The ISIS Plot in Kansas City You Heard Nothing About

Credit: Boone County Sheriff

A few years ago, Robert Lorenzo Hester, Jr. of Columbia, Missouri met “several young men who suggested that Islam was a religion that valued men like him.” That was when his troubles began: prosecutors announced Wednesday that they want Hester to serve twenty years in prison and be under supervision for the rest of his life for plotted a jihad massacre in Kansas City. His case shows yet again how politically correct willful ignorance regarding the motivating ideology and magnitude of the jihad threat renders us all vulnerable.

True to form, federal prosecutors are already busily ignoring the possibility that Hester was inspired to try to kill non-Muslims by Qur’anic exhortations such as “kill them wherever you find them” (2:191, 4:89; cf. 9:5). According to the Columbia Tribune, they claim that “mental health issues combined with a mockery of his race and intellect by fellow soldiers led him to extremists ideologies.” Federal public defender Troy Stabenow also notes that Hester suffered from an “abusive childhood” and engaged in “drug use at an early age.” He “wanted to feel accepted and do something to make others proud, so he joined the Armed Forces,” but he didn’t stick.

And so, apparently, he got the idea that committing mass murder for ISIS in Kansas City would be just the thing.

All that may be, but the “extremists ideologies” to which he fell prey were ready to hand in his new religion. Where did this convert to Islam (who has also called himself Ali Talib Muhammad and Rami Talib) learn about his new religion? From whom? How many other American converts were taught by the same people? Where are they now? Generally media reports about jihad plotters tell us that they were “radicalized on the Internet.” These reports never explain why the supposedly peaceful Islam that these Muslims presumably learned at the local mosque was unable to withstand the appeal of the allegedly twisted and hijacked online version

According to prosecutors, Hester “repeatedly glorified violence, and proclaimed his excitement to help ISIS carry out a terrorist attack. Hester thought he was assisting in a plan to cause widespread deaths, doing everything he could to help. Hester did not act in a vacuum. His conduct was part of a larger movement of growing support for ISIS in the United States and abroad.”

Reaf the rest from Robert Spencer HERE.

If you like what you see, please "Like" us on Facebook either here or here. Please follow us on Twitter here.