The most curious aspect of the attack in New Orleans in the early morning of New Year’s Day is the naked and open contradiction between the city’s mayor and the FBI about what exactly happened. And that contradiction may mean that we will never know what really happened.The basic facts of the incident are fairly straightforward, but they’re the only straightforward aspect of this.
At around 3:15 a.m. on Wednesday as New Year’s revelers packed the streets at Canal and Bourbon Street in New Orleans, a large truck plowed into them at high speed. By all accounts, the driver did this deliberately, killing at least ten people and injuring dozens more in the process.
And the man wasn’t finished. After crashing his truck, he jumped out and started firing at the cops who were beginning to assemble at the scene, wounding two of them. The police returned fire, and the attacker was killed. It appears that he had plans for even more mayhem, when the police searched his truck, they found improvised explosive devices.
This is where the story takes a strange turn.
At a hastily convened press conference early on Wednesday morning, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell said that the incident was a “terrorist attack,” although she offered no information or speculation about what kind of terrorist attack it might have been. Once Cantrell was finished, however, FBI Special Agent Aletha (that’s how Fox has her name; NPR and CNN have “Alethea”) Duncan contradicted her, asserting that it was “not a terrorist attack.”
Now, this is just weird. What else does the FBI propose to call an attack in which a driver deliberately plows a truck into a crowd, then gets out and fires on the cops, and had explosives ready so as to kill or injure even more people? If that isn’t a terror attack, what exactly is a terror attack? Does the woke, clueless, compromised, and corrupt FBI only consider an incident to be a terror attack when it can plausibly claim that the perpetrator was a “white supremacist” Trump supporter?
Is it possible that the FBI doesn’t want to call what happened in New Orleans a terror attack because doing so might lead some people into “Islamophobia”? Absolutely. There is no information available as yet about the New Orleans attacker, but vehicular attacks are a favored tactic of Islamic jihadis. And the FBI of Christopher Wray and Robert Mueller has been busy downplaying and denying the reality of Islamic jihad for years.
There are numerous examples. Although the recent vehicular attack at the Christmas Market in Magdeburg, Germany is mired in controversy over whether or not the attacker had genuinely left Islam as he claimed to have done, there is a long history of jihadis using this tactic and precious few examples of non-Muslims resorting to it.
Recently, in Oct. 2024 in Israel, another truck driver injured 35 people in a vehicular jihad attack at a bus stop near Tel Aviv. Just weeks before that, a Syrian Muslim migrant with a Palestinian flag wounded 31 people in arson and ramming attacks in Essen, Germany. Also in September in Darmstadt, Germany, an Afghan Muslim migrant ran through several red lights at high speed and tried to run over pedestrians, explaining that he did it “on behalf of Allah.”
Vehicular jihad has taken place in the U.S. as well: at Ohio State University in Nov. 2016, a Somali Muslim migrant mowed down students with his car, then jumped out and started stabbing anyone he could reach. Eight people were injured. As far back as 2014, the Islamic State (ISIS) was calling upon Muslims in Western countries to carry out vehicular jihad attacks.
Whoever carried out the New Orleans attack, there is another curious aspect of it: on X, a photo showed that the truck had a flagpole attached to its back bumper, and the driver was apparently flying some kind of flag. What kind, however, is unknown as of this writing on Wednesday morning, for it seemed as if one of the first things that the police did was cover the flag with a coat. Or did they? Another X user posted a different photo of the truck that was apparently taken just moments after the attack, and although the photo itself is not all that clear, asserted that “it was always just a black coat on a pole.”
Would some nut fly a black coat from a flagpole? Sure. Would the cops cover up a flag that an attacker was flying because seeing it might make people think negatively about a group that enjoys protected status from the left and its establishment media lapdogs? That possibility cannot be counted out, either.
So what happened in New Orleans?
We can only hope that the FBI and New Orleans authorities will follow up with a thorough investigation, without regard for woke niceties. But given the deep corruption of both, that seems unlikely in the extreme.
