Connect the dots between New Orleans and support for anti-Israel terror

Attacks that can be linked, however tenuous or unlikely, to the political right, are seized upon as an excuse to demonize conservatives and Republicans. Those that can’t be associated with the right but involve gun violence are used to promote gun control laws. But comments about slaughter linked to Islamist extremism are very different. They are primarily used to scold the country not to connect the dots between such incidents and a growing tolerance for antisemitism in the country, as well as support for anti-Western violence in the Muslim world.

This was demonstrated repeatedly in the aftermath of the New Orleans terrorist attack on the first day of 2025.

While caution is always a good idea when commenting about a crime before all the facts become available, that’s a rule that is never applied to those incidents that can be employed as political fodder for the left.

Officials in denial

In his initial remarks about the New Orleans terrorist attack on Jan. 1 by a person he already knew had declared that he was inspired by ISIS, President Joe Biden went out of his way to declare that “no one should jump to conclusions” about what happened.

Nor was the president alone in taking that attitude. Yet the car driven by Shamsud-Din Jabbar—the Texas-born assailant who was killed in an exchange of gunfire with police after he drove into a crowd of New Year’s celebrants on Bourbon Street, killing 14 and wounding dozens—contained an ISIS flag. The 42-year-old also planted explosives that fortunately did not go off.

Yet local police officials and a spokesperson for the FBI were still insisting that what had happened wasn’t necessarily an act of terrorism. While officials were soon forced to change their minds about that, the delay in labeling it as such was significant. So, too, was the fact that in the days since then, most of the national reporting and commentary about the event in the liberal corporate media has largely avoided any discussion of whether this is part of a global problem of Islamist-motivated terror. Absent from the same mainstream forums has been any reporting or analysis as to whether there is any connection between this and other acts of extremist Islamic violence, including the loud and virulent anti-Israel agitation on college campuses. Much of the same media sources have rationalized Islamist terror directed at Jews and the Jewish state, as well as demonized Jerusalem’s efforts to eradicate the perpetrators.

Indeed, the very suggestion that there is any link between what happened in New Orleans and the open antisemitism coming from pro-Hamas mobs on college campuses and in the streets of American cities has been dismissed as unfounded and irrelevant. That is true despite the fact that only hours after the Bourbon Street massacre, “pro-Palestine” demonstrators chanted in support of terror—“intifada revolution”—in New York City’s Times Square. Instead, officials and their cheerleaders in the press have congratulated themselves that Jabbar was a “lone wolf” who apparently acted alone, without any help or connection to foreign terrorist groups.

This is nothing new. Even at the height of the “war on terrorism” being conducted by the United States in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks undertaken by Al-Qaeda on American soil on Sept. 11, 2001, the events were treated as having nothing to do with the deadly terror attacks of the Second Intifada from 2001 to 2005 that cost the lives of more than 1,000 Israelis. News outlets and even politicians refused to accept that 9/11 and similar atrocities in Israel, such as the bombings of a Tel Aviv nightclub or a Sbarro’s pizzeria in Jerusalem, were all part of the same global struggle that pitted Islamists against the West.

Terrorism against Americans is something the media has been willing to deplore unreservedly. But when Israelis or Jews are the victims, the condemnations always come with caveats that seek to rationalize or justify criminal violence as an understandable form of “resistance” in a manner that would never be considered acceptable when applied to terrorism on American soil.

Forgetting about the threat

Though there has been a steady stream of incidents involving Islamic extremists over the last quarter century, Americans have largely forgotten about the threat of Muslim terrorism.

Fatigue and disgust about the ultimately unsuccessful U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had something to do with it. The identification of the “war on terror”—a phrase that never made any sense since the opponent wasn’t a generic description of terror but the widely shared worldview of Muslim radicals—with these endless and unwinnable conflicts caused many, if not most Americans to rethink the advisability of any such endeavor.

Another element was the concerted effort by the administrations of both President George W. Bush and his successor, President Barack Obama, to distance the very real struggle the United States was engaged in from any thought of a clash of civilizations with the Muslim world. Bush was so worried about the possibility of a backlash against Muslim countries that were American allies, in addition to Muslim citizens and those living in the United States, that his constant refrain about Islam being “a religion of peace” became something of a comic cliché.

The belief that there had been a post-9/11 backlash against Muslims in the United States was unsupported by any real evidence. For the past quarter century, FBI statistics have shown that Jews have been the victims of the largest number of religion-based hate crimes with the total consistently dwarfing those in which Muslims were targeted.

Bush’s willingness to downplay the fact that 9/11 and other acts of Islamist terror were rooted in a popular version of Islam was wrongheaded. Obama went further by signaling to the Muslim world that the United States owed it apologies while also prioritizing appeasing the Islamist regime in Iran.

Just as dangerous was the way official Washington treated entities like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as civil-rights organizations rather than an antisemitic political front group for apologists for Hamas and other terrorists. The myth of a post-9/11 backlash has now been succeeded by an equally false idea that American Muslims were put at risk in the aftermath of the Hamas-led assault on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

That is the basis for the Biden administration’s decision to initiate a national strategy to combat Islamophobia, which essentially followed CAIR’s lead on a largely fictional issue. Bias against Muslims exists and all such prejudiced behavior is deplorable. But most of what groups like CAIR label as Islamophobia are nothing more than efforts to shine a spotlight on the antisemitism and support for Islamist extremism that is widespread in the Muslim community.

Politicizing justice

In the last four years, the Biden administration has sought to raise awareness about domestic terrorism. However, it did so in such a way as to avoid mentioning Islamists—something that would antagonize Muslims and left-wing groups that had embraced the misleading narrative about Islamophobia and the demonization of Israel.

Instead of worrying about mosques and imams throughout the country that spread hate or the way that CAIR sought to prevent scrutiny of such behavior, the Biden administration was focused on treating its conservative political opponents as terrorists.

Under the leadership of Attorney General Merrick Garland, the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI devoted a disproportionate amount of their resources to investigating dissent against liberal orthodoxies. In this way, it was opponents of abortion, parents who protested against school boards allowing divisive teachings about critical race theory and other toxic ideas into local schools and those who challenged the 2020 election results who were labeled as constituting the primary threat from domestic terrorism.

This was a dangerous misuse of federal power. Treating partisan disagreement as an imminent threat of terrorism politicized the justice system. It also distracted law-enforcement officials who were already more worried about being labeled Islamophobic than in scrutinizing genuine extremists from the Islamist threat. This also helped to divert Americans from the growing support for anti-Israel terror that manifested itself in the wake of Oct. 7.

The belief that the long-running war against the one Jewish state on the planet is entirely separate from Islamist threats against the United States is a myth. To Iran, which is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, as well as the remnants of ISIS and Al-Qaeda, coupled with groups that have attempted to follow in their footsteps, Israel is the little Satan and America the great Satan.

Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris repeatedly claimed that the views of Hamas apologists were legitimate and deserve to be heard. Their blatantly political motive for taking this stand is a testament to the strength of the intersectional and increasingly antisemitic left-wing of the Democratic Party.

Considering all threats seriously

It takes a prodigious leap of faith to accept the notion that the antisemitic protests on campuses that seek to legitimize Islamist terror against Israelis won’t eventually morph into support for violence against Jews and others in the United States. It has, after all, happened before, when leftist anti-war groups split into violent and non-violent factions in the 1960s. The mainstreaming of radical ideologies, in addition to antisemitic narratives and smears, such as has been seen in the last 15 months, creates an atmosphere in which “lone wolf” supporters of ISIS and other terrorists may feel justified in taking the leap from sympathy for violent extremism to doing it themselves.

With so much of the media and law enforcement unwilling to take the risk of being falsely tarred with the Islamophobia label, it will be easy for Americans to move on from the New Orleans attack without drawing any conclusions about it. But efforts to keep tabs on a Hamas support network that has already exhibited a willingness to use violence and intimidation to get its way ought to be a priority for the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump. That should involve a policy of defunding institutions that turn a blind eye to antisemitism and deporting foreign students who are advocates of terror.

If that happens, expect it to be attacked as Islamophobic and xenophobic, and for unfairly targeting Muslims and “critics” of Israel. But sensible persons will understand that the New Orleans massacre is a wake-up call. The threat that a chorus of support for hatred and violence could lead to Islamist terror in the United States is something that a rational government can’t ignore.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.