What can one do with a stolen school bus? The mind reels, but in one recent case in New Jersey, we’re lucky we never found out.
The Justice Department announced Thursday that a young man named Bader Alzahrani, who came all the way from Saudi Arabia to pursue the American Dream, has pled guilty to “one count of an indictment charging him with interstate transportation of a stolen vehicle.” It seems that back on Jan. 17, 2023, “the Livingston, New Jersey Board of Education reported that a school bus was stolen from a parking lot.” As it happened, the bus theft took place across the street from an unoccupied house that had been broken into two days earlier.
The crimes were connected: as it turned out, Alzahrani broke into the house and then stole the bus two days later. According to a criminal complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, a backpack was found in the broken-into house, containing Alzahrani’s Saudi passport and a number of “other items that appeared to belong to Alzahrani.” Among these items were journals that contained entries in both English and Arabic.
The entries were nothing short of hair-raising. Alzahrani wrote: “Why didn’t you slaughter the police officer who threw the Quran?” It’s unclear to whom or what Alzahrani was referring. Back in 2005, a Muslim in Britain claimed that a police officer threw his Qur’an in the trash while arresting him. Was Alzahrani still seething about that incident, which took place when he was five years old, almost two decades later? Or did he have in mind some other police officer who allegedly threw a Qur’an? Either way, the young man wanted the cop slaughtered, which might have thrilled, or at least titillated, the “Defund the Police” crowd but didn’t suggest that Alzahrani was prepared to become a loyal, stable, productive member of American society.
In fact, Alzahrani’s other journal entries ruled that out clearly. He wrote: “This is a war, and there will be losses, and collateral losses. … It is a war and y’all started, feel the rage.” The war he had in mind would be extremely bloody: “Destruction of the new world and the earth will be destroyed from all sides.” It was a religious war: “God I am ready for your orders. I want to live the rest of my life to serve you and the religion.” Alzahrani added: “Blood, blood, destruction, destruction. Allah.”
Amid all this, Alzahrani anticipated coming fashions by throwing in some antisemitism: “Jews control everything,” he wrote, without explaining how the Jews compelled him to steal a school bus. He also wrote: “F**k each and every Jewish person” and “F**k you privileged whitey.” According to the complaint, “the Journals also included entries concerning ‘Jihad’ and how Alzahrani did not intend to return to Saudi Arabia.” He also doesn’t seem to have placed a whole lot of emphasis on his studies, despite being in the United States on a student visa: “In or around October 2022, Alzahrani left the university in which he was enrolled and was reported missing.”
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There is no indication in the criminal complaint against Alzahrani about what exactly he intended to do with his purloined school bus, or what connection, if any, the hate-filled and violent rants in his journals had to do with the bus theft. Nonetheless, anyone who could write the kinds of things that Alzahrani wrote clearly had malign intentions that would likely have manifested themselves in some form before he returned to his homeland.
We can be grateful that all Alzahrani did was steal a bus and that no one got hurt in the process. Nevertheless, this incident should make American authorities reexamine some of their basic assumptions, although that’s about as likely as the Democrats throwing Kamala under Alzahrani’s bus and nominating Trump this week.
Yes, not all Muslims are terrorists, but when someone such as Bader Alzahrani comes from the land of fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers, a place where the jihad ideology is widely held, American officials should not be sanguine about what kind of havoc this young man could have wreaked. This time, authorities caught the jihadi in time. We can only hope that they’ll always be so lucky.
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