“Ideas do not need visas.”
So proclaimed the words on a blood-red Al Qaeda map of the United States, published electronically in 2017. The terror group was exulting over a range of attacks in recent years by self-titled “jihadis” who were launching their own armed assaults inside the U.S., as in San Bernardino, Boston, and New Jersey.
The Tsarnaev brothers in Boston, or lone actors, do not represent some threat to the organization’s authority. Terror masters do not always insist upon full control. Al Qaeda’s magazine in English (2010 to 2017) was named “Inspire” – not “Micro-Manage.” ISIS propaganda soon adopted the Al Qaeda line, in that both have argued in recent years that acting alone can be a most effective form of attack. A big group can leak or be betrayed, but a solo perpetrator has operational security. The militant press have called for self-activation by faith and ideas, versus the dangers of going outside the country for terror training. This is what an American, Shamsud-din Jabbar, has done in New Orleans.
One of the patterns of recent mass-killings by vehicle is that the solo driver had been living in the country for a long time. At trial, Sayfullo Saipov said he was looking to join ISIS when his truck crushed human beings on the Hudson River Bike Path in Manhattan in 2017. It was seven years after he moved here from Uzbekistan. In 2017 when dozens were killed or injured on Westminster Bridge in London, the “perp” was Adrian Russell Elms, a criminal who had converted to militant Islam while in prison in the U.K. He’d changed his name to Khalid Masood, and even lived in Saudi Arabia, but he was born in Britain, living in Britain.
Inspiration and ideas should get new focus, as the blood is cleansed from pavements in New Orleans. It is not only tactical similarities that link the vehicle attack cases and directly recall the blueprint laid out in Al Qaeda’s magazine. Uniting the vehicle cases is something else that gives inspiration right back to the originators, the propagandists of Inspire: successful attacks serve a twisted version of Islam; methods of terror advance religio-political purposes.
Al Qaeda doctrine posits that terror (as well as guerrilla war, politics, and education) radicalize and militarize, and one day these will allow the formation of a new Caliphate, a transnational entity ruled by loyalists of militant Sunnism. ISIS accepts this and has supercharged it. They do so not just by murdering Shia rivals, or the terrorism of previously-unimaginable videos. They went ahead and founded “The Islamic State” as their name requires, named a Caliph, and ruled over millions of people. A great coalition then flattened the proto-state and restored the Middle East’s boundaries.
But the militants’ idea lives. Ideas are hard to kill with bullets or bombs. Ideas don’t need visas. “Militant Muslim internationalism”—as I called it in testifying in Congress after 9-11—has transnational reach, as do Anarchism, Democracy, and Communism.
So it is unfortunate that so many of the professional commentaries in our media of the day are very uncomfortable discussing the “motive” for the New Orleans murders or the ISIS flag. Motive is something we agree is central to criminal law. The killers have declared their motives! When Al Qaeda published its blueprint for making vehicle attacks, in the Fall of 2010 in Inspire, they explained that this was for their faith, for the Palestinian cause, to fight Israel, and for destroying people in the countries where live ‘defamers of Mohammad.’ Nine such nations were named as ripe targets for ramming pedestrians with vehicles.
Since then, self-proclaimed “jihadi” drivers, or actors praised by ISIS or Al Qaeda sources, have been ticking though the list: France (Nice, 2016). Britain (London, 2017). The U.S. (New York, 2017 and New Orleans 2025). Germany? It is too early to be clear on the motives of the Saudi male (Magdeburg, 2024). Spain, not on that list, is frequently attacked by religious terrorists: a double-event with two cars separately doing rammings, injuring dozens of pedestrians, took place in 2017. With the arrests, police found a house that was a bomb factory.
New Orleans is sadly kin to other target zones, and not by coincidence. The many crime scenes give us a sense of the “the war of ideas.” The pattern is excruciatingly real, spelled out in a terrorist document 15 years ago. Nor is this pattern changed, or banished, by the fact that some others who do vehicle rammings have other motives.
Dr. Harmon teaches the international-minded course Counterterrorism and the Democracies (IWP 669) and wrote A Citizen’s Guide to Terrorism and Counterterrorism (2nd edn. 2021).