When ISIS carried out its first attack in America, its target was the Draw Mohammed cartoon contest in Garland, Texas.
Bosch Fawstin’s cartoon won the contest. Robert Spencer was a co-sponsor of the event.
Four years after the attack, questions still linger about the level of FBI involvement.
Last year, Robert wrote, “The FBI clearly knew the attack was coming (although it didn’t bother to inform us or our security team), as the FBI agent was right there, following behind the jihadis, whom he had encouraged to “tear up Texas.” But even though they knew the attack was coming, they didn’t have a team in place to stop the jihadis. They had one man there, and one man only. The jihadis were not stopped by FBI agents, but by our own security team. If the jihadis had gotten through our team, they would have killed Pamela Geller and me, and many others.”
The case he was writing about continues.
The attorney for a security guard injured in a 2015 terror attack in Garland, Texas, has filed an appeal in the U.S. Fifth Circuit after the original lawsuit was dismissed in December.
The two attackers, Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi, drove from Phoenix to Garland, where the “Draw the Prophet Muhammad” event was being held, and opened fire at a security checkpoint.
Because of other court cases, it became public knowledge that an undercover FBI agent had infiltrated the small cell of radicals in Phoenix, and when the “Draw Muhammad” event was announced, the agent texted Simpson “Tear up Texas.” The Department of Justice characterized the text as “innocuous.”
Additionally, it later became known that the same undercover agent was in a separate car directly behind the attackers when they opened fire, had been taking pictures of them seconds before the gunfire and then tried to flee the scene once the shooting began.
The FBI had become deeply corrupted in the Obama era. Law enforcement may have no legal liability when failing to take action, but there are major questions that need to be answered. What did the FBI leadership know? When did it know? And why didn’t it do anything? Did it view the targets of the ISIS attack as expendable troublemakers?
Four years later, those questions are still waiting to be answered.