ISIS Exposed: Beheadings, Slavery, and the Hellish Reality of Radical Islam (13 page)

Less than one week before Haider’s one-man jihadi outburst, Australian authorities arrested fifteen people in connection with a plot to carry out so-called “demonstration killings” in Sydney. ISIS sympathizers allegedly planned to kidnap a random person off the street, cover that person in an Islamic State flag, and behead him or her for the camera in a sickening “demonstration” of the subterranean depths of ISIS’s evil—and its ability to carry out attacks in Western countries.
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If successful, the plot would have sent shockwaves throughout the world and left citizens from Paris to Toronto to New York looking over their shoulders on their morning commutes.

ISIS-style beheading has already come to the West. Besides the September 2014 beheading of the Oklahoma grandmother by an ISIS supporter, in May of 2013 we saw a British soldier nearly decapitated in broad daylight on a London street by a pair of jihadists. The Sydney beheading plot was simply another sign of the times and a harbinger of things to come in ISIS’s budding guerilla war against the West.

The week of October 20, 2014, marked the official arrival of Islamic terrorism to the Great White North. Canadian authorities had arrested several terror suspects in the years following 9/11. The “Toronto 18,” for example, was a massive, eighteen-person cell in Ontario that planned to behead Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. But no Islamic terrorist had ever struck successfully on Canadian soil until a white convert to Islam named Martin Rouleau-Couture—who went by the monikers “Ahmad Rouleau” and “Abu Ibrahim Al-Canadi” in pro-ISIS rants online—mowed down two uniformed Canadian soldiers with his car as they walked across the parking lot of a Quebec strip mall, killing one of them and wounding the other. Rouleau, who was well known to Canadian authorities prior to the attack, then led police on a high-speed chase that ended when his car flipped over into a ditch. He emerged from the car, knife in hand, and charged police, who shot and killed him.
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During the car chase he had phoned a 911 dispatcher and said he carried out the attack, “in the name of Allah.”
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Just two days later, another radicalized convert and ISIS sympathizer, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, shot and killed a Canadian soldier who was standing guard at the National War Memorial in Ottawa. Zehaf-Bibeau then stormed the nearby Canadian parliament building, filled with senior government officials, and opened fire before being shot and killed by the parliament’s sergeant-at-arms.
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The sum of Rouleau and Zehaf-Bibeau’s respective “chip away” attacks was two dead Canadian soldiers—both murdered on Canadian soil in the span of three days—plus wall-to-wall international media coverage. The case of Zehaf-Bibeau also exposed the glaring security vulnerabilities of Canadian government facilities and managed to cripple Canada’s capital city for several hours as police hunted for any possible accomplices.
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A disturbingly impressive accomplishment for a mere “lone wolf” armed with nothing more than a hunting rifle.

On October 11, 2014, the FBI issued a bulletin warning that U.S. law enforcement personnel could be targeted by ISIS supporters.
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Twelve days later, yet another Muslim convert, a thirty-two-year-old man named Zale Thompson, attacked four rookie New York City police officers with a hatchet in broad daylight on a Queens street. Thompson, whose Facebook page featured the obligatory radical Islamic imagery, critically wounded one of the officers with a hatchet blow to the head before being shot and killed. NYPD brass determined that Thompson’s explosion of violence was indeed an act of terrorism, and that Thompson was “self-radicalized.”
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So why are so many recent Muslim converts, like Thompson, drifting into terrorism? Bernard Squarcini, former head of France’s domestic security service, has described the stunning speed and ease with which an individual can become radicalized: “An ideological transformation can be done in three months on the web,” he said. “An individual can at night auto-radicalize himself via the [Internet] and get in touch with leaders of terrorist organizations.”
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It’s unclear what path a New Jersey native named Ali Muhammad Brown took to become a one-man walking jihad. Brown was not a recent
convert; he had been a Muslim for some time. Also, his killing spree occurred in the months before ISIS declared a caliphate and called for attacks against Western civilians. Nevertheless, Brown, who gunned down three people in Washington state and one in New Jersey between April and June 2014, was clearly motivated by Islamist ideology. He told a police investigator, “My mission is vengeance. For the lives, millions of lives are lost every day . . . [in] Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, all these places where innocent lives are being taken every single day. . . . So, a life for a life.”
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This is classic jihadist grievance rhetoric, the kind that all too often resonates with Western Islamists who wish to help their beleaguered brothers overseas. Sometimes they wire money to fund jihad. Other times, as in the case of Brown, they turn to violence.

Former CIA and State Department official Fred Fleitz, now with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., observed, “While Brown was not radicalized by ISIS, I believe recent ISIS propaganda and publicity pushed Brown over the edge to conduct terrorist killings.”
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Fleitz also noted the glaring lack of interest in Brown’s case by the Obama administration and the mainstream media. I guess it would be tough to brand a cross-country murder spree as “workplace violence.”

The lone wolf attacks described above—all of which, besides Ali Muhammad Brown’s multi-state jihadist frenzy, occurred over a span of just four weeks—represent the new normal for the West in the age of ISIS. The flurry of violence by ISIS sympathizers was no coincidence. Each time the Islamic State issues a call for attacks on Western soil, as Abu Mohammed al-Adnani did in September 2014, you can bet that at least some of its fanatical supporters in Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia will respond with rudimentary yet deadly effective lone wolf attacks—or perhaps something much worse.

Take the massacre in Paris of twelve people, including two police officers, at the offices of the French satirical magazine
Charlie Hebdo.
Al Qaeda had long called for attacks against the magazine for its irreverent
cartoons featuring Islam’s prophet Mohammed. On January 7, 2015, Said Kouachi, thirty-four, and his brother, Cherif, thirty-two—both French citizens—responded and stormed the offices of
Charlie Hebdo,
gunning down eleven people, including the magazine’s editor, and then executing a French policeman (who was Muslim) on the street outside of the building. The assault was carried out in a highly professional manner—not surprising, since it was later revealed that the brothers had trained with al Qaeda in Yemen (which claimed responsibility for the attack).
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The pair, who were on both U.S. and UK terror watch lists, fled the scene of the attack and were on the run for two days before being killed by French police in a hostage standoff near Charles De Gaulle Airport.

On January 8, one day after the massacre at
Charlie Hebdo,
another French Muslim, thirty-two-year-old Amedy Coulibaly, an acquaintance of the Kouachi brothers (and, like them, on a U.S. terror watch list),
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shot and killed a French municipal police officer in Paris. The next day, Coulibaly turned up at a Kosher Jewish supermarket in Paris, murdering four people and taking several more hostage before being shot and killed by French security forces.
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In a video published online by the Islamic State after his death, Coulibaly pledged allegiance to ISIS.
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Just two months before his rampage, ISIS had called for attacks against France.
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These sorts of attacks, which were once sporadic, promise to only increase in frequency thanks to ISIS’s continued success in expanding its caliphate and inciting its followers through social media. Shortly after the attacks by Coulibaly and the Kouachi brothers in France, Belgian authorities broke up a terror cell that was reportedly directed by the Islamic State. Members of the cell “had traveled to Syria and met with ISIS” to plan attacks in Europe.
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The ultimate goal, again, is to instill terror in the hearts of Western citizens and turn cities into virtual battlefields, as in Mumbai, Paris, Boston, and Ottawa. ISIS wishes to create an environment in which Western cities are besieged—not just sporadically, but on a sustained basis by self-starter jihadists hitting a variety of civilian, military, and law enforcement
targets. If you’re an American ISIS supporter seeking to wage jihad, the calculation is simple: Why travel to the battlefields of Syria and Iraq when you can create one in your own backyard, striking not against Iraqi, Syrian, or Kurdish troops but against Islam’s greatest enemy, the United States? Die in a firefight with Iraqi security forces in Anbar province, and you fade into the dustbin of history. Die killing a few police in an attempt to storm the U.S. Capitol, and you become famous, your bushy-bearded mug plastered on media worldwide as jihadists far and near extol your praises.

All of this means we’ve entered a frightening—and personal—new phase in radical Islam’s war on the United States. Will Americans glance up from their smartphones and put down their video game consoles in time to notice? And what about our government? Terrorism expert and investigative journalist Patrick Poole has found that American lone wolves may be better described as “known wolves”—virtually all of them were already on law enforcement and counterterrorism authorities’ radar
before
engaging in, or attempting to engage in, terrorist activity on U.S. soil.
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But no need to worry: James Comey and the Obama national security team have things completely under control.