Yes, yes, of course: lone wolf militant Episcopalians, enflamed by their martial ideology, at it again. “‘Lone wolf’ attackers a security concern,” from AP, with thanks to The One Who Must Not Be Named:
NEW YORK (AP) “” Slumping in his prison clothes and pallid from a year behind bars, Shahawar Matin Siraj didn’t look like much of a threat as he silently endured a routine hearing in federal court this month.
But the 23-year-old Pakistani immigrant stands accused of a scheme to attack a busy New York subway station with bombs hidden in backpacks.
As police seek to secure the nation’s largest transit system in the wake of the London Underground bombings, they say they are concerned about angry, isolated men like Siraj as much as organized terror networks like al-Qaida.
“One of the department’s ongoing concerns is the emergence of ‘lone wolves,'” said Paul Browne, the New York Police Department’s chief spokesman.
The first known plot against New York’s subways was averted in 1997, police said, when officers acting on a tip burst into Palestinian-born Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer’s Brooklyn apartment and shot him in the leg as he reached for a toggle switch on a pipe bomb. He was sentenced to life in prison after testifying he wanted to kill Jews riding the subway in Brooklyn.
Despite initial reports of Hamas ties, Mezer was acting with a single alleged accomplice, who was convicted of an immigration violation and deported after three years in prison.
Siraj was working at an Islamic bookstore in Brooklyn when he was approached in 2003 by an Egyptian-born police informant. The informant spent months secretly monitoring Siraj and his co-defendant James Elshafay.
As a result, police say they have recordings of the two men and the informant discussing how attacks on three spots “” the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and subway stations at Herald Square near Macy’s and next to Bloomingdale’s on Manhattan’s East Side “” could damage the economy as part of a holy war against the United States.
And all that time the guy was working in an Islamic bookstore. Just think of all the opportunities he missed to dip into a few of those books and bone up on Islamic peace and tolerance.
What’s that? He could have imbibed his jihad ideology from many of the books in the store? The works of Qutb, Maududi, and other key jihad theorists are readily available in Islamic bookstores in America? What are you, some kind of Islamophobe?