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January 3, 2025 - 10:00am
With a body count of 14 (excluding the perpetrator), Wednesday’s act of terror in New Orleans is now the deadliest vehicle-ramming attack in American history. The record was previously held by Sayfullo Saipov, who in October 2017 drove a pickup truck into a crowded cycle path along the Hudson River in New York, killing eight people.
Like Saipov, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the perpetrator of the New Orleans attack, had professed allegiance to Isis; indeed, he attached the distinctive black flag popularised by the group to the pickup truck he used. In the coming weeks, the media and the legion of online sleuths who have come to distrust it will frantically rake over Jabbar’s life story in an effort to discover how he went from being a reserved type who “kept to himself” to the sort of dead-eyed fanatic who could murder scores of people in cold blood.
No less predictably, extremism experts will do what they always do in the wake of an Isis-related attack, which is to sound the alarm about how the group never really went away, despite its near-total destruction in March 2019, and how it still represents a serious threat. While it would be foolish to write off Isis, it seems unlikely that the New Orleans attack will spark a new wave of jihadist terror in the West, given that the group no longer commands any significant territory and long ago jettisoned its ideological primacy within the global jihadi movement.
The more likely scenario portended by Jabbar’s actions is instead more vehicle-ramming attacks, regardless of the animating motivation. This is because the tactic itself has a contagious quality which appeals to all kinds of would-be-murderers — from jihadists to incels to white supremacists to the eternally aggrieved and the mentally unhinged. As an approach to killing, it is cheap, effective, and requires no particular competence other than the ability to drive in a rudimentary way.
It is surely no accident that the New Orleans attack follows so quickly on the heels of the ramming attack in Magdeburg, Germany last month. These events tend to happen in clusters, and Jabbar is almost certain to have at least known about it. It is a well-documented fact, which will surprise no one, that would-be-murderers are deeply interested in the theory and practice of mass-murder. Watching or reading about how the Magdeburg attack unfolded may have given him the impetus to “go postal” himself. Isis, for its part, has been inciting followers to launch vehicle-ramming attacks since September 2014, when the group’s then-spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani explicitly mentioned it alongside a host of other killing methods.
In a paper on vehicle-rammings published in 2019, the academics Keith Hayward and Vince Miller asked why these motorised crimes had only now been adopted by everyone from jihadists to Right-wing lone-wolf killers, despite the availability of automobiles for decades. Their answer, roughly, was that it is not ideology, incitement or a lack of violent alternatives that connect the perpetrators of vehicle-ramming attacks. Rather, it is the very spectacle of a car ploughing into defenceless and terrified bodies that serves to inspire further such terrorism. More recent research broadly supports this conclusion, and documents the striking way in which vehicle-rammings, particularly since 2017, are clustered so closely together.
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SubscribeWell surprise. A writer discovers that two drive-through murder sprees by Islamists will provoke his preferred bete noires on the Right to go into overdrive (pardon the term) in their own violent crusades – up to now notably rare in comparison to jihadists.
This writer is on the Right and has spent his career studying (and broadly condemning) Islamist extremism.
White supremacist attacks are rare, and involve deeply disturbed, delusional individuals.
Insofar as vehicle attacks, black nationalist Darryl Brooks beat them to it.
He killed four elderly women, a child, and six people in total, immediately after the Rittenhouse verdict in neighboring Kenosha. He also publicly expressed his hatred for whites on social media.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waukesha_Christmas_parade_attack
Agreed, I thought Mr Lee was being sarcastic.
I was.
Waste of time reading that.
All 5 minutes? Must be a busy man.
Yep, I wonder if they’ll start pounding the table for laws to restrict auto ownership. Think of the poor children getting run over needlessly. If we could just keep cars out of the hands of criminals and terrorists, blah blah blah. We need background checks and waiting periods and an excuse to spy on people’s medical/psychological history.
Thanks for saying what needed to be said. After all, according to the logic of the left, it’s the automobile that kills people, not the driver.
Well, you can bet that as surely as the sun rises, after every mass shooting, the gun control crowd will shamelessly use it to score political points, sometimes literally before the bodies are even cold, They’ve earned public scorn and ridicule afaic.
I’m not trying to get into a debate about gun control – it’s none of my business as I’m in UK – but comparing cars and guns is a rather poor analogy. A car is designed to transport people safely, though a few people are killed. A gun is designed for killing power, though it may also be used for benign purposes.
I don’t recall any vehicle attack that was not Islamic but maybe I’m wrong about that. ISIS (or whoever is behind/organising/inspiring these attacks) has a straightforward Islamic motive and knows that countries cannot defend themselves against such attacks. That said, other groups/individuals will likely copy ISIS.
In summary:
Author reaches some strange conclusions from the available data.
Reader is all the more confident about other, more reasonable conclusions.
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Thank you for you for your insights, Simon. Bang on, as usual.