“The person” who murdered at least fifteen people and injured dozens more in the early morning hours of New Year’s Day in New Orleans “was an Army veteran,” said FBI Assistant Special Agent-in-Charge Alethea Duncan at a press conference on Wednesday afternoon. 

“We believe he was [an] honorable discharge. But we’re working through this process to figure out all this information.” While it’s possible that he could have gotten a dishonorable discharge, this would have been a discordant end to what appears to have been a capable term of service. 

So what happened to Shamsud-Din Jabbar to turn him from a loyal soldier of the United States into a bloodthirsty jihad mass murderer? Everyone knows. Few dare say.

Now a mere glance at our soft, woke, combat-free generals with their chests bedecked with more medals than a Soviet Premier ever sported is enough to demonstrate that this is the age of the Participation Trophy Army. The military hands out medals these days as if they were candy bars on Halloween. Nevertheless, it’s clear that Shamsud-Din Jabbar was a perfectly reasonable soldier, competent if not distinguished. 

So what went wrong?

The New York Times offered some clues toward an answer when it reported Wednesday that Jabbar “grew increasingly devout” in his observance of Islam. The paper said that he was a convert to the religion, and that the jihadi’s brother, Abdur Jabbar claimed “that they had been brought up Christian but that his brother had long ago converted to Islam.” 

Yet apparently that conversion took place long ago, for Abdur Jabbar added: “As far as I know he was a Muslim for most of his life.” Brother Jabbar concluded with another improbable claim: “What he did does not represent Islam. This is more some type of radicalization, not religion.”

Well, maybe. But after the jihadi Jabbar had been killed in a firefight with police, an Islamic State flag was found in his truck, and he was discovered to have made several videos in which he “pledged allegiance to ISIS.” 

Dwayne Marsh, the husband of Shamsud-Din Jabbar’s ex-wife, said that the New Orleans killer “had been acting erratically in recent months, ‘being all crazy, cutting his hair’ after converting to Islam.”

Does the jihadi’s brother believe, or would he have us believe, that Shamsud-Din Jabbar misunderstood the faith for which he gave his life? The answer is obviously yes, but only the most naïve and ill-informed could possibly fall for this. The left caricatures the Islamic State as an outfit of nitwits who profess to follow Islam scrupulously but actually don’t follow it at all. Reality is quite different, and less compatible with woke sensibilities.

I’ve quoted the texts from the Qur’an and Sunnah exhorting Muslims to wage war against and subjugate non-Muslims in innumerable books and articles. 

Most Americans still don’t know such passages exist, and wouldn’t care if they did. Others are sure that they’re counterbalanced by numerous passages exhorting peace and tolerance (they aren’t) or that they’re hedged around by an interpretative tradition that blunts their literal force (no go on this also).

The unpleasant and unwelcome fact is that Islam teaches love for killing (see Qur’an 2:191 and 4:89, cf. 9:5) and death (Qur’an 62:6). Pointing out this fact will get you vilified, defamed, deplatformed, marginalized, and silenced, but none of that makes it any less a fact. Quite simply, Shamsud-Din Jabbar got deeply involved in a death cult, and that’s what turned him from a defender of Americans into a murderer of Americans.

American government and law enforcement officials, like their counterparts all over the Western world, have been resolute in ignoring the aspects of Islam that make for what we saw in New Orleans on the morning of New Year’s Day. But here again, ignoring them will not make them disappear.

The sooner we adopt a more realistic approach to Islam and what it can do to a human being, the fewer people we will have who take the road that Shamsud-Din Jabbar traveled. And that will be to the benefit of everyone.