly weapon in 2019 for allegedly slashing a city park ranger with a box cutter who said he appeared to be in an ‘altered mental state.’”
According to the San Francisco Standard, “in November 2019, Amani was arrested after crashing a woman’s car near the Seventh Street off-ramp of Highway 80 in San Francisco. He was accused of using a boxcutter to cut a city park ranger who stopped at the scene of the crash and tried to pull him from the vehicle…Amani faced attempted murder and other charges in connection with the incident, but a judge dismissed the attempted murder charge at a preliminary hearing.”
Public defender Scott Grant, who represented Amani in that case, said his former client was having a “clear mental health episode.” Grant explained that Amani “was an Afghan interpreter who contracted with the U.S. government over the course of a decade.” He translated for the Navy SEALs and “survived being shot multiple times during his five-year tenure working with the military.” He was given a visa and came to the U.S. but “struggled with severe post-traumatic stress disorder” once here. Grant concluded: “He suffered some of the most horrific trauma anyone could have gone through.” In accord with that, “the remaining assault charges against him were dismissed after he completed mental health diversion.”
But clearly, the mental health treatment didn’t work, and Amani wasn’t pacified by the fact that the country that welcomed him as a refugee was also providing for his welfare: his room in the residential hotel in which he charged the police was paid for by the city of San Francisco.
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Was Ajmal Amani a jihadi? Certainly, his screaming “Allahu akbar” opens up that possibility. And nowadays officials frequently ascribe what is clearly jihad activity to mental illness. American officials, especially in the Biden era, show no signs of ever acknowledging that fact or studying its implications, but it is nonetheless true that Ajami comes from a cultural milieu in which violence against unbelievers is considered to be not only righteous but even therapeutic. The Qur’an tells Muslims that fighting unbelievers can “heal the hearts” of the believers: “Fight them, and Allah will punish them by your hands, and he will lay them low and give you victory over them, and he will heal the hearts of people who are believers. And he will remove the anger of their hearts” (9:14-15). It may be that Ajami, suffering from PTSD or any number of other torments, may have turned to jihad violence in order to heal his own heart.
Ajami also seems to have imbibed the idea of the appropriateness of violence in certain circumstances from the culture of violence in which he was raised. Such considerations, however, are out of bounds for officials in the U.S., who are dogmatically bound to the claim that Islam is a religion of peace that has nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.
And so nothing is more certain than that this incident will pass virtually unnoticed by the political and media elites unless they want to make it into a police brutality case, which would be extremely difficult in light of the manifest professionalism of the police officers in the video. Instead of examining the actual implications of this case, particularly the question of how wise it was to bring thousands of unvetted Afghan migrants to the country, including an unknowable number who may be in the same mental state as Ajmal Amani, we will no doubt soon hear again about the chimerical “white supremacist” terror threat. Propagandists will stick to their preferred narrative.
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