FBI Goaded Muslims into Attacking Garland, Texas Free Speech Event?

Is a rogue, Islamophobic FBI really badgering Muslims who would otherwise have been peaceful, law-abiding citizens until they finally snap and go jihad? Only in the Left’s most febrile fantasies.

Katie Zavadski would have us believe that if this undercover FBI agent hadn’t told Ibrahim Simpson to “tear up Texas,” Simpson would have remained a peaceful, law-abiding member of the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix, and would never have dreamed of driving to Garland with his fellow jihadi, Nadir Soofi, and opening fire at our Muhammad cartoon event.

In reality, Ibrahim Simpson had been wanting to wage jihad for quite some time before the Muhammad cartoon event. Along with Soofi and Abdul Malik Abdul Kareem, who supplied weapons to the pair and helped them train, he 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 you won’t hear that from the Daily Beast.

“FBI Agent Apparently Egged on ‘Draw Muhammad’ Shooter,” by Katie Zavadski, Daily Beast, August 4, 2016:

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.

“U know what happened in Paris,” Simpson responded. “So that goes without saying… No need to be direct.”

That revelation comes amidst a national debate about the use of undercover officers and human sources in terrorism cases. Undercover sources are used in more than half of ISIS-related terror cases, according to statistics kept by the George Washington University Program on Extremism, and civil liberties advocates say some of those charged might not have escalated their behavior without those interventions.

“It would certainly be inappropriate for an FBI undercover agent or cooperating witness to provoke or inspire or urge a person to commit an act of violence,” Michael German, a former FBI agent now at the Brennan Center for Justice, told The Daily Beast. “I could imagine an undercover agent thinking it was just the hyperbolic rhetoric they are participating in, and it wasn’t an intent to go to Texas and do harm….

The texts were included in the indictment, released Thursday, of Erick Jamal Hendricks of Charlotte, North Carolina. He was charged with conspiring to provide material support to ISIS. The 35-year-old tried to recruit other Americans to form an ISIS cell on secret compounds and introduced an undercover agent to one of the Draw Muhammad attackers, according to the FBI.

But Hendricks did more than make a connection. According to the court papers, he asked the undercover officer about the Draw Muhammad event’s security, size, and police presence, during the event, according to an affidavit filed in court.

The affidavit does not specify what the undercover responded to questions about size and security.

“If you see that pig [Pamela Geller] make your ‘voice’ heard against her,” Hendricks allegedly told the undercover agent, referring to a notorious Islamophobe.

Notice that Katie Zavadski never characterizes the jihad killers using any negative terminology.

Press officers for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Ohio, the Cleveland FBI Office, and the Department of Justice declined to comment beyond the affidavit. FBI spokeswoman Carol Cratty hung up on The Daily Beast after being asked about the “tear up Texas” text….

Deservedly.

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