Mohammad entered the classroom armed with a hunting knife. He also had a backpack containing zip tie handcuffs, two plastic bags of a petroleum substance, a night vision scope, duct tape, and other tools. He stabbed and slashed several students before construction worker Byron Price rushed into the classroom after hearing the screams of the victims and confronted Mohammad.
Price was stabbed while attempting to subdue him. Mohammad then fled the classroom and attacked another student before being shot and killed by a responding university police officer.
A subsequent search of Mohammad's property uncovered a folded copy of the ISIS flag, a handwritten manifesto with detailed instructions to behead students and multiple reminders to "praise Allah."
This horrendous act was then glorified on a Twitter posting from an account associated with ISIS stating "May Allah accept him."
Is there any question as to how this incident should be classified? Apparently in the minds of some there is.
At a press briefing, Merced County Sheriff Vern Warnke said "there is nothing to indicate this was anything other than a teenage boy who got upset with a few fellow classmates."
Still, local law enforcement asked the FBI to assist in the investigation to determine if there were any terrorist connections based on Mohammad's ISIS flag, and also to analyze Faisal Mohammad's Internet activity.
We are told that there were some questions arising over possible websites that Mohammad visited. But to assuage our fears the university Chancellor Dorothy Leland announced there is no evidence linking the UC Merced stabbings to terrorist organizations.
Officials seemed to think that in order for an act to be connected to a terrorist organization, the deranged individual must have been in direct contact with Abu Bakar al Baghdadi specifically telling him what to do.
They evidently haven't learned that the methodology used by radical Islamic groups like ISIS has changed. It has morphed and adapted to utilize social media and the Internet.
In the past, we thought of terror groups in terms of cells, or handlers who coordinated attacks. But terrorist organizations no longer need handlers in direct contact to bring the crazy guy along and convince him to do their will. They can do it online and unilaterally.
The Internet and social media postings of ISIS are specifically designed to attract disassociated loners with unstable minds to a convenient pathway to channel their anger. It matters not to ISIS if the individual is a true believer, they only want him to act out. That is one of the reasons ISIS puts these images on the web.
ISIS knows its audience.
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