America needs to wake up to the terror at its doorsteps

The New Year should be a moment of joy and peace, but the residents of New Orleans woke up to sounds of horror blanketing Bourbon Street as Shamsud-Din Jabbar, an Islamist terrorist, drove into a crowd, killing 14 and wounding at least 35.

Terror has arrived at America’s doorsteps — and we should be asking tough questions about how and why this has happened. How, for instance, was law enforcement so ill-prepared to recognize the signs of terror in New Orleans. And why aren’t Americans adequately educated to identify potential terrorists themselves? Most urgently, what more can police do to detect and prevent explosive devices from being planted in our streets? 

Unfortunately, lax laws dating back decades have enabled terrorists to use the United States as a base, and the internet as their tool for recruitment. The 1996 Communications Decency Act, for instance, was designed to incentivize big-tech to remove content deemed harmful to children.  But Section 230 of the Act shields tech platforms from liability for harmful content posted by users, including extremist and terrorist material. Terror-related content can proliferate without consequence, facilitating real-world violence. 

Despite enhanced surveillance resources under the controversial 2001 USA Patriot Act, Federal law efforts failed on Bourbon Street. Law-enforcement agencies issued pre-holiday warnings that low-tech vehicle-ramming was a key area of concern. But street barriers known as “bollards” that would have closed Bourbon Street had been removed for repair and were not in place. 

This is inexcusable — especially coming so close to last week’s Sugar Bowl. Police discovered improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and an ISIS flag in Jabbar’s truck — painting a chilling picture of his motives and the severity of the threat.

What sets the NoLa attack apart from similar events in the past is that it took the police a mere four hours to publicly acknowledge this was a terror. Yet authorities remained cautious about linking the episode to the subsequent explosion of a Tesla Cybertruck in Las Vegas later that same morning, killing its driver and injuring seven. The Tesla case continues to be investigated, but a bomb exploding outside a property owned by President Trump certainly suggests terror. 

There has been a steady rise in such home-grown terrorism over the past decade. A report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) cited 231 domestic terrorism incidents between 2010 and 2021. Many are racially motivated cases, such as the Buffalo supermarket killing of 10 African Americans in 2021. 

But other “lone wolf” events have clear links to in foreign actors like the Islamic State. In Minnesota, for instance, V.S. Subrahmanian, a professor of computer science at Northwestern University, says ISIS has attempted to recruit Somali immigrants, regarding them as a huge asset in “enemy countries.”

New Orleans is just the latest example of radicalization among Americans overlooked by US authorities. Take the case of John Georgelas, who was born in Plano, Texas, and raised in a Christian family. He converted to Islam shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and changed his name to Yahya al-Bahrumi. 

Georgelas soon moved to Syria and wrote about jihadi subjects in online ISIS journals, amassing a loyal following that would lead The Atlantic to declare him “the most important and prominent American” in ISIS by 2013.  He trained for combat, continued to spew propaganda to recruit fighters and even pushed ISIS to declare a caliphate in parts of Syria and Iraq.

A telling error in his case: Georgelas was arrested and imprisoned in Texas in 2006 for hacking AIPAC’s website, but after serving time he returned to the Middle East unimpeded, where he was killed in 2017 during the Syrian Civil War. Despite the unquestionable signs of radicalism, someone of Georgelas’ threat level was still allowed to roam free. Intelligence failures like Georgelas is why incidents like the New Orleans attack can happen today.

Similarly, on the first day of the new year in Manhattan, hundreds of protesters marched through Midtown Manhattan chanting, “There is one solution: Intifada revolution.” Such jihadi rhetoric has become normalized since the Hamas attack on Israel two Octobers ago — with clear consequences. Beyond the intimidation of Jewish university students, there’s the December case of a George Mason University student obsessed with martyrdom and ISIS, arrested in Virginia for plotting a mass casualty event on the Israeli Consulate in New York City.

Terror is no longer a distant threat — it is here. And law enforcement must do more to instill confidence, ensure public safety and work intelligently to prevent further tragedies. 

In much of the world this is already happening. Following a spate of terrorist episodes — from Mumbai and Paris to Brussels, Nice, London and Barcelona — Indian and EU officials boosted joint counter-terrorism activities in 2016. This included increased surveillance on ISIS recruitment, including forensic accounting of real estate and bank transactions along with biographic and biometric screening at airports. The efforts were so successful that the US State Department commended India for “significant efforts to detect, disrupt, and degrade the capabilities of terrorist organizations” last year. Why can’t similar efforts be implemented right here at home?

Americans must become vigilant and involved. They should be informed regularly by law enforcement about the tactics of Islamist terrorism, which seeks to reshape our world based on archaic ideologies. We need to replace the ineffective “If you see something, say something” ethos of the early 2000 with far more anticipatory and proactive awareness campaigns. The public can (if not must) serve as a valuable resource, offering thousands of vigilant eyes in areas where emotionless cameras can’t always assess potential threats.

This is the wake-up call to terror.

Felice Friedson is president and CEO of The Media Line news agency.