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January 2, 2025 - 10:00am
Early on Wednesday morning Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a 42-year-old US citizen, drove a truck into revellers celebrating New Year’s Eve on New Orleans’s famed Bourbon Street. At least 15 people were killed and dozens more wounded. Law enforcement found an Isis flag in Jabbar’s vehicle, and President Joe Biden has stated that the perpetrator’s social media posts suggest he was inspired by the terrorist group. Jabbar, who was killed in a shootout with police, claimed on his now-removed LinkedIn account that he was formerly in the US military.
The New Orleans attack underlines the continuing appeal of Isis to certain malcontents within society. The Isis-K syndicate based out of Afghanistan remains the primary concern when considering directed attacks of the kind seen in Moscow last March. But terrorists who seek purpose in Isis ideology and then carry out attacks in its name remain overwhelmingly the main concern for Western security services. There are tentative indications that Jabbar may have operated as part of a broader cell, but his attack demonstrates the persistent influence of Isis, even though the group’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is long dead and his Syria-Iraq caliphate near entirely deconstructed.
Rooted in a warped interpretation of already hardline Sunni Salafist ideology, Isis makes al-Qaeda look moderate in comparison. The beheading, immolation and drowning videos of a decade ago — the highpoint of the group’s theatre of death — were not solely designed to cause fear. Instead, they were geared towards showing malcontents such as Jabbar that there is purity in the absolute and unashamed deconstruction of others. This idea is central to the Isis vein of Salafi-jihadist thought. How else do you persuade someone to drive a car into strangers?
The group’s ideological forebears have a fanatical view of how to bring about God’s will on Earth. In a basic sense, they believe that the urgency of delivering divine rule requires the matching of sacrifice to absolute brutality. Isis asserts that by inflicting pain on enemies — whether innocent Yazidi women, Jordanian fighter pilots, or concertgoers in Paris or Moscow — they can prove heroic submission to God’s will. It is notable that the oratory in musical overlays for Isis propaganda videos is far less rooted in narratives of humble (if murderously warped) service to God, and far more in sagas of angry defiance. The notion of “heroism”, however, is still important.
After all, the likes of Jabbar are not moved to run down innocents simply because they have had a bad day. They need a greater inspiration and cause. They need something that brews within them, eventually leading them to the certainty that they will find moral salvation by killing strangers at random. Here, Isis’s black flag and its heritage of significant territorial success and global mayhem offer credibility for the ordained cause of unimpeachable service to something greater. Translated into action, this dictates that causing misery to the maximum number of strangers in a maximally public fashion offers the apex of personal glory — and thus an honoured page in the eventual history of the global Caliphate, rather than the ignominy of irrelevance.
Jabbar’s ability to avoid FBI detection prior to his attack, not an easy thing to do in 2025, will be a necessary point of focus in the days ahead. Still, the damage he has brought about proves that Isis remains a potent inspirational force for would-be jihadists.
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SubscribeWell done Unherd. A new low for you. Write about an Islamic terrorist attack without using the word ‘Islamist.’
Let’s all ignore that. Everyone look the other way please.
Islam is a fraught mix of religion and politics. Unlike Christianity, Muslims were never persecuted by their own government for being Muslims. Furthermore, the Islamic world never had a Renaissance, nor an Enlightenment, so they are simply not the same as the rest of us.
At the same time, gory psychopathy isn’t necessarily the same as terrorism. Terrorism is a weapon of the weak – it uses fear as a weapon, to effect political change. Mass murder is simply an expression of misanthropy. The two are not the same, nor is Islam necessarily the same as any one political movement.
In other words, Islam is an excuse used by the vicious to be vicious. It’s not barbarism and savagery in and of itself, but only a justification for it.
Of course harming innocent people strikes us as evil. It is. But what better excuse for evil than politics and religion? And what better political tool can there be than a madman?
What greater evil could there be than groups that use the dangerously insane to effect political change, through suffering and fear?
The whole religion is an opportunity for violence and unfortunately that line is far too close to what you’re saying.
Unless you’ve been living in cave for the last decade you’d know the likes of ISIS are Islamist terrorist groups so why does it need to be explicitly stated every time those groups are mentioned?
Do you also complain that they don’t point out the Pope is Catholic, or that water is a liquid?
Only the terminally stupid would complain about such a minor detail, and yet again you’ve complained about something minuscule while completely ignoring the crux of the article
To you it is miniscule To me it is the main purpose of the article commissioned by Unherd. Ask someone you know to explain to you that prose can be used to frame a reality. Then ask yourself why Unherd are framing the atrocity this way. I’ve told you what I think.
So in an article that talks about a terrorist found with an ISIS flag and goes on to explain ISIS’ hardline Sunni Salafist ideology, you’re implying that UnHerd are covering up the fact it was an Islamist terrorist attack?
Because it isn’t ‘the ISIS ideology which appeals to some malcontents’ – a weasel worded evasion of the facts if ever there was one – it’s the pure, unmoderated Islamic religion as preached and practised by its inventor, and currently promoted and funded in the form of Salafi, Deobandi, ans Wahhabi strains of Sunni Islam, and the cult of Shi’ism being imposed by the latest demented psychopath of an ayatollah running Iran.
There won’t be many comments from UK readers. We have our very own non-crime laws to make us think or, should I say, not think at all.
And it looks like they are only going to become worse. Meanwhile, the police ‘don’t have sufficient time or resources’ to deal with burglaries, shoplifting, muggings, car thefts, etc.
You no doubt think you’ve “said it all”, but this has been debated countless times, and in far more serious fashion that you’re able to muster.
The ability to think requires, firstly, an ability to not jerk one’s knee (or anything else).
You support the non-crime and hate-crime laws?
Anyone who challenges you must be someone who supports what you’re against?
I’ve commented many times on these issues. Do the work, and read them.
Why are you challenging me then?
There won’t be many comments because there isn’t much to discuss. This is seemingly a home grown terrorist inspired by online content, which are ten a penny over there
This is seemingly a home grown terrorist with typical American name Shamsud-Din Jabbar 😉
Anybody whose name doesn’t come from a Native American Indian tribe isn’t homegrown to you I’m assuming? All those who pretend to be Italian or Irish don’t count?
Jabbar was born in Texas and served in the American army, I’d class that as about as homegrown as you can get
Congratulate you!
.
Everyone sees your virtue signaling, everyone knows you are against racists, everyone takes off hat in respect to such a liberal and respected personality.
Pointing out your mistakes doesn’t make me a liberal. Don’t assume that everybody who criticises your comment does so from a position of oppositional partisanship
I didn’t care if you are a liberal or not. Your problem is that you can’t see your mistakes. You don’t even realize how sanctimonious your first answer to me was 🙂
It wasn’t sanctimonious, I was questioning why you don’t consider a man born in the States and who served in the armed forces to be home grown simply because of his name?
Stop equating “Allah” with “God”, as if Islam is just another quirky religion alongside the faith that built the West.
People like Jabbar are not misfits who happened to wander into the mosque and brought their warp with them. They are the personifications of the anger and frustration that Islam holds against a (for now) successful West. Carthago delenda est.
There is a reluctance to talk frankly about this issue that will inevitably cost further lives.
Genesis 16:12
What’s Phil Collins got to do with any of it?
Islam is a political ideology pretending to be religion.
Any person who would deliberately drive a vehicle at speed into crowds of fellow human beings is neither religious nor worthy of anything beyond contempt. Such a person is morally disgusting and quite simply debases any notion of the value of religious affiliation. Radical Islamism is a cancer in the world which requires, in common with all malignant growths, to be excised and discarded.
Let us all stop dancing on the head of a pin in an effort not to offend moderate Muslims. I say to all peace loving, kind, thoughtful Muslims this one thing: Stop piously opining that: ‘This is not what we are’, and start dissociating yourselves from this appalling, unwarranted violence by saying: ‘I am sorry for, and absolutely abhor, what the radical, fandamentalist wing of my religion seems determined to inflict upon Western societies in order to subjugate and, ultimately, destroy them.’
Then we in the West may listen and accept that you, the moderate Muslim majority, understand that violence and destruction is not the ideal path to a brighter future.
Until that moment arrives I will continue to view all Muslims with deep suspicion and a great, and steadily increasing, degree of fear, apprehension and distrust.
Well said.
Western governments who use ISIS to fight their proxy wars never learn. Rearing Frankenstein’s monsters should be abandoned, but Deep States will ensure that won’t happen…
The administration fixated on white supremacy finds out that terrorism is still the work of easily identified groups.
“But terrorists who seek purpose in Isis ideology and then carry out attacks in its name remain overwhelmingly the main concern for Western security services.”
I disagree. The main concern seems to be parents at school meetings, lite beer drinking oafs from January 6th and people who shop at Gander Mountain or Cabela’s. This, of course, will change on January 20th. Thank heavens.
Amen, Mr. Trees.
Radical Islam = satanism
“Jabbar’s ability to avoid FBI detection prior to his attack, not an easy thing to do in 2025″
Actually, the FBI have been busy dealing with domestic terrorists, you know, like N*zis and abortion haters. And with so many new unknowns having flowed in over our “border” — it might not really be all that difficult for extremists of certain stripes to avoid detection.
And influencing an election by suppressing the release of Hunter’s laptop contents.
Jabbar’s ability to avoid FBI detection prior to his attack, not an easy thing to do in 2025
Are you sure? Maybe the FBI is too busy trying to fabricate ‘far-right’ conspiracies to bother with trivial matters such as this.
It’s less an ideology than a strategy for terrorism. The religion itself is already built upon the concept of jihad.
Let us not forget however, the painstaking work of one Thomas Wictor at the time, to show that the apparent immolation of that Jordanian fighter pilot in a cage was something fully staged
The attacks are not about personal glory but revenge for Western attacks on the Islamic world and a hatred for Westerners. We can expect more of them (which are impossible to prevent) and it is impossible to say when they will end.
revenge for Western attacks on the Islamic worldm – Consult Gad Saad. He will explain to you how to perform self-flagellation.