Zale Thompson may not have received orders from an ISIS outpost in Syria before he went after cops with an axe, but it’s clear he found radical Islam.
“Which is better, to sit around and do nothing, or to jihad,” he commented on a YouTube video supporting an Islamist caliphate. Other posts by the Muslim convert and former Navy sailor express hatred for America and white Christians and Zionists.
Thompson attacked four rookie cops on Jamaica Avenue in Queens on Thursday before the officers shot and killed him. One of them, Officer Kenneth Healey, remains hospitalized with a severe wound to the back of his head.
Police Commissioner Bill Bratton says Thompson had visited the Web sites of several terrorist groups, including ISIS and al Qaeda, and had viewed video of terrorist attacks and beheadings: “He was self-radicalized and self-directed in his activities.”
It underscores a point made by Deputy Commissioner John Miller — a man who once interviewed Osama bin Laden. Where overseas terror outfits once tried to recruit personnel, he said, “today’s model is mass marketing. They hope for a few to buy in to that rhetoric and then act on it themselves.”
In other words, the nature of threat isn’t so much changing as expanding.
We saw it this week in Ottawa; we saw it last year on the streets of London; and we saw it in June in New Jersey, where a self-professed jihadi murdered student Brendan Tevlin in retaliation for Muslims killed by the United States in the Middle East.
Maybe they were all lone wolves. And acting on their own makes such people harder to identify and stop before they attack. But having acted alone doesn’t make any of them any less a terrorist.
So as New York responds, we need to address the threat clearly, honestly — and without the handcuffs of political correctness that too often have prevented our government from calling these Islamist-inspired attacks by their rightful name.