NOLA Attacker Was a Vet Who Fought the War on Terror Before Breakdown

I love New Orleans, and have been known to hit the jazz clubs on Bourbon Street into the wee hours. So what happened there Wednesday is a gut punch, and I want to express my condolences to the families of the victims and to the community there for its trauma.

Donald Trump jumped to the conclusion that the New Orleans attacker, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, who killed 15 people and wounded three dozen more, was a career criminal and recent immigrant. In fact, he was an African American veteran, born and raised in Beaumont, Texas. His conversion to Islam must have happened before 2004, when he tried to enlist in the Navy under that name. Instead, he ended up in the Army, and was deployed for a year to Afghanistan (2009-2010). He was trained as an IT specialist. He remained a reservist after his honorable discharge.

He was, in short, a patriotic American who did his part in fighting the war on terror. He was not an immigrant or a member of a foreign criminal gang.

That Trump persists in deploying the politics of hate and bigotry is a bad sign for the U.S. Even if Jabbar had been a immigrant, his actions would have said nothing about immigrants, who have low rates of criminality compared to the native-born population, and whose productivity is key to America’s economic success. They don’t take jobs from the native-born on the whole, but do jobs that the latter typically won’t do.

Nor is Jabbar’s religion a reason to engage in Muslim-hatred. The New York Post‘s insidious and Islamophobic reporting ominously says that one of his neighbors in the trailer park in which he lived spoke only Urdu. If that were true, it would be because poor people live in trailer parks, including immigrants with limited English. However, it sounds fishy to me, since even poor Pakistanis of the sort who come to the United States tend to know English. It was the colonial language and still an essential language. The report goes on to say there is a mosque in the area. So what? Mosques are houses of worship where people go for solace when facing rough times.

The Post says ominously that Jabbar referenced the Quran, the Muslim scripture. No kidding; He was a Muslim. He also referenced the Quran when he was in Afghanistan as part of the U.S. Army’s fight against the Taliban.

The Quran forbids murder and urges believers to forgive and do good to their enemies.

If this guy had been a white Proud Boy found with guns and explosives, would U.S. news outlets imply that it is suspicious that he quoted the Bible and that there is a Baptist church near his house? It is 2025, New York Post. Islamophobia is a disgusting form of racism.

I admire veterans. I grew up in an Army family, just as Jabbar’s children did. Most veterans are admirable citizens who come back and contribute to their communities, building businesses and providing key services. But the job undeniably can lead to trauma and stresses that a small minority deal with in dysfunctional ways. The suicide rate is tragically high. I’ve lost people I knew that way. Some end up homeless. Some are radicalized. It is not a coincidence that the leadership of the Proud Boys, convicted of sedition, were disproportionately veterans.

Journalist Jacqueline Sweet was able to screenshot some of Jabbar’s postings at Twitter / X:

In the first posting, from 2021, he says that a “scarcity mindset” is unhealthy in an environment of abundance, and that if you can’t turn off that scarcity mindset it becomes a kind of trauma. In the second, from the same year, he complains about the lack of Black protagonists in films after Marvel’s “The Black Panther” (2018) who are not “submissive, immoral or silly/immature.”

Then in 2022, everything went to hell. His wife divorced him, he went deeply into debt, and the Post says he ended up living in a trailer home with chickens and sheep in the lawn.

Everybody spirals out of control in their own way. White nationalists try to invade the Capitol and hang the vice president. Kahanaist Jews in Israel shoot up mosques and commit atrocities in the Occupied Territories. A handful of Muslim Americans have declared themselves ISIL (ISIS, Daesh), even though that organization barely exists and has no command and control. It is like a white supremacist declaring that he is acting in the name of Adolf Hitler even though the Nazi army was long ago defeated and Hitler died in his bunker.

It should go without saying that the fact that a tiny number of disturbed individuals act this way does not reflect on the up to 5 million Muslim Americans, who are our physicians, accountants and local business people. Tarring a whole group with the actions of a few is the definition of prejudice. Likewise, the Proud Boys don’t reflect all white people.

I’m not a psychiatrist and don’t play one on television. I therefore cannot comment on Jabbar’s state of mind. But I do know that if a white guy lost his family and his business, went tens of thousands of dollars into debt, and ended up living in a trailer home with livestock in his yard, and then committed a similar atrocity, sympathetic white reporters would elicit regrets from his white parents that he was suffering from mental problems. But the U.S. media treats white terrorists differently.

Here are my top 10 differences between white terrorists and others:

1. White terrorists are called “gunmen.” What does that even mean? A person with a gun? Wouldn’t that be, like, most people in the U.S.? Other terrorists are called “terrorists.”
2. White terrorists are “troubled loners.” Other terrorists are always suspected of being part of a global plot, even when they are troubled loners.
3. Doing a study on the danger of white terrorists at the Department of Homeland Security will get you sidelined by angry white congressmen. Doing studies on other kinds of terrorists is a guaranteed promotion.
4. The family of a white terrorist is interviewed, weeping as they wonder what went wrong. The families of other terrorists are almost never interviewed.
5. White terrorists are part of a “fringe.” Other terrorists are apparently mainstream.
6. The acts of white terrorists are random events, like tornadoes. Other terrorists are long-running conspiracies.
7. White terrorists are never called “white.” Other terrorists are given ethnic affiliations.
8. Nobody thinks white terrorists are typical of white people. But other terrorists are considered paragons of their societies.
9. White terrorists are alcoholics, addicts or mentally ill. Other terrorists are apparently clean-living and perfectly sane.
10. There is nothing you can do about white terrorists. Gun control won’t stop them. No policy you could make, no government program, could possibly have an impact on them. But hundreds of billions of dollars must be spent on police and on the Department of Defense, and on TSA, which must virtually strip search 60 million people a year, to deal with other terrorists.