You’ve heard of “Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, the married couple who massacred 14 people on Dec. 2, in San Bernardino, California.” Why, asks Daniel Pipes, PhD, have you heard not a thing about Yusuf Ibrahim?
In early 2013, when he was 27, this Egyptian-born Muslim lived in Jersey City, when he allegedly shot, then cut off the heads and hands and knocked the teeth out of two Coptic Christians, Hanny F. Tawadros and Amgad A. Konds, then buried them in Buena Vista Township, New Jersey.
Yusuf Ibrahim. There are no publicly available pictures of his victims, who remain faceless and featureless.
He is charged with two counts each of murder, felony murder, kidnapping, robbery, desecration of human remains, and other crimes. In addition, he has pleaded guilty to a Dec. 22, 2011, carjacking and a Sep. 20, 2012, armed robbery, both in Jersey City (in the latter, he shot his victim in the foot), and early in 2015 he was sentenced to 18 years in prison for these later crimes.
The twin beheadings are spectacular, gruesome, and replete with jihadi (or in police parlance, “terrorist”) elements. Historian Timothy Furnish explains that “ritual beheading has a long precedent in Islamic theology and history,” making it a distinctly Muslim form of execution. A Muslim killing a non-Muslim fits the ageless pattern of Islamic supremacism. It also fits a tragic pattern of behavior in the United States in recent years.
Yet the police, politicians, the press, and professors (i.e., the Establishment) have shown not the slightest interest in the Islamic angle, treating the double beheadings and amputations as a routine local murder. Symptomatic of this, the police report about Ibrahim’s arrest makes no mention of motivation; on the basis of this lack of mention, left-leaning Snopes.com (which describes itself as the “definitive Internet reference source for urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation”) goes so far as to dismiss as “false” the allegation that the mainstream media “deliberately ignored” this incident. The wagons have been circled.
Almost three years after the event, we know next-to-nothing about Ibrahim, his motives, his possible connections to others, or his institutional affiliations …
Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum, has “compiled long lists of other potential instances of jihadi violence … in which the Establishment has colluded to sweep the Islamic dimension under the rug, treating the perpetrators as common criminals whose biographies, motives, and connections are of no interest and therefore remain unknown.”
Ultimately, “the police, politicians, the press, and professors” will keep mum until these delightful additions to the American family begin to pick off the Establishment class.
