UPDATE: At 9:45 a.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, the FBI in New Orleans posted a statement on its Facebook page, saying: "The FBI is the lead investigative agency, and we are working with our partners to investigate this as an act of terrorism." It is good that they have come around on this rather obvious fact after an FBI special agent initially denied that it was a terror attack, as you can see in the original article below. Will we eventually be told what kind of terrorism was involved here? That remains to be seen.
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At 3:15 a.m. on the morning of New Year’s Day, a man barreled a large truck into a massive crowd of revelers on Canal and Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing at least ten people and injuring dozens more. This was no accident; he was clearly targeting the crowd intentionally. After he crashed his truck, the driver got out and began firing at police officers, injuring two of them, and was himself killed in the firefight with the cops. When the police searched his truck, they found improvised explosive devices.
That much we know. After that, this incident becomes exceedingly strange. At a press conference early Wednesday morning, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell said that the incident was a "terrorist attack," although she provided no details as to what kind of terrorist attack it might have been. And after Cantrell spoke, FBI Special Agent Alethea Duncan said that it was "not a terrorist attack."
So was it a terrorist attack, or was it not? Maybe it all depends on your point of view, or maybe we’ll find out soon enough, but the open and unapologetic contradiction between the mayor and the feds on this point was unusual. And the story gets stranger still.
On X, a photo showed that the truck had a flagpole attached to its back bumper, and the driver was apparently flying some kind of flag.
New Orleans attacker was flying a flag from the truck, but police at the scene intentionally covered it up.
— Kiki (@kikisknees) January 1, 2025
What was that flag? pic.twitter.com/lhiFHLqnEd
What kind, however, is unknown as of this writing on Wednesday morning, for it seemed as if one of the first things that the police did was cover the flag with a coat. Or did they? Another X user posted a different photo of the truck that was apparently taken just moments after the attack, and although the photo itself is not all that clear, asserted that “it was always just a black coat on a pole.”
Would some nut fly a black coat from a flagpole? Sure. Would the cops cover up a flag that an attacker was flying because seeing it might make people think negatively about a group that enjoys protected status from the left and its establishment media lapdogs? That possibility cannot be counted out, either.
So what do we have here? It does seem to have been a terrorist attack, judging from the fact that all accounts say that the driver intentionally plowed into the crowd and that he didn’t stop there, but began firing at the cops, and on top of all that, had explosives. Although the recent vehicular attack at the Christmas Market in Magdeburg, Germany, is mired in controversy over whether or not the attacker had genuinely left Islam as he claimed to have done, vehicular attacks are a favored tactic of Islamic jihadis.
Related: France’s ‘Christian Terrorist’ Turns Out to Have Been a Muslim All Along
In Oct. 2024 in Israel, another truck driver injured 35 people in a vehicular jihad attack at a bus stop near Tel Aviv. Just weeks before that, a Syrian Muslim migrant with a Palestinian flag wounded 31 people in arson and ramming attacks in Essen, Germany. Also in September in Darmstadt, Germany, an Afghan Muslim migrant ran through several red lights at high speed and tried to run over pedestrians, explaining that he did it “on behalf of Allah.” This has happened in the U.S. as well: at Ohio State University in Nov. 2016, a Somali Muslim migrant mowed down students with his car, then jumped out and started stabbing anyone he could reach. Eight people were injured. As far back as 2014, the Islamic State (ISIS) was calling upon Muslims in Western countries to carry out vehicular jihad attacks.
Does this mean that the New Orleans incident was a jihad attack? Of course not. That is particularly true nowadays when so much of the world seems to have gone insane. But it needs to be noted that there are many incidents of jihadis resorting to this tactic, while deliberate car rammings by others are comparatively rare. We can hope that the FBI and New Orleans authorities will follow up with a thorough investigation of that possibility, but woke considerations might intervene, and it might be left unexplored over concerns about “Islamophobia.” There are certainly abundant precedents for that.
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