Houston's Muslims Are Not to Blame for the New Orleans Attack

Edited by Sam Thielman

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This edition of FOREVER WARS is dedicated to the memories of everyone killed in New Orleans on New Year's Day. It's also dedicated to the memory of my friend Jeanne Brooks, whom we learned yesterday has left us after a battle with cancer. It's only January 6 and already I don't like 2025. 

This edition won't discuss the near-simultaneous detonation of the Cybertruck in Las Vegas by Green Beret Sgt. Matthew Livelsberger. My next Zeteo column, which I filed last night, is about Livelsberger. Paid subscribers to FOREVER WARS will get it free in their inboxes the day after the Zeteo team publishes it. If that's not yet you, you know what button to push.

Instead I feel it necessary to address something I don't always: media coverage of the New Orleans attacker, Shamsud-din Jabbar. Or, rather, coverage of his community, with the implication that it holds the key to his disgusting act of mass murder. This is a noxious pattern in journalism whenever it appears an act of terrorism is attributable to a Muslim. It discredits our profession and obscures the crimes people like Jabbar commit in the name of exposing their motivations.  

There are several stories I've read that display this pattern, but the one that motivated me to write this was a multi-byline piece published in the New York Times called, in the print version I read, "A Path of Isolation and Radicalization, Leading To New Orleans." The vagueness of the print headline is a clue to the piece being what we call a pull-together: something that has a bunch of string but doesn't knit into a sweater, published because it's Something about a major recent event. I've contributed to my share of these. (The online edition has a different hed.) 

In 2004, Osama bin Laden boasted that all someone had to do was to declare themselves to be al-Qaeda to get the Americans to come running. Jabbar's late-breaking declaration to have joined ISIS is doing the same work. Perhaps evidence will emerge that Jabbar actually joined ISIS in a meaningful way. Right now there is only evidence that he declared himself to be part of the group, much as murderers including the Pulse nightclub killer did during the brief life of ISIS' so-called caliphate. Theoreticians of violence ranging from al-Qaeda's Abu Musab al-Suri to the KKK's Louis Beam have in recent decades argued the virtues of "leaderless jihad." Such cases take the term "affiliation" past the point of absurdity. 

That absurdity nevertheless sent the Times team on a journey for answers among Jabbar's family and neighbors. That is not an inappropriate investigative endeavor. But for publication, the material the reporters gather simply doesn’t support the path-of-jihadist-radicalization frame that holds the pull-together together. This is the piece's nutgraf, the paragraph that presents the point of a news story: 

[N]ew details from recordings, interviews, and public records trace Mr. Jabbar's growing discontent with American society and a shift toward what was at first a more conservative version of Islam, and then something much darker. Much of the scrutiny is on the past year, when Mr. Jabbar deepened his isolation from others as he moved into a Muslim neighborhood just north of Houston, a cluster of mobile homes where chickens, goats and cats roam freely through backyards. 

Putting aside the weird exoticization of what sounds like a working-class community, the reported fact of Jabbar's isolation sure suggests that his family and his neighbors, let alone his religion (as opposed to his religiosity), don't actually hold explanations for Jabbar's crime. Yet the pull-together persists, even as a relative tells the paper, "I don't think I ever heard the word Allah said." An "expert on Islamic extremism" the paper quotes gently points out that "the views contained in [Jabbar's] SoundCloud recordings showed a puritan bent but were not associated with a violent interpretation of the faith on their own." 

Most egregious are these paragraphs: 

The two mosques in his small neighborhood represent two distinct interpretations of Islam. One, the Baitus Samee Mosque, has come under criticism from more conservative Muslims, some of whom have branded the mosque’s followers as “apostates.” When graffiti to that effect was sprayed on a wall of the mosque in August, the F.B.I. posted a $10,000 reward, hoping to make an arrest.

The other mosque, known as the Bilal Mosque, closest to where Mr. Jabbar lived, has drawn attention of its own, as on at least one occasion, it hosted a speaker who made inflammatory remarks denouncing Jews.

Congregants said they had not seen Mr. Jabbar at either one.

Multiple congregants quoted in the piece by name tell the reporters this. If there is no evidence Jabbar attended these mosques, these paragraphs simply don't belong in a story about Jabbar. They do no journalistic work and instead spread innuendo and collective suspicion over the community. The Times kicker reports that "outside [the Bilal Mosque], a helicopter that appeared to be watching the gathering below circled overhead." Such law-enforcement presence underscores that there are real consequences for intimations of collective responsibility. 

Sandwiched in the middle of the piece are potential investigative leads that could explain Jabbar's act of mass murder. They're mundane, not as sexy as Guy Joins ISIS, and go underexplored: 

Mr. Jabbar’s personal troubles at first appeared in more worldly forms. There were divorces and business troubles and disputes over finances.

With the marital separations came alimony and child support for his two daughters, now ages 20 and 15, and his young son. In 2021, court records from his third divorce show that he was ordered to pay $1,350 a month to his third wife. He was working in real estate with his relatives to earn extra income, in part because of debts: The house involved in his divorce case was facing foreclosure, he reported in 2022, with $27,000 in back payments owed on the mortgage. 

Maybe worth devoting more effort to this explanation, since his "closer family" tells the paper that this largely accounts for the unraveling they saw in someone who got to the point of posting that "the release of 'Get Rich or Die Tryin,' a rap album by 50 Cent [was connected] to a series of murders in his neighborhood." Many more people will experience divorce and financial hardship than will ever be tempted to declare themselves ISIS members. But we tend to recognize the absurdity and offensiveness of casting collective suspicion on them. Similarly, last month, the FBI discovered on the property of a farm near Norfolk, Virginia the largest cache of improvised explosive devices in the bureau's 100-year history. Neither FBI agents nor journalists went out looking into the churches and backyards of Isle of Wight County for clues to Brad Stafford's apparent Path To Radicalization. Again; rightly so.

One final thing. I don't think it's right to focus overly much on the reporters themselves, since pull-togethers are usually the result of editors. That said, I was surprised to see the last byline—though not someone who reported from Houston, it should be said—go to Rukmini Callimachi of the disgraced Caliphate podcast. Without exceptionalizing her, read Rozina Ali's excellent essay "The ISIS Beat" for why that's a red flag. 

ANTONY BLINKEN, SECRETARY OF STATE WHO FACILITATED ISRAEL'S GENOCIDE IN GAZA, has a valedictory interview with the Times. It's what you would expect: genteel deflections from Blinken that ask the reader to imagine how much worse Gaza, and Lebanon, and the broader Middle East would have been if not for his team's valiant efforts, rather than reckoning with how horrific Gaza, and Lebanon and the broader Middle East are, because of his team's valiant efforts. I expect we'll get a lot of these kinds of interviews for the remainder of the public careers of Biden's relatively young foreign policy team. You already know how I feel about that. 

Peter Beinart unloads: 

[Blinken] essentially talks about the US relationship with Israel as if America doesn’t give Israel weapons, or as if the notion that we would actually question whether we give Israel these weapons simply cannot be discussed, right. It’s completely outside of his mental framework, right. So, he says, ‘no one needs to remind me of the sufferings’—this is Palestinians—‘because it’s something that drives me every single day.’ Okay, so first of all, let’s just be honest. That’s bullshit. It’s a bold-faced lie. Antony Blinken might say that to make him fall asleep at night, but nothing in his actual actions suggests that he’s driven every single day by Palestinians suffering in Gaza because he keeps supporting the sending of those weapons, right. …

This is what William Fulbright famously called during Vietnam the arrogance of power. The arrogance of power. The arrogance and, frankly, the intellectual idiocy of power. We need to create an environment in this country, in the media, and in whatever institutions that people like Antony Blinken are going to be spending their time in when they leave the Biden administration, that will not accept those answers, in which you simply can’t say, no, it’s not [genocide], and then walk away.

Meanwhile, according to Axios, Jake "It Was All Good On October 6th" Sullivan presented the sundowning lame-duck president with options to attack Iran "if the Iranians move towards a nuclear weapon before Jan. 20." These are people who consider themselves the responsible faction in U.S. foreign policymaking circles.

ISRAEL MUST FREE DOCTOR HUSSAM ABU SAFIYA. Israel initially denied detaining the director of the Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza. Haaretz reports that the Physicians For Human Rights Israel recently submitted a habeas corpus request for Dr. Abu Safiya. It notes that "as far as Abu Safiya's family knows, he is not connected to any security activity and that they are not aware of any reason that could justify his imprisonment." The obvious reason for his detention is his provision of medical services to the Palestinins of Gaza. We should call Dr. Abu Safiya what he is: a hostage. 

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No one is prouder of WVW than her older sibling, REIGN OF TERROR: HOW THE 9/11 ERA DESTABILIZED AMERICA AND PRODUCED TRUMP, which is available now in hardcover, softcover, audiobook and Kindle edition. And on the way is a new addition to the family: THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN.