I’d like to respectfully correct a mistake in my friend Adam Haber’s recent interesting Op ed entitled “The Worst: Guns, Gangs or Terrorism?” (Nov. 17.)
The Op-ed mistakenly says that the recent (Nov. 6, 2017) Islamist terrorist truck-ramming attack in New York City, in which an Islamist terrorist murdered eight innocent civilians and injured more than a dozen other innocent people, was “the largest Islamic terrorist attack on American soil since the Boston Marathon in April 2015.”
In fact, the Boston Marathon massacre by Islamist terrorists (in which three innocents were murdered and 264 innocent people were injured) occurred in April 2013 (two years earlier than the Op-ed states).
And, unfortunately, there have been other major radical Islamic terrorist attacks, and numerous other smaller and attempted Islamist terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since the Boston Marathon massacre. For instance:
- On June 12, 2016, ISIS-Islamist terrorist Omar Mir Seddique Mateen murdered 49 innocent people and injured dozens more at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla.
- On Dec. 2, 2015, ISIS-Islamist terrorist-couple Tashfeen Malik and Syed Farook murdered 14 innocent co-workers and seriously injured another 22 co-workers in a brutal Islamist terrorist attack at Farook’s office Christmas party in San Bernardino, Calif.
- In addition, federal officials discovered that Malik and Farook were in the final planning stages for another assault on a separate building or location “with a lot more people inside,” possibly at a nearby school or college.
- On Nov. 28, 2016, ISIS-Islamist Abdul Razak Ali Artan, ran his car into a group of students and slashed the students with a butcher knife at Ohio State University, seriously injuring 11 innocent students, who had to be hospitalized.
- On July 16, 2015, ISIS-inspired Islamist Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez shot and killed four Marines and a sailor at a military base in Chattanooga, Tenn.
- On May 3, 2015, two ISIS-Islamist terrorists shot up the entrance to the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland, Texas, injuring an unarmed security guard.
- If the terrorists had not been shot dead by a fast-thinking Garland police officer, the terrorists would have perpetrated a horrific massacre at a“Mohammed cartoon contest” free speech event taking place inside the Curtis Culwell Center.
- On December 20, 2014, radical Islamist Ismaayil Brinsley shot and murdered two police officers, execution-style in Brooklyn.
- On September 24, 2014, radicalized Islamist Alton Nolen beheaded a woman and stabbed and injured another at a food plant in Moore, Okla.
- In addition, although the shooter’s motive is still not clearly established, ISIS claimed responsibility for the Las Vegas massacre (on Oct. 1, 2017), in which 58 innocent concert-goers were murdered and another 515 were wounded.
- ISIS’s claims of responsibility have historically turned out to be correct. In addition, the Las Vegas shooter had visited the Middle East several times in recent years.
- ISIS-Jihadi bride, former British punk rocker Sally Jones a/k/a Sakinah Hussain was implicated in several plots here and abroad, including plotting a mass shooting at a North Carolina concert.
- Hussain also allowed her 11-year-old son to assist ISIS in murdering Kurdish prisoners, and warned from Raqqa: “You Christians all need beheading with a blunt knife and stuck on the railings at Raqqa… Come here I’ll do it for you.”
- And former FBI Director Comey reported that there are ISIS cells in every state in the United States.
- Notably, while all Americans are at risk, radical Islamic terrorists aim many of their attacks at particularly vulnerable populations, including gays, Jews and Christians. For instance:
- The Islamist terrorist in Orlando targeted a gay nightclub to carry out his horrific massacre.
- The Islamist perpetrators of the Boston Marathon massacre brutally slit the throats of three young Jewish men whom they had befriended, on Sept. 11, 2011 – a year-and-a-half before perpetrating the Boston Marathon massacre. (The failure to treat the murders of those Jewish young men as a terrorist attack was one of the errors that prevented law enforcement officials from averting the Boston Marathon massacre.)
- The ISIS perpetrators of the San Bernardino Christmas party massacre specifically targeted a pro-Israel gentile Messianic Jew to murder first, after threatening him that “Jews and Christians deserve to die.”
- The anti-Semitic ISIS “kill list” uncovered in March 2017 reportedly names over 7,000 targets in the US “to kill wherever you find them,” specifically naming people with memberships in synagogues or churches.
A fair and reasoned debate about gun laws and gun law enforcement in this country can surely take place without downplaying the dangers of radical Islamist terrorism.
I note that Op-ed authors usually do not provide the titles for their Op-eds.
Thus, Mr. Haber may not have intended for his Op-ed to appear to be a “contest” among dangers, as the title implied.
Liz Berney, Great Neck. Liz is the Long Island-Queens Executive Director of the Zionist Organization of America.