An Outrage, and Then a Tragedy, in New Orleans

I was going to write this column yesterday, mere hours after a radicalized jihadist Muslim drove a Ford Lightning pickup truck through a semi-crowded Bourbon Street New Year’s revelry in New Orleans, killing 15 and injuring 30.

I couldn’t do it. For two reasons. First, the information available mere hours after such an event is notoriously unreliable and cannot be sufficient as a base for any real analysis.

And second, I was simply too pissed off to write something useful.

Those of us hailing from the Big Easy are used to tragedies. They’re commonplace in New Orleans. There’s always a terrible story someone has to tell — the freewheeling lifestyle leads to accidents, bad health outcomes, unhappy family life and other sad results, though few who live here would change much about the soulful life in South Louisiana.

And that doesn’t take into account the toll things like hurricanes and the quality of the local leadership will inflict on the people of that area.

We see tragedies. We’re experts in tragedy. What happened in the early hours of New Year’s Day on Bourbon Street was not a tragedy.

It was an outrage. An atrocity.

The tragedy came later.

Shamsud-Din Jabbar, an Army veteran, real estate broker, and six-figure Deloitte consultant from Houston who was somehow dead broke and had burned through two marriages on his way to finding jihadist Islam, seems to fit a common pattern of having a life which made absolutely zero sense.

He’d been working as an IT specialist at Deloitte since 2021, making some $120,000 per year, and yet Jabbar was living in a rundown trailer in a lousy part of Houston with goats and chickens skulking about the property. Within walking distance of Jabbar’s home was Masjid Bilal, a somewhat notorious mosque which, mere hours following Jabbar’s terrorist act, put out a communique to its members directing them to refuse to cooperate with law enforcement or the media (not altogether unreasonable) and to direct all inquiries to CAIR (massive red flag).

We don’t know that Masjid Bilal was the mosque which radicalized Jabbar. It’s fair to say the imam there was insufficiently influential in turning him away from violence.

And everyone in his neighborhood was shocked — shocked! — that he would go off on such a rampage.

Yes, of course. You’re all very shocked. Because if you weren’t shocked, that would mean you might have the blood of his victims on your hands. And while we don’t do collective guilt in this country, woke denunciations of straight white men notwithstanding, those members of his family and mosque who saw him descend into darkness can’t plausibly claim they couldn’t see where this was leading.

What Jabbar did wasn’t tragic. It was outrageous. The tragedy came when the Federal Bureau of Investigation alighted onto the scene.

In the early hours of New Year’s Day, a press conference was called. There, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell and Anne Kirkpatrick, the city’s police chief, were joined by FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Alethea Duncan. The latter, a rather distracting stud protruding from the side of her nose, proceeded to contradict the mayor by denying that what Jabbar had done was to commit a terrorist act.

Hold up.

An FBI Agent with a nose ring who can barely speak coherent English sentences told the media that a terrorist driving a truck with an ISIS flag killing 10 Americans is NOT a terrorist attack!?!

Seriously. listen to this

We need Kash Patel NOW!pic.twitter.com/v2sjeJ2bcH

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) January 1, 2025

This, hours after the FBI had gained possession of the ISIS flag Jabbar had proudly displayed from a pole attached to the truck’s trailer hitch as he mowed down the unbelievers. The time for downplaying terrorism as a cause of the event had long past, and yet the clear DEI hire was still flogging away at the standard narrative.

Duncan then appeared at another press avail, minus the nose ring, and backtracked to say that yes, it was a terrorist attack. She further said, “We do not believe that Jabbar was solely responsible” for the attack.

And officials representing the city, state, and federal government explained that a manhunt was underway for Jabbar’s confederates while the Sugar Bowl, which was to take place in the Superdome not very far from Bourbon Street, would be postponed until Thursday afternoon.

But then on Thursday morning the FBI was represented at a press conference not by Duncan but by an authoritative white man from Washington named Christopher Raia, of the FBI’s counterterrorism division, who announced that the FBI’s latest judgment was that Jabbar had acted alone.

Raia cited videos made by Jabbar in the minutes before the attack as evidence for the contention this was a lone-wolf affair. Surveillance footage of ice-cooler bombs left in multiple locations around New Orleans’ French Quarter, he said, indicated those were planted by Jabbar and not other individuals as was previously believed.

And this was treated with relief by the city and state officials at that press briefing, because if Jabbar acted alone and he was dead, well, then there was nothing left for the tourist paradise of New Orleans to do but to hold jazz funerals for the dead after putting on a big party at the Sugar Bowl.

And to toast Christopher Raia of the FBI for solving both the problem of Agent Nosering and her nonexistent credibility and the public’s angst at the idea an active jihadist plot to cause mayhem among tourists would turn New Orleans into a ghost town after working hours.

Except nothing about this passes the smell test.

The quotable and irascible Sen. John Kennedy, who was on hand for the press conferences on New Year’s Day, sounded a very skeptical tone at the outset of the investigation and indicated he believed Jabbar’s rampage was part of something bigger.

“There’s a lot of information going around. Some of it is actually true. Some of it isn’t,” Kennedy said at a press conference with law enforcement Wednesday afternoon.

“Here’s what I want to ask from the federal government: Catch these people and then tell the American people the truth. Now, I don’t want you to tell us yet anything is going to interfere with the investigation. And there are things that I’ve been told that I think are true that I’m not sharing with you today because it could interfere with their investigation,” he went on.

“But after we get to the bottom of this, they need to tell the American people the truth, and the people in New Orleans the truth, and the people of America the truth.”

Kennedy also warned: “I will promise you this: I will, when it is appropriate in this investigation is complete, you will find out what happened and who was responsible, or I will raise fresh hell and I will chase those in the federal government who are responsible for telling us what happened like they stole Christmas.”

Less than a day later Jabbar “acted alone” and Bourbon Street was back open for business in time for the Sugar Bowl.

Acting ‘Alone’ in New Orleans?

And you’re to believe that a man who had so butchered his personal and professional life that he was keeping company with goats and chickens while babbling about the war between “believers and unbelievers” had …

• Procured two separate firearms, a Glock 9 millimeter pistol and a .308 rifle both reported stolen in separate states;
• Rented a Ford Lightning EV pickup truck perfect for the purpose of the attack given its weight and acceleration;
• Rented an AirBnb in the St. Roch neighborhood near to Bourbon Street which magically caught fire a couple of hours following his attack;
• Assembled and placed explosive devices along what might have been the route of his escape from Bourbon Street, one of which was near the St. Louis Cathedral; and
• Drove around making and posting something of a video manifesto proclaiming his allegiance to ISIS just before barreling through the crowd on Bourbon Street.

This would make Jabbar out to be a stunningly competent terrorist. Except he really wasn’t.

Jabbar bypassed the New Orleans Police SUV which was parked sideways across Bourbon Street to block vehicle traffic; he just jumped the curb and drove on the sidewalk before pushing the pedal to the metal and beginning his rampage. But why did he wait until 3 in the morning to kick off the attack? By then, most of the revelers had decamped for their hotel rooms and for home. Bourbon Street on New Year’s Eve is a sea of humanity packed so tightly it’s somewhat difficult to move around in until 1:30 or 2:00 a.m.; after that, the crowd begins to peter out.

Not to mention that he managed to crash the truck into a portable crane parked on the street just a couple of blocks from the beginning of his rampage, something which prevented him from killing lots of other innocents.

He could have killed 150, or even 1500, instead of 15, had he gone in earlier. And almost anyone would have figured this out during the planning of the attack. But not Shamsud Din Jabbar, the lone wolf terrorist mastermind who acted alone.

How plausible is this?

Is it more plausible that someone radicalized him, supplied him, gave him a prime-quality jihadist blueprint to work from and set him off on his bloody errand, and he managed to botch the execution of the plan just as he botched his life?

What say you, Christopher Raia?

And what say you, Sen. Kennedy? Will you raise that fresh hell you promised now that the FBI has demanded you buy their tragic pig in a poke?

There is no credibility left in that agency. It shouldn’t be the lead investigative agency on major terrorist events ever again.

READ MORE from Scott McKay:

Five Quick Things: The EOY 5QT

Biden: Commutations For Murderers, Persecutions For Normal Americans

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