Donald Trump has of late been complaining that the media has been underplaying the threat presented by Islamist terrorism.
Although one could question whether a hazard that has inflicted six deaths per year in the United States since 9/11 actually represents something that could be called a “threat,” the New York Times in its Sunday, February 5 edition presented on its front page an exercise in terrorism fear-mongering that should surely warm Trump’s heart, if any.
The article, “Not ‘Lone Wolves’ After All” by Rukmini Callimachi seeks in the most ominous tones to demonstrate “How ISIS Guides World’s Terror Plots From Afar.”
The article does an excellent job at showing how a few ISIS operatives have been trying through internet communication to stir up violence by sympathetic would-be jihadists around the world. However, the evidence from the article includes enough information to indicate that this effort has been an abject, even almost comedic, failure.
The information could have been framed that way, but, one darkly suspects, it might not have made the Sunday front page if it had been.
Callimachi argues that “a pattern has emerged.” In this, a supporter “initially tries to reach Syria, but is either blocked by the authorities in the home country or else turned back from the border.”
This could be taken to be an indication of the pronounced decline ISIS is experiencing. After all, the group’s whole point and appeal, proclaimed repeatedly for years, is to establish a viable caliphate in the Middle East.
But Callimachi espies a nefarious upside for the vicious group: “Under the instructions of a handler in Syria or Iraq, the person then begins planning an attack at home.”
The article is centered on an effort by “virtual coaches” in ISIS over no less than 17 months to get the apparent leader of a small band of sympathizers in India to commit some violence in its name. Apparently working with a congenial criminal network in India, one of the coaches was able to supply the distant conspirators with two pistols that proved to be rusty accompanied by 20 essentially irrelevant bullets.
And only at the end of the article do we find out that the police were able through wiretaps to close down the whole scheme shortly after the boys in the band found they could not fabricate bombs from material surreptitiously supplied by their handler following the instructions he apparently posted on YouTube: “We could not succeed in making powder, as it became jellylike paste,” one lamented. Far from dedicated jihadists, the plotters cooperatively spilled all they knew about the plans and connections to the authorities after they were arrested.
The article is peppered with similar tales. One guy shoots himself in leg, another was supposed to drive over people but attacks with an ax instead because he didn’t have a driving permit, a third detonates a bomb prematurely killing only himself, and an explosive in a suicide vest proves insufficiently lethal to smash a nearby flowerpot.
About the only “success” for what Callimachi calls the “cybercoaches” seems to have been the slitting of the throat of an 85-year-old priest in northern France—perhaps the most pointless and thoroughly counterproductive act of terrorism in history. That is, really, really stupid.
The only example of cybercoach work in the United States that is dealt with in any detail in the article is a case in Rochester, NY, in which the 25-year-old Emanuel Lutchman, looking for ways to get to Syria, was encouraged by his ISIS handler to do some local terrorism to demonstrate his devotion to the cause. The idea was to launch a machete attack on a bar on New Year’s eve somehow killing, in the words of his distant, disembodied coach, “1000000s of kuffar”—infidels.
Left out of the article is that Lutchman was rather inadequate for the mission. He had spent most of the previous ten years in prison for various infractions, the first of which was robbing a man of such unimpressive items as his cell phone, baseball hat, bus pass, library card, and cigarettes. He was also mentally ill and was apparently no longer taking his prescribed medication. He had tried to commit suicide several times, most recently by stabbing himself in the stomach. He had no money, job, or resources, and he was given to picking up cigarette butts outside the targeted bar from which he had repeatedly been shooed away by its irritated owner who characterized him as an “aggressive panhandler.”
Lutchman attracted the attention of the FBI when he mindlessly posted favorable commentary about violent jihad and about ISIS on the web, and he soon found himself at the center of a terrorist cell of four. The other three were all FBI operatives. They worked to facilitate his (or his handler’s) addled fantasies, even shelling out the $40 Lutchman didn’t have to buy a machete and other terrorist equipment from a local Walmart.
Any terrorist “threat” presented by the hapless Lutchman and his remote cybercoach, then, was pretty modest. But you’d never know that by reading Callimachi. Or by listening to Trump.
