Editors at National Review Online assess a high-profile incident of domestic terrorism.
The jihadist whose shooting spree left two dead and 14 wounded at a bar in Austin early on Saturday — a day after American and Israeli forces began the aerial invasion of Iran — left so little to the imagination that, for the most part, we’ve been spared the media self-parody that habitually follows such attacks about how “we may never know the motive.”
This gunman had donned an Iranian-flag T-shirt, underneath a sweatshirt emblazoned with “Property of Allah.”
The suspect, who was killed in a shoot-out with responding police officers, has been identified as Ndiaga Diagne, 53, a native of the West African nation of Senegal, whose population of about 20 million is nearly all Muslim. In his SUV, he had circled the target location — Buford’s Backyard Beer Garden, a popular spot in Austin nightlife — before opening fire as he drove by, then parking and firing some more.
While the investigation is just getting underway, it has been confirmed that Diagne came to the United States in 2000 on a tourist visa but probably did not leave. He is said to have married an American citizen and, on that basis, was permitted to adjust his status to lawful permanent resident alien in 2006. Seven years later, he was naturalized. At the time of Saturday’s murders and attempted massacre, he was residing in Texas after having lived for a time in New York. He reportedly has a minor criminal history — a misdemeanor arrest in 2022 arising out of a car crash — and investigators are looking into past encounters with mental health service providers.
The FBI and local police are exploring whether Diagne had connections to overseas terrorist organizations. That is standard practice. That said, Trump administration law enforcement and security officials must resist the word games by which the government denies that a patent terrorist attack is a terrorist attack.
