U.S. Attorney Philip R. Sellinger announced that Bader Alzahrani, a Saudi national who is in the country on a student visa has been charged with stealing a school bus and moving it out of state. But, what is more, troubling is that Alzahani made several statements that seem to paint him as a jihadi terrorist. How soon will it be before Democrats and the media begin describing him as a white supremacist?
The criminal complaint against Alzahrani claims that he “knowingly and intentionally received, possessed, concealed, stored, and disposed of a motor vehicle, namely a 2020 Chevrolet School Bus.” He had taken the bus from New Jersey to Pennsylvania, where he lives. What is much more troubling is what they found in an unoccupied home across from where he stole the bus. A backpack was found in the residence that had been broken into Alzahrani’s Saudi passport and a number of “other items that appeared to belong to Alzahrani.”
In journals, they found belonging to Alzahrani in English and Arabic, he wrote:
“Why didn’t you slaughter the police officer who threw the Quran? This is a war, and there will be losses and collateral losses. … It is a war and y’all started, feel the rage.” The war he had in mind would be extremely bloody: “Destruction of the new world and the earth will be destroyed from all sides.” It was a religious war: “God I am ready for your orders. I want to live the rest of my life serving you and the religion. Blood, blood, destruction, destruction. Allah.”
Alzahrani also mixes in some obligatory anti-Semitism. “Jews control everything,” he wrote, and “F**k each and every Jewish person.” And then he channeled his inner liberal as he said “F**k you privileged whitey.” well, there goes the white supremacist theory.
There is no indication in the criminal complaint against Alzahrani about what exactly he intended to do with his purloined school bus, or what connection, if any, the hate-filled and violent rants in his journals had to do with the bus theft. Nonetheless, anyone who could write the kinds of things that Alzahrani wrote clearly had malign intentions that would likely have manifested themselves in some form before he returned to his homeland. We can be grateful that all Alzahrani did was steal a bus, and that no one got hurt in the process. Nevertheless, this incident should make American authorities reexamine some of their basic assumptions, although that’s about as likely as the Democrats running a Trump-DeSantis ticket in 2024.
It is virtually certain that when Bader Alzahrani applied for his student visa, no one asked him what he thought about Jews, or jihad, or anything related to “blood, blood, destruction, destruction. Allah.” To have done so would have been considered “Islamophobic,” and American officials of the post-9/11 era have been skillfully trained to abhor even the appearance of “Islamophobia.”
Yet in pretending that “Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism,” as Hillary Clinton so memorably put it in November 2015, and that “authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence,” as Pope Francis claimed in November 2013 (is November “Let’s Lie About Islam Month”?), American law enforcement and intelligence officials are doing American citizens a disservice and exposing them to danger. Yes, of course, not all Muslims are terrorists, but when someone such as Bader Alzahrani comes from the land of fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers, a place where the jihad ideology is widely held, American officials should not be so pollyannish. This time, authorities caught the jihadi in time. We can only hope that they’ll always be so lucky.
