Suspicious FBI role in Garland jihad attack is major FBI scandal on Comey’s watch

Robert Spencer

James Comey [photo above] has been fired, and not a moment too soon, but questions linger. 60 Minutes ran a feature recently about the FBI’s curious role in the May 2015 Garland jihad attack at a free speech event co-organized by Pamela Geller and me. It was, predictably enough, viciously biased, sloppy, and incomplete, but it was nonetheless illuminating in raising a hard and unanswerable question: did the FBI want Pamela Geller and me dead?

Despite the fact that the jihad attack took place at our event, neither Geller nor I appear, except in one still photo, in the 60 Minutes piece. All they say is that “a self-described free speech advocate named Pamela Geller was holding a provocative contest.”

The contempt fairly leapt from the screen. “A self-described free speech advocate”? Did 60 Minutes mean that Pamela Geller didn’t have the requisite degree in free speech advocacy? Or that she wasn’t really a free speech advocate? What they really mean, of course, is that she is not on the Left, and so cannot be celebrated as a free speech advocate the way the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, who were all Leftists, can be.

60 Minutes also gave a nod to Sharia blasphemy laws by describing the contest as “provocative.” It was an art exhibit, featuring historical and modern images of Muhammad, some created by Muslims. It was only provocative to Muslims who believe in Islam’s death penalty for blasphemy (and brainwashed dhimmis). Was 60 Minutes implying endorsement of that death penalty? Why, yes. If our event was provocative, the shooters were justifiably provoked.

Meanwhile, CBS gave a lot of space to Usama Shami, the imam of the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix, from which the jihadis came, allowing him to exonerate the mosque of any responsibility for “radicalizing” the jihad attackers. 60 Minutes didn’t mention what Simpson’s friend Courtney Lonergan told the Arizona Republic: “Simpson would never waver from the teachings he picked up in the mosque and elsewhere….He was one of those guys who would sleep at the mosque. The fact that he felt personally insulted by somebody drawing a picture had to come from the ideological rhetoric coming out of the mosque.”

60 Minutes also doesn’t challenge Shami on his lies right after the attack, when he said that the jihadis were not regular members of the mosque.

Despite all the predictable politically correct whitewashing and appeasement, CBS did a good job of highlighting a curious and still unexplained aspect of the attack: the FBI clearly knew the attack was coming (although it didn’t bother to inform us or our security team), as the FBI agent was right there, following behind the jihadis, whom he had encouraged to “tear up Texas.” But even though they knew the attack was coming, they didn’t have a team in place to stop the jihadis. They had one man there, and one man only. The jihadis were not stopped by FBI agents, but by our own security team. If the jihadis had gotten through our team, they would have killed Pamela Geller and me, and many others. (They would no doubt have loved to kill Geert Wilders, but he left before they arrived.)

The Daily Beast wrote in August 2016 about how this undercover FBI agent encouraged the jihadis. The Beast’s Katie Zavadski wrote: “Days before an ISIS sympathizer attacked a cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, he received a text from an undercover FBI agent. ‘Tear up Texas,’ the agent messaged Elton Simpson days before he opened fire at the Draw Muhammad event, according to an affidavit (pdf) filed in federal court Thursday.”

This was not entrapment. Simpson and Soofi were determined jihadis who had scouted out other targets. Simpson, along with Soofi and Abdul Malik Abdul Kareem, who supplied weapons to the pair and helped them train, sought information about pipe bombs and plotted to attack the Super Bowl, and planned to go to Syria to join the Islamic State (ISIS), long before anyone told him to “tear up Texas.”

But what was the FBI’s game in telling them to do that? Why didn’t they have a phalanx of agents in place, ready to stop the attack? Or did they want the attack to succeed, so that Barack Obama’s vow that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam” would be vividly illustrated, and intimidate any other Americans who might be contemplating defending the freedom of speech into silence?

We twice asked the FBI for an investigation into this matter. They ignored us. Of course. After all, it isn’t as if this happened to someone important, like Linda Sarsour [photo below]

10 Major FBI Scandals on Comey’s Watch,” Grabien News, May 9, 2017 (thanks to the Geller Report):

News just broke that President Trump is dismissing the director of the FBI, James Comey.

Comey will inevitably be remembered for the controversial role he played in the 2016 presidential election, where his agency conducted surveillance of the Trump campaign as well as investigated the Clinton camp for mishandling classified materials, giving both sides arguments for how the FBI ultimately swayed the vote.

But even before the 2016 campaign, the FBI endured a number of humiliations under Comey’s tenure. Most damning were revelations that the FBI was generally aware of almost every terrorist who successfully struck America over the last eight years.

Here are 10 of Comey’s biggest embarrassments at the FBI:

1. Before he bombed the Boston Marathon, the FBI interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev but let him go. Russia sent the Obama Administration a second warning, but the FBI opted against investigating him again….

3. The FBI had possession of emails sent by Nidal Hasan saying he wanted to kill his fellow soldiers to protect the Taliban — but didn’t intervene, leading many critics to argue the tragedy that resulted in the death of 31 [sic; actually 13] Americans at Fort Hood could have been prevented.

4. During the Obama Administration, the FBI claimed that two private jets were being used primarily for counterterrorism, when in fact they were mostly being used for Eric Holder and Robert Mueller’s business and personal travel….

8. The father of the radical Islamist who detonated a backpack bomb in New York City in 2016 alerted the FBI to his son’s radicalization. The FBI, however, cleared Ahmad Khan Rahami after a brief interview.

9. The FBI also investigated the terrorist who killed 49 people and wounded 53 more at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Fla. Despite a more than 10-month investigation of Omar Mateen — during which Mateen admitting lying to agents — the FBI opted against pressing further and closed its case.

10. CBS recently reported that when two terrorists sought to kill Americans attending the “Draw Muhammad” event in Garland, Texas, the FBI not only had an understanding an attack was coming, but actually had an undercover agent traveling with the Islamists, Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi. The FBI has refused to comment on why the agent on the scene did not intervene during the attack.
Robert Spencer, Jihad Watch, 10-5-2017