This borne out by how the legacy media as well as federal law enforcement agencies have responded to the New Year’s Day terrorist attack perpetrated by Shamsud Din Jabbar, a 42-year-old American Muslim of Pakistani/Indian descent.

At the first press conference dealing with the details of this horrific attack, after the mayor of New Orleans spoke and tagged the truck ramming on Bourbon St. as a terror assault, the FBI’s special agent on site took the podium to declare (wrongly, as it turned out) “This was not a terrorist event.” Special Agent Alethea Duncan (whose first name, ironically, is the English transliteration of the Greek word for “truth”) later backtracked that claim when mounds of early evidence proved her embarrassingly wrong).

Everyone agreed thereafter that this was an act of terrorism. The next question was, “What kind of terrorism?” The media went out of its way to point away from Islam. We were told that Jabbar was born and raised in Texas, that he was a US Army veteran who had served in Afghanistan and was awarded a Global War on Terrorism Service Medal as well as the Army Good Conduct Medal during his time of service. He had held a six-figure job since his military discharge, but had fallen on hard times, married and divorced twice and in the midst of a third divorce, and failing on his alimony and child support payments.

The New York Times published a hasty interview with Jabbar’s younger half-brother, Abdur-Rahim, reporting that they “had been brought up Christian,” but then became Muslim soon after. This turns out not to be true. Shamsud’s mother was from a Christian background, but converted to Islam upon marriage to his father, a lifetime Muslim. The names Shamsud and Abdur-Rahim are decidedly Islamic, not Christian, names. The younger brother acknowledges that they attended the mosque regularly on Fridays as they grew. Shamsud was a quiet, respectful and devout young man. Somewhere along the way, he stepped away from his Islamic practices and fell into a worldly lifestyle, but in the last few years had returned to the fold, trying to get his life together.

Jabbar posted five videos to his Facebook account in the hour and a half before his terror rampage at 3:15 AM. In those, he declared that he had given his allegiance to ISIS sometime before the summer of 2024, prompted in part by a series of dreams. Though his family and friends said they didn’t detect a change in his behavior or demeanor, they noted that he had cut his hair short, begun growing his beard longer and started dressing more modestly. These are common signs of “Muslim radicalization.” The deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, Christopher Raia, after seeing these videos and the black flag of ISIS mounted on the trailer hitch of Jabbar’s rented pickup truck, declared that the terrorist “was 100% inspired by ISIS.”