In the early hours of New Year’s Day, 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a U.S. Army veteran from Houston, plowed his rented truck through revelers on New Orleans’s Bourbon Street. Then he jumped out and initiated the shootout that ended his life, wounding two police officers. Police found an ISIS flag, weapons, and an improvised explosive device in Jabbar’s pick-up truck, along with two more IEDs in the area. Jabbar’s attack left at least 14 dead and dozens more hurt.
The FBI now believes that Jabbar probably acted alone. And officials have found no link between his attack and the suicidal explosion of a Tesla Cybertruck outside Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas hours later—an attack also apparently committed by a military veteran. In a video posted to social media before the attack, Jabbar expressed a “desire to kill” and pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. He originally considered inviting his entire family to a “celebration” and massacring them before choosing to attack strangers in New Orleans instead.
In many ways, Jabbar fits the decades-old mold of a homegrown extremist. His life wasn’t going great: two divorces and a failing business left him cash-strapped and sounding desperate in correspondence with lawyers. One of his exes stopped allowing him to see their shared daughters. Jabbar’s religious observance became increasingly “radical,” and he kept largely to himself. It’s a familiar portrait.
What these incidents suggest is a growing lack of awareness and care by American citizens and institutions. We have lost much of the “see something, say something” mentality of the early post-9/11 era. This obliviousness is evident not only in our response to jihadi threats but also in our ignoring many criminal and anti-Semitic threats.
As I know from a decade spent studying, teaching, and working in counterterrorism, identifying and combating radicalization is frustrating and difficult work. The world is full of unstable individuals and brimming with jihadi rhetoric and literature.
We have yet to learn whether authorities missed any crucial signals leading up to Jabbar’s attack. But in our current relaxed milieu, it’s easy to imagine. We have convinced ourselves that vigilance is just another symptom of our Western privilege. This was evident in June, when we allowed pro-Hamas “protesters” to block gay pride marches from Boston to Philadelphia to Denver.
The sight of anyone flying the flag of a designated terror group in American streets warrants calling in a lead to law enforcement. There is no such thing as benign terror support. And while most of the deluded, ignorant anti-Zionist protesters who have waved Hamas or Hezbollah flags won’t go on to drive trucks into crowds, there is no way to find out who will without investigating.
Government officials have let down their guard. Last June, the Department of Homeland Security belatedly identified more than 400 migrants smuggled into the U.S. by an ISIS-affiliated network. Record-breaking illegal border crossings in recent years demonstrate a collapse of institutional vigilance.
We’ve also stopped responding to leads when it comes to ordinary criminal violence. Just two weeks before Darrell Brooks killed six people by driving through a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, in 2021, he threatened, punched, and drove over his then-girlfriend. In 2020, Brooks had been charged with three felonies—including shooting at his own nephew—but was ultimately released on a cash bond of just $500. And this followed more than two decades of convictions, for which Brooks served minimal prison time and frequently received early release.
When the criminal-justice system ignores so many signs that someone is dangerous, it’s no wonder that citizens drop their guard, too. Recent weeks have seen several horrific New York City subway attacks by disturbed individuals. But New Yorkers have become so accustomed to erratic behavior underground—from fare evasion to drug use to physical assault—that most of these red flags also go unreported.
We have also stopped “saying something” when we “see something” anti-Semitic. Students at elite universities and high schools across the country have been subjected to hundreds of incidents of harassment over the past year just for the sin of being Jewish. Too many of us write off these incidents as mere “anti-Zionism.” And when such incidents do get reported, too many institutions—like the City University of New York—lack official policies recognizing them as anti-Semitism.
We’ve yet to learn the full story about the New Orleans and Las Vegas attacks. There may be good reasons for why these individuals slipped through the cracks. Still, the evidence of our indifference, public and institutional, to dangerous threats is too abundant to ignore. It is a recipe for more carnage in the future.
Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images