A scorching article by Daniel Pipes at FrontPage (thanks to EPG) shows a disturbing pattern that law enforcement officials have yet to notice. He recounts the strange details of the Armanious murders, but there is much more:
This attitude of denial fits an all-too-common pattern. I have previously documented a reluctance in nearby New York City to see as terrorism the 1994 Brooklyn Bridge (“road rage” was the FBI”s preferred description) and the 1997 Empire State Building shootings (“many, many enemies in his mind,” said Rudolph Giuliani). Likewise, the July 2002 LAX murders were initially dismissed as “a work dispute” and the October 2002 rampage of the Beltway snipers went unexplained, leaving the media to ascribe it to such factors as a “stormy [family] relationship.”
These instances are part of a yet-larger pattern.
· The 1990 murder of Rabbi Meir Kahane by the Islamist El Sayyid A. Nosair was initially ascribed by the police to “a prescription drug for or consistent with depression.”
· The 1999 crash of EgyptAir 990, killing 217 — by a co-pilot not supposed to be near the aircraft’s controls at that time who eleven times repeated “I rely on God” as he wrenched the plane down — went conspicuously unexplained by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).
· The 2002 purposeful crash of a small plane into a Tampa high-rise by bin Laden-sympathizer Charles Bishara Bishop went unexplained; the family chimed in by blaming the acne drug Accutane.
· The 2003 murder and near-decapitation in Houston of an Israeli by a former Saudi friend who had newly become an Islamist found the police unable to discern “any evidence” that the crime had anything to do with religion.
Nor is this a problem unique to American authorities. Other examples include:
· The 1993 attack on foreign guests dining at the Semiramis Hotel in Cairo, killing five, accompanied by the Islamist cry “Allahu Akbar,” inspired the Egyptian government to dismiss the killer as insane.
· The 2000 attack on a bus of visibly Jewish schoolchildren near Paris by a hammer-wielding North African yelling “You”re not in Tel-Aviv!” prompted police to describe the assault resulting from a traffic incident.
· The 2003 fire that gutted the Merkaz HaTorah Jewish secondary school in a Paris suburb, requiring 100 firefighters to douse the flames, was described by the French minister of interior as being merely of “criminal origin.”
· The 2004 murder of a Hasidic Jew with no criminal record as he walked an Antwerp street near a predominantly Muslim area left the Belgian authorities stumped: “There are no signs that racism was involved.”
I have cited thirteen cases here and provide information on further incidents on my weblog. Why this repeated unease acknowledging Islamist terrorism by the authorities, why the shameful denial?
Read it all.