In August, Jessica Bowie was arrested in connection with a plot to blow up New York State legislators at the capitol building while pretending to be delivering DoorDash and then in Oct, Benny Caldera Jr. was arrested in a plot to shoot up the Texas State Capitol.
The two terror plots targeting state capitols and legislators in two different states took place less than three months apart and while these are the sorts of terror plots that might have been expected of Islamic terrorists, Bowie and Caldera were Americans, and yet their plots were Islam-inspired.
The Bowie and Caldera terror plots were not the first Islam-inspired attacks in America.
Last year, Elias Rodriguez, a Chicago radical leftist, murdered an engaged couple at the Capital Jewish Museum, while shouting, “Free Palestine”. A spectrum of Islamist and leftist groups ranging from the DSA Liberation Caucus to the Bronx Anti-War Coalition, to Unity of Fields, linked to Iran, endorsed the Islam-inspired terrorist attack in Washington D.C.
The Bowie and Caldera attacks show that the situation has only escalated from there.
Jessica Bowie’s terrorist attack was more directly inspired by Islamic terrorism. Bowie, a white woman living in Albany, New York, the location of the state capital, appeared to have converted to Islam at some point and posted messages such as “Praise be to Allah for September 11th” and denounced the legislators as “enemies” of Allah.
Benny Caldera Jr. had allegedly told a friend, “I am going to the Capitol and I am going to shoot it up. These people have to be exterminated.” He had supposedly said goodbye to his parents.
Like many Muslims and radical leftists, Caldera appeared to be obsessed with AIPAC, a pro-Israel group that has a limited presence in Texas, while Bowie did not specifically mention Israel, but focused on the opportunity of bringing “harm to the enemies of Allah.”
Bowie’s attack appeared to be better thought out than Caldera’s. Bowie lived near the New York State Capitol and had been conducting site surveillance, having made “it a point to have picnics by the capital to observe and [have] coffee in the observation hall” and had planned her attack for a time when state senators were holding meetings. Her plan was to detonate a nail bomb and harm as many officials as she could while pretending to be doing a food delivery run.
The common denominator between Bowie and Caldera however appeared to be that they had both accepted Islamic propaganda about America and it eventually turned them into terrorists and a threat to the centers of government in two very different parts of the country.
Despite ongoing efforts by the FBI, Islamic terrorist narratives circulate on social media like never before and have been adopted by fringe and not so fringe domestic political movements. Islamic terrorists and terror states find a range of social media defenders from the DSA to Tucker Carlson. Even Al Qaeda propaganda, like ‘Osama’s Letter to America’, actually written by Adam Gadahn, a California hippie turned Al Qaeda spokesman, has made its way across social media, boosted by enemy platforms from TikTok to Tucker.
The fundamental message that America is bad and that Muslim terrorists are righteously resisting us has even been embraced by DSA Democrats and their growing number of allies who have mainstreamed Hasan Piker, a Turkish Muslim influencer, who argued that Al Qaeda is better than America and that, “America deserved 9/11”.
Who needs ISIS beheading videos or Osama bin Laden video dumps to Al Jazeera when the New York Times and politicians like Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed are boosting this kind of rhetoric that was once considered Al Qaeda propaganda?
In the years after the September 11 attacks, there was a focus on preventing Al Qaeda and other Jihadist groups from recruiting Muslims in America. Not only did those strategies fail, but Americans are increasingly being directly and indirectly recruited to commit terror acts for Islam.
The threat of Americans converting to Islam and turning to terrorism, including unlikely people like teens from Maine and Tennessee, is being accompanied by more Islamic-adjacent or Islamic-inspired attacks in which the perpetrators may not be aware that they are engaging in second degree Islamic terrorism.
The perpetrators don’t necessarily formally convert. For example there have been multiple ‘Free Palestine’ stabbings of innocent people, both Jewish and non-Jewish in New York City in which the perpetrators shouted the terrorist catchphrase. The most recent such attack took place over the summer when Raul Morales stabbed an Asian man and a Jewish man while shouting “Allahu Akbar” and “Justice for Palestine.” It’s not clear that Morales had ever formally converted, but investigators found copies of both Das Kapital and the Koran in his apartment.
Some of this may be due to unstable people being barraged by second-degree Islamic terrorist propaganda on Facebook, YouTube and TikTok which does not directly promote Islam, but instead promotes fake Gaza atrocities, and may not even be coming from Islamic sources, but from Chinese and Russian bot armies which use them as a way to undermine America.
That’s how the relatively crude crowdsourced solicitations by Al Qaeda, after the Bush administration destroyed its strongholds in Afghanistan, have evolved into a much more sophisticated multipoint crowdsourced network with buy-in from not only much of the Muslim world, but also non-Muslim enemy nations, as well as plenty of propagandists in America.
The combination of foreign social media bot armies, the influencer economy and the growing radicalization of what used to be mainstream Democrats has made ‘second degree’ Islamic terrorism into the wave of the future. Americans are joining Al Qaeda’s mission of infiltrating the country, attacking its every vulnerability and weak point and ultimately bringing it down.
And sometimes the perpetrators themselves don’t even know it.
Daniel Greenfield, Front Page Magazine
