Weekend Jolt: The Threat of Jihadist Terrorism Lives On

WITH AUDREY FAHLBERG

January 04 2025

The Threat of Jihadist Terrorism Lives On

Dear Weekend Jolter,

New Year's celebrations in New Orleans came to a halt in the wee hours of January 1 when news broke that a man had driven a pickup truck into a crowd of people on Bourbon Street and then opened fire, killing at least 14 people and injuring dozens more. The 42-year-old perpetrator, U.S. Army veteran Shamsud-Din Jabbar of Texas, was killed at the scene in a shootout with police, during which he wounded two officers.

The FBI said Wednesday that officials are "working with our partners to investigate this as an act of terrorism," walking back a conflicting assessment earlier that day from New Orleans special FBI agent Alethea Duncan, who said that the incident was not considered at the time to be a “terrorist event."

To wit: Law enforcement officials said that an ISIS flag was found attached to Jabbar's rental vehicle and multiple explosives were found on and around the scene. And the suspect posted a series of videos on Facebook in the lead-up to the mass murder in which he pledged allegiance to ISIS and spoke about dreams he'd had of killing his family.

Why the initial conflicting assessments from authorities? Here's Noah Rothman's analysis of Duncan's "reflexive dismissal" of Jabbar's terroristic motives:

There are hard calls to make here. Charity and discretion should compel those of good faith to acknowledge the difficulties. In the immediate wake of a terrorist event, does it serve the public interest to provide anxious Americans with unvetted, raw information that could contribute as much to a panic as to enhanced vigilance? The answer isn't obvious. But the alternative to providing the public with information that may produce undesirable behaviors cannot be the distribution of misinformation designed to manipulate them. Too often, public officials have deferred to the idea that the public needs to be controlled more than informed. . . .

We may never know enough about the internal deliberations that culminated in Agent Duncan's promotion of a falsehood — a deception that could be attributed just as easily to the fog of war as to a sordid impulse to save the public from themselves. But the fact that we cannot rule out the latter, given how frequently American luminaries and public officials resort to promoting manipulative fabrications, is part of the problem.

American institutionalists spend a lot of time thinking about how they might restore the public's faith in the country's governing bodies. They should start by displaying the sort of trust in the American public that they expect the Americans to invest in them.

Hours after the New Orleans attack, a Tesla Cybertruck filled with explosives detonated in front of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, killing the driver and injuring at least seven others. The man behind the wheel, 37-year-old active-duty Army Green Beret Matthew Alan Livelsberger, sustained what law enforcement officials believe was a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head before the blast.

Federal authorities have found "no definitive link" between the two incidents, our Haley Strack reports, though the suspects in the New Orleans and Las Vegas attacks notably rented their trucks through Turo, the same peer-to-peer rental company.

One thing we know for certain? "A new year has begun with a horrific reminder that the longstanding challenge of jihadist terrorism has not disappeared," as the NR editors write.

This week's deadly attack on Bourbon Street is eerily similar to another attack that occurred just last month in Germany, when a 50-year-old man originally from Saudi Arabia plowed his car into a Christmas market in Magdeburg, killing five and injuring hundreds. In that case, the attacker’s motives remain murky. But the active threat of terrorism is real: We've seen many instances of jihadist-influenced vehicular homicides in recent years in the U.S. and around the globe. And in October, the Justice Department announced that U.S. officials had charged an Afghan national for conspiring to conduct an Election Day terrorist attack in Oklahoma in the name of ISIS.

U.S. officials have been warning for months about the threat of foreign attacks on domestic soil. Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee back in March 2024, Army General and CENTCOM commander Michael E. Kurilla raised the alarm about the increased threat of the Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISIS-K) in particular. “I assess ISIS-Khorasan retains the capability and will to attack U.S. and Western interests abroad in as little as six months and with little to no warning," Kurilla told the committee. “Today, the central region faces its most volatile security situation in the past half century. This is not the same central region as last year."

Also last spring, outgoing FBI director Christopher Wray said he's seen "the threat from foreign terrorists rise to a whole nother level after" Hamas's brutal attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023. "Looking back over my career in law enforcement, I'd be hard pressed to think of a time where so many threats to our public safety and national security were so elevated all at once. But that is the case as I sit here today," Wray said in his testimony before members of the House Appropriations Committee.

As our Jim Geraghty put it in Thursday's Morning Jolt: "Whatever you think of the U.S. 'war on terror' and whether it ever ended, the threat of terrorism never completely disappeared. You may not be interested in terrorism, but terrorism is interested in you."

Might these New Year's Day attacks affect the confirmations of some of Trump's more unconventional national-security cabinet picks? Of course, not every nominee will need the extra lift. Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), Trump's secretary of state pick, is expected to sail through the confirmation process with support from Democrats. But others, like Tulsi Gabbard, tapped to be the director of national intelligence, are expected to have a tougher time getting confirmed. (Check out my pre-Christmas reporting on her confirmation strategy here.)

The tragedy in New Orleans may make it more politically unpalatable for on-the-fence senators to vote no on Trump’s controversial nominees, especially now that Senate Republican leaders are expressing a renewed sense of urgency about putting the incoming administration’s national security team in place.

"Lives depend on it," newly elected Senate GOP whip John Barrasso wrote in a New Year's Day post on X. Added newly elected Senate GOP leader John Thune in a post later that day: "The threat posed by ISIS will outlast this administration, and this is a clear example of why the Senate must get President Trump's national security team in place as quickly as possible."

NAME. RANK. LINK.

EDITORIALS

On the late 39th president: Jimmy Carter, R.I.P.

On the speaker election: Republicans Should Stick with Mike Johnson as Speaker

On the intra-MAGA spat over immigration: The H-1B Program Is Badly in Need of Reform

ARTICLES

Ryan Mills: A Beaver-Meat Ban, Secret Gender Transitions, and a Drug Injection Free-for-All: The Wild Blue-State Laws of 2024

Philip Klein: Jimmy Carter Was a Terrible President — and an Even Worse Former President

Philip Klein: In Defense of Speaking Ill of Jimmy Carter

Jack Butler: Jimmy Carter and National Review

Rich Lowry: Of Course Elon Musk Is Correct about Obesity Drugs

Dominic Pino: Manmohan Singh, R.I.P.

Andrew McCarthy: Will Trump's DOJ Cooperate with Alvin Bragg in the Luigi Mangione Case?

Noah Rothman: Pramila Jayapal Makes No Sense

Caroline Downey: Woman Sues Prison for Housing Her with Trans Child Molester Who Allegedly Sexually Assaulted Her

Jeff Blehar: Looking Back at 2024 Is as Healthy as Staring at the Sun — So Let's Do It

Jimmy Quinn: U.N. Rapporteur Urges Medical Boycott of Israel

Jim Geraghty: The Last-Minute Push from the Lamest of Lame Ducks

James Lynch: Musk Promises 'War' over H-1B Visa Issue, Suggests Opponents Are 'Unrepentant Racists' Who Should be Booted from GOP

CAPITAL MATTERS

Matt Weidinger bids adieu to our spendthrift lame duck: Farewell, President Stimulus

LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.

Brian Allen, on a grand exhibit coming to Chicago and Fort Worth: The 'Myth and Marble' of Rome Comes to America

Armond White on a certain kind of corruption: Saturday Night Is SNL's Propaganda Origin Story

Giancarlo Sopo on a remake of the classic vampire story: Nosferatu Wrestles with Darkness to Find the Light

RING IN THE NEW YEAR WITH THESE NR EXCERPTS

Andy McCarthy lays into the FBI's initial dismissal of the New Orleans attacker's terroristic motives and explains why it is "irrational to refrain from stating forthrightly that a terrorist attack is being investigated as a terrorist attack." Read more from Andy here:

As we know from many past experiences, initial reports on these incidents tend to be rife with error. I don't mean to be opaque here; it's just that this mass-casualty incident happened only a few hours ago, and there is much we just don't know.

That said, there should be no hesitancy in saying that this incident is being investigated as a terrorist attack. It was an obvious mass-murder attack by someone who was clearly trying to kill as many as possible — even prepared to kill with other weapons once the truck-weaponization component of the attack was completed. The attack, moreover, fits a common terrorism pattern of vehicle-ramming attacks.

Nevertheless, Alethea Duncan, the special agent in charge (SAC) of the FBI's New Orleans Field Office, stated at a press conference this morning that the bureau does not consider the mass-murder attack a "terrorist event" at this point. The same unidentified official who told NBC the suspect "is believed to be" dead amplified that the bureau is investigating the incident as a "potential terrorist attack" but must be careful in the words it uses publicly at this premature stage.

This is maddening, but in the FBI, as it has "evolved" since the Obama era, it is standard operating procedure.

There should be no problem stating that one is investigating what is manifestly a terrorist attack as a terrorist attack. One investigates based on educated suspicion — there is no requirement that one must be able prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt in order to investigate it on the assumption that it is what it appears to be. That is common sense.

But the FBI long ago retired common sense out of fear of being perceived — by its "partners" in the Muslim community and its superiors in Washington — as equating terrorism with Islam. Ergo, the FBI is reluctant to use the T-word in the absence of solid evidence establishing "operational ties" between the suspect in an attack and a known terrorist organization.

Of course, this obscures the very real possibility that the suspect may be "inspired" by jihadist doctrine, even if he is not a member of a known jihadist organization. But the FBI can't acknowledge that. This is due to Obama-Biden guidance that has transmogrified counterterrorism, which tends to be ideologically driven, into "countering violent extremism," in which investigators are instructed to blind themselves to ideology and focus only on violence. An acknowledgment by the bureau that an attacker may have been "radicalized" by fundamentalist Islam would implicitly concede that there is something about that ideology that inspires violent attacks against infidels. Can't have that.

This dizzying illogic also explains why the FBI hesitates to identify the suspects in these cases even though investigators usually discover the identity in short order. If the suspect is a Muslim, this naturally feeds into the commonsense conclusion that the suspect was catalyzed by scripturally based jihadist doctrine — precisely the conclusion the FBI has been trained to resist.

As our octogenarian president prepares to leave the White House for good, the Editors reflect on the obvious — yes, he was always too old for the job:

Given the stakes involved, the journey America has traveled in the span of those four years — from the raising of dismissed qualms about President Biden's mental decline at the start of his term to a cynical denouement where we are expected to shruggingly grant that our president is and has always been mere nominal fiction — is the single most scandalous, and poorly reported, story in 21st century American politics.

CBS's Jan Crawford said much the same thing on Face the Nationthis past weekend, applying it only to the year 2024; she tactfully understates the matter. If one trusts the reporting of the Wall Street Journal — and expect more to emerge soon to buttress its claims – then President Biden's mental and physical decline was in fact evident as early as the spring of 2021, mere months after he took office. Not only was this concealed by the White House, who managed Biden carefully to keep him out of public (and even private) eyes, it was treated with immense indifference — even hostility — by the Washington, D.C. press corps whose job it is to cover the presidency.

Now we are told the real story. Now we are "allowed" to know that which the American people, by all public polling, understood long before Joe Biden ever took the stage on June 27, 2024: The president of the United States was mentally collapsing, and nobody outside of conservative dissidents wanted to talk about it until Joe Biden forced the matter upon us all by dissolving in public. Just because this is pathetic does not mean it is not also disgraceful.

Dominic Pino considers some of Jimmy Carter's greatest legislative accomplishments — deregulating "air and surface transportation" — and explains why the late U.S. president got so much flak from progressives for signing them into law:

Since Phil already laid out the comprehensive case against Jimmy Carter, with which I agree, I wanted to note that despite all of that, Carter did sign three of the best laws Congress has passed in the last 100 years — and many of the progressives who love Carter hate all three of them:

The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. Before this law, the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) got to decide which airlines operated which routes and what prices they were allowed to charge. Carter appointed regulatory economist Alfred Kahn as CAB chairman and charged him with dismantling the agency. The Airline Deregulation Act eliminated the Civil Aeronautics Board — abolished a federal agency, in real life! — and freed airlines to compete with each other. Deregulation resulted in the advent of low-cost carriers and the wider availability of air travel to the middle class.
The Motor Carrier Act of 1980. Before this law, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) got to decide which trucking companies operated which interstate routes and what prices they were allowed to charge. The Motor Carrier Act removed those powers, and today the trucking industry is one of the most competitive industries in the United States. Thousands of independent owner-operators compete to offer the lowest prices and fastest service, with constant churn of firms entering and exiting the trucking market. The law also helped break the power of the Teamsters, who were no longer negotiating with legally protected monopolies for labor contracts and could not unionize the mass of independent truckers.
The Staggers Rail Act of 1980. Before this law, the ICC also got to decide which railroads operated which routes and what prices they were allowed to charge. The Staggers Act, named for Representative Harley Staggers (D., W.Va.), removed those powers, preventing freight rail from reaching the same fate that passenger rail had reached nine years earlier: federal takeover. Railroads were allowed to close down unprofitable routes that the government had been forcing them to operate, leaving them more money to invest in their fleets and infrastructure. The rates freight-rail customers paid declined while railroads' profitability increased, and the U.S. today has by far the largest freight-rail network in the world.

CODA

We at National Review hope everyone had a restful holiday break and wish you all a happy new year and a promising start to 2025. Judd will be back soon.

Thanks for reading.