Chicago’s handling of the shooting of a 38-year-old American Jewish man by a 22-year-old Mauritanian Muslim man has been just infuriating — nearly as infuriating as the Biden-Harris border policies that are responsible for the shooter’s illegal presence in our country.
The victim survived the attack. So did the police, who were also fired at by the shooter, Sidi Mohamed Abdallahi. In returning fire, police struck Abdallahi. He survived, was taken into custody, and has been hospitalized. Last night, after days of handwringing, the man was finally charged with a terrorist offense and a so-called hate crime.
As this is written, the name of the victim has still not been publicly released, as is appropriate for privacy and security reasons. Last Saturday, the man was walking to a synagogue in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of the Rogers Park area on Chicago’s North Side when Abdallahi — evidently provoked by nothing other than the man’s obvious Judaism — shot him and scurried away. He was quickly identified and confronted by police about a half-hour later.
Infuriating issue number-one involves the usual “we may never know the motive” approach that Democratic-run governments take (a) whenever a Muslim is implicated in a violent crime against a person or group deemed by sharia supremacists to be an enemy of Islam, and (b) whenever a notorious crime of any kind is committed by a “migrant” who has been allowed under Biden-Harris policies not only to enter our country but to remain at liberty in violation of federal law. It ends up taking a ridiculously long time for blue-city authorities to provide basic details. Here, naturally, police and other Chicago officials delayed in releasing Abdallahi’s name, nationality, and immigration status.
Witnesses relate that, as he was shooting (at least at the cops, and possibly at the Jewish victim), Abdallahi was shouting “Allahu akbar!” Yet, as Fox News reports, although police superintendent Larry Snelling acknowledged that the shooter had said something during the firefight with police, when asked what was said, Snelling made like he hadn’t heard the question. As some video of the police press conference since published on X/Twitter shows, Snelling skittishly turned the podium over to another official, who kinda sorta elaborated:
“The statement that was made while [the shooter] was engaging our officers is nothing that we could bring in as evidence at this point that would support any motive against his actions towards our officers or towards our victim,” the other official said, adding “We’re not going to be able to put out that information right now because I want to make sure I’m not misstating anything.” [Emphasis added.]
When asked in a follow up if the police could reveal what language the shooter was speaking at the time, the official, like Snelling, made like he hadn’t heard the question. They couldn’t bring themselves to admit that a jihadist was screaming Allahu akbar as he shot at a Jew and, later, at American police officers.
In Arabic, Allahu akbar means “Allah is greater.” It is often mistranslated as “God is great.” The God in question, however, is Allah and no other (as in “There is no god but Allah, and Mohamed is his messenger” — from the Shahada, Islam’s Quran-based declaration of faith). The proclamation, moreover, is quite intentionally a comparative — greater (as in greater than other gods, non-Muslims, enemies of Islam, etc.).
Now, it is true that Allahu akbar is an incantation voiced by Muslims during prayer. If you heard it in, say, a communal prayer on a Friday, you would assume the person or people saying it were being reverential, not menacing. But it is also a well-known, incontestable fact that Muslim terrorists often yell Allahu akbar when they are committing acts of jihadist violence.
The Arabic expression jihad fi sabilillah, in its fundamentalist and sharia-supremacist understanding, means “holy war (or struggle) in the cause of Allah.” As I’ve explained many times over the years in these pages, there are reformist efforts to evolve the concept of jihad so that it refers only — or at least principally — to an internal struggle for personal betterment. There are problems with this construction, however well-meaning it may be, because even in this non-violent rendering, jihad is a struggle not to become a better person, but a better Muslim — meaning to live a more sharia-compliant life — which is not necessarily the same thing. (Sharia is Islam’s law and societal construct, and it sits uneasily with Western conceptions of the good.) In any event, as the late great historian Bernard Lewis explained, jihad historically is a military term, rooted in scripture — in the numerous Quranic commands that Muslims fight and slay their perceived enemies. When a Muslim from a fundamentalist Islamic society, while in the act of shooting a Jew or shooting at American police, yells Allahu akbar, we can safely assume that this is a triumphalist proclamation of hatred and conquest.
Chicago authorities clearly understand this. Fairly quickly, they charged Abdallahi with six counts of attempted murder (for the shootings of the original Jewish victim and, shortly afterwards, the cops and paramedics), in addition to eight other gun charges. But they would not charge the shooter with a hate crime based on the patent circumstances that surrounded the shooting. Those charges finally came last night, after days of mounting scrutiny and unanswered questions. Police say they acted based on a forensic investigation of Abdallahi’s phone, which allegedly showed methodical plotting and willful targeting of Jews that was impossible to ignore. Even in announcing the charges, the police maintained that they lacked sufficient proof of Jew hatred before examining the phone.
That brings us to infuriating issue number-two: hate crimes.
The concept is noxious and never should have been introduced into the criminal law. Crimes such as murder and attempted murder are heinous regardless of the motive that has catalyzed them. In our constitutional system, we are not supposed to criminalize thought — people are allowed to believe reprehensible things. We criminalize bad acts. The actor’s state of mind is relevant in proving that the bad act was intentional. But that’s it: Proving the intent behind the criminal act is the only relevance of the malevolent thought; evil thoughts are not the business of the criminal law unless they generate illegal behavior (even though they are condemnable in many other contexts).
Furthermore, since we don’t criminalize hatred but rather the criminal act that results from hatred, the concept of “hate crime” adds nothing beneficial. In any criminal case, the law permits the prosecutor to prove motive — it is relevant to establishing knowledge, intent, and lack of mistake, which must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. And later, once a trial or guilty plea has established a defendant’s guilt, the law permits a sentencing judge to take into account any fact that may be relevant to assessing the severity of the crime and the character of the offender (including the likelihood of recidivism). Therefore, if a violent act is motivated by racism, antisemitism, or any other species of hatred, the court already weighs that fact in assessing both whether the defendant is guilty and what sentence should be meted out. Nothing is served by criminalizing the hatred per se.
While adding nothing of value to the justice system, the “hate crime” concept sows division in the body politic. It compels us to rank hatreds — whether based on race, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, ideology, or the like — and determine which are sufficiently odious to merit criminalization (which somehow always ends up meaning “which are particularly offensive to progressive Democrats”). Do we really think a murder is more or less heinous depending on whether the victim was a gay black man or an old white lady? We shouldn’t. In rule-of-law terms, what matters is that the sociopath who commits violent crimes because he can’t check his irrational beliefs is taken off the streets, making all of us more secure.
All that said, we are also committed to equal protection under the laws, even the stupid laws. Ergo, if we would make a “hate crime” of an attempted murder in which a Jewish man (or, as these things go, any white male) shot a Muslim who was entering a mosque, then our principles require making a hate crime of Sidi Mohamed Abdallahi’s shooting of a Jewish man who was en route to a synagogue. And we can’t be willfully deaf to his chants of Allahu akbar. The fact that peaceful Muslims invoke this phrase when they pray does not nullify the fact that sharia supremacists, who believe Allah has commanded them to kill Jews, invoke it during acts of jihad. That is not a smear of all Muslims; it is common sense applied to a notorious subset of Muslims who are at war with the West regardless of whether Western progressives care to notice it.
Again, I’d get rid of all hate crimes. The notion does not unite us against hate; it divides us against each other by judging whether we have all the right thoughts. If you’re going to have hate-crime laws, though, they have to be applied consistently. All hates are created equal for these inane purposes. For that reason, it is good that the Chicago authorities have added a hate crime and terrorism charge against Abdallahi, even if they had to be pressured to do it.
In the end, we’re left to wonder which is more psychotic: The federal government under the progressive Democrats of the Biden-Harris administration or Chicago under the progressive Democrats of Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration?
Abdallahi’s native Islamic Republic of Mauritania is a plenary Muslim country of a little over 4 million people in northwest Africa. As in any such Sunni Muslim society, sharia supremacism is a dominant ideology, so it is only natural that the country is a jihadist crucible and an al-Qaeda hub (the local franchise is called “al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb”).
Because of this, as Fox News reports, the Department of Homeland Security regards illegal immigrants from Mauritania as “special interest aliens” who are supposed to receive heightened vetting. But it’s a joke. Vetting cannot be done in the absence of cooperative governments with reliable databases; do you suppose DHS calls up Mauritanian security (or maybe al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) and asks, “Tell us what you’ve got on Sidi Mohamed Abdallahi?” As FBI director Chris Wray has conceded, we are taking in aliens from countries where, as a practical matter, it is impossible to do meaningful background checks.
Yet the Biden-Harris administration lets them in, heedless of whether they are a sensible cultural fit for a pluralistic society committed to religious liberty, freedom of conscience, freedom of expression, peaceful resolution of disputes — all the things that make the West anathema to fundamentalist Islam. It’s not clear that Abdallahi got any meaningful vetting when he entered with hordes of other illegal aliens in March 2023 through the San Diego sector of what passes for the Border Patrol. Of course, following Biden-Harris protocols, border agents promptly released Abdallahi after they “encountered” him (i.e., interacted with him but didn’t arrest or detain him, as federal law mandates).
Mauritanian alarm bells made no difference. Here’s the Fox report again:
There has been a significant increase in Mauritanian arrivals, putting pressure on towns like Lockland, Ohio, where more than 3,000 migrants have arrived in the village of 3,500. A Washington Post analysis in June found that over 15,000 residents from Mauritania came to the U.S. last year, a 2,800% increase over 2022, when just 543 arrived.
You read that right: 15,000 from a country of just over 4 million with a culture so steeped in sharia-supremacism that al-Qaeda has a home there.
And now Abdallahi has been charged with attempted murders in Chicago.
Mayor Johnson’s administration has Abdallahi’s back, even though he screams Allahu Akbar at Chicago’s police. It’s not just that officials had to be pressured before finally charging him with a hate crime; it’s not just that they consciously avoid stating the ideology that fueled his rampage. It’s that, even as illegal aliens have flooded the place, putting unsustainable strains on the budget, Chicago obdurately remains a sanctuary city. Yes, now that he’s allegedly committed multiple violent crimes, the federal administration that released Abdallahi into the country has finally filed a detainer that would place him in federal custody if the city releases him pre- or post-trial. But Chicago’s sanctuary policies prohibit cooperation with federal immigration authorities, so the detainer won’t be honored.
If Donald Trump gets elected president next Tuesday, Democrats may, at long last, grasp the public outrage over what they’ve done to border security and law enforcement.
