NYC Mayor Says Islamic Terror ‘Vanishingly’ Rare

In the wake of a radical Islamic terrorist attack on New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio is telling citizens not to worry about the threat of jihadist violence and pushing for even more questionably vetted migrants to be resettled in the United States.

De Blasio and the mayors of London and Paris co-wrote an op-ed in which they said terrorism committed by refugees is “vanishingly rare.”

“Militant violence is vanishingly rare,” the trio wrote in The New York Times on the heels of three separate attacks in the United States.

“Militant violence is vanishingly rare,” the trio wrote in The New York Times on the heels of three separate attacks in the United States.

The comments are not likely to go over well in a city on edge after the explosion. Police arrested Ahmad Khan Rahami after a shootout in New Jersey Monday. Authorities allege he is responsible for planting bombs in New York and near the site of a charity run in New Jersey.

Rahami is not a refugee — he is a naturalized citizen, having moved with his family to the United States from Afghanistan. Acquaintances say he returned from a trip to Pakistan a changed man, suddenly devout in his faith and wearing traditional Muslim robes, according to The New York Times.

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The suspect identified by officials in the weekend’s other terrorist incident,  Dahir Adan, who launched a Jihad inspired mass stabbing at a mall in Minnesota, was a Somali refugee. Adan moved to the United States with his parents when he was 3 months old, according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

But a new description has been applied to him: terrorist. As he stalked through the Crossroads Center mall, wearing a security guard uniform and wielding a knife, Adan, 22, mentioned Allah and asked at least one victim if he was Muslim, the police said.

Kyle Shideler, director of threat information at the Center for Security Policy, said the tone of the op-ed is consistent with progressive rhetoric that angry Americans will seek retribution on innocent Muslims.

“It sort of plays into this whole backlash narrative they’re constantly pushing, even though we haven’t really seen that,” he said.

Shideler said most Americans — and legal immigrants, for that matter — “would prefer that they worry more about the terrorism.”

So in the most hyper-technical sense, the mayor is correct. Terrorist attacks by refugees are rare. But terrorism involving Muslim immigrants or refugees and their children account for almost every high-profile jihadist attack carried out in the United States in recent years and a majority of the convictions on terror-related charges. A report released in June by the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest indicates that 380 peopled convicted of terrorism-related charges from the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001 to the end of 2014 were born abroad. That is 65 percent of the total number.

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At least 100 citizens of convicted of terrorism-related charges became naturalized citizens after entering through one of America’s immigration programs. At least 24 of the convicts were refugees and 17 were the U.S.-born children of immigrants. At least 33 came on visas and remained after they expired.

Even before Tuesday’s op-ed, de Blasio came under fire for his reluctance to identify the bombing as terrorism and for his conduct as mayor. Former New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly suggested in an interview with The Daily Beast that the mayor’s administration is too politically correct and overly sensitive to media criticism to effectively fight terrorism.

Kelly was particularly critical of de Blasio’s decision to disband the Demographics Unit, which the former commissioner had created in 2003 to study the social habits and locations of the city’s ethnic groups.

“It was dumb, quite frankly,” he told The Daily Beast.

Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was characteristically blunt, according to the website Circa.

“He shows up and says it’s an intentional act, but not a terrorist act,” he said. “Before we even knew it was Islamic-inspired, a bombing that wounds 29 of his citizens is by definition a terrorist act … So you are kind of on Mars if you can’t figure that out.”