Bourbon Street Attack Was Foreign Policy Blowback
The U.S.-backed Israeli slaughter in Gaza motivated a New Year’s mass killing in New Orleans.
In the early hours of January 1, 2025, as revelers celebrated the arrival of the new year in New Orleans’ French Quarter, an American-born citizen from Texas conducted a vehicle-ramming attack (VRA) along the city’s iconic Bourbon Street.
Forty-two-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a veteran of the U.S. Army, sped a Ford F-150 Lightning pickup truck down the pedestrian-packed street, killing 14 people and injuring more than 50. After crashing the truck, he exited it with a gun and engaged in a brief firefight with several police officers who quickly shot and killed him.
The attack had all the indications of “blowback” terrorism, the violent consequences of American foreign policy. But it wasn’t until August 2026 that the author, Horton, confirmed it was blowback driven specifically by the U.S.-backed Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.
After the attack, it was quickly established that Jabbar was a convert to Islam and had voiced support for ISIS on social media. Authorities also found an ISIS flag in the pickup truck he rented to carry out the attack. His choice of the truck itself, an electric vehicle, showed tactical expertise that has become prevalent within Islamic terrorist circles. Electric vehicles weigh more than analogous gas- or diesel-powered vehicles and accelerate quickly and relatively silently. The FBI concluded Jabbar was “100 percent inspired” by ISIS.
In the 19 months since the attack, the author consistently and publicly speculated that Jabbar was directly motivated by Israel’s crimes against humanity in Gaza, and by America’s unquestioning support of them. The day after the attack, during an interview with Libertarian Institute news editor Kyle Anzalone, he said:
If the guy in… New Orleans was not motivated by what’s currently going on in Gaza, well then I guess I would just be amazed. That he’s [going to] sign up as a lone wolf bin Ladenite essentially… while this is going on — it’s the worst series of atrocities since the height of Iraq War II, you know, going on in the Gaza Strip right now — and so [it] very likely played some role in his radicalization.
During his drive to New Orleans on December 31, 2024, Jabbar recorded five videos. He posted them on Facebook hours before the attack. The videos are no longer available on Facebook, and neither the videos nor transcripts of them have been released. The FBI obtained these videos in the hours following the attack and had reviewed them by the following day.
During a press conference on January 2, 2025, Christopher Raia, the FBI deputy assistant director of counterterrorism, revealed details from the tapes: Jabbar said he joined ISIS before summer 2024, provided a will and testament, and claimed his original plan was to harm his family and friends. Evidently, Jabbar scrapped this latter idea because he believed it would fail to focus media attention on the “war between the believers and the disbelievers.”
What, if any, contact Jabbar may have had with the FBI or its informants before the attack remains unknown.
On August 23, 2025, the author (Horton) told the podcaster Lex Fridman:
And what are the chances, Lex, that on New Year’s Eve 2024, that this man is motivated… to do this for any other reason than American support for Israel in the Gaza Strip? There’s a 99 percent chance that was what he was ranting about to his parents in his video messages that he recorded on his way from Houston to New Orleans.
There was no mention of Israel or Gaza in Raia’s press conference, or anywhere in government communiques or national media reports about the attack. The narrative was that Jabbar had been “secretly” radicalized by Islam. The implication was that he too became imbued with Islam’s well-known hatred of our freedom.
A December 29, 2025, article in the Houston Chronicle got close to the truth: “Based on posts made by Jabbar, the severity of his rhetoric increased with a focus on the war in Gaza.”
Despite this critical insight, the article was entitled, “One year after the New Orleans attack, the ‘why’ still eludes the Houston killer’s family.”
In a January 14, 2025, statement, the FBI said: “The FBI, along with our partners, continue to work around the clock to determine what motivated Shamsud-Din Jabbar to drive his truck into a crowd of people on Bourbon Street.”
The FBI can now stand down in this effort, because the author received confirmation that his speculation about the Gaza genocide motivating Jabbar was correct. During the Scott Horton Show podcast on August 14, Joe Kent, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), said he viewed parts of the tapes and Jabbar specifically referenced Gaza.
“He definitely cited Gaza,” Kent confirmed. “One of his big grievances with the West on why he was going to conduct a terrorist attack was our support for Israel and what Israel was doing in Gaza.”
This is a single source, but it is authoritative and on-the-record. The NCTC is the central hub for America’s domestic and international counterterrorism intelligence. As part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), it has vast access to secret intelligence, including information that is classified simply because it is inconvenient to the War Party’s narratives. As NCTC director, Kent was able to view this data directly.
The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment.
To be charitable to the American public and media, they were distracted by another truck attack later the same New Year’s Day, 2025. Not even eight hours after the Bourbon Street attack, a Green Beret shot and immolated himself with explosives inside a rented Tesla parked directly in front of the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas. The branding of Elon Musk’s Tesla and Donald Trump’s hotel was all the spectacle the national press needed to divert them from asking the FBI obvious questions pertaining to the attack in Louisiana.
According to the Associated Press, the soldier in the Tesla bombing, 37-year-old Matthew Livelsberger, left notes on his cell phone that discussed his need to “cleanse” his mind “of the brothers I’ve lost and relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took.” He had served two tours in Afghanistan and intended his death to serve as a “wake-up call” to Americans about imperial violence. Unfortunately, it unwittingly assisted the government in keeping Americans asleep.
Livelsberger’s action, though misguided and criminal, was not terrorism in either the colloquial or official sense. It was more reminiscent of the self-immolation protest of Aaron Bushnell outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., on February 25, 2024. Bushnell, an active-duty member of the U.S. Air Force, said he would no longer be complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, shouting, “Free Palestine!” as he burned to death. So it goes.
But the FBI, the Justice Department, the entire “Intelligence Community” (IC), the Pentagon, and the Joe Biden White House must have known that Jabbar was motivated by Gaza, unless they are all beset by a level of incompetence that even the most cynical critic of government would be hard-pressed to imagine. Consider, for a moment, the scope and scandal of this coverup. Just how many law enforcement and intelligence officers and lawyers at Justice buried this crucial information for political reasons? All to protect Israel.
Surely, they recognize what they all had themselves predicted. Consider some of the warnings issued during the 14 months prior to Jabbar’s attack.
On November 15, 2023, FBI Director Christopher Wray, during his opening statement at a House Committee on Homeland Security hearing, said, “In a year when the terrorism threat was already elevated, the ongoing war in the Middle East has raised the threat of an attack against Americans in the United States to a whole other level.” He added, “Bottom line: We’re going to continue to do everything in our power to protect the American people and support our partners in Israel.”
On March 11, 2024, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines, during her opening statement at a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing for the Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community, said that “the crisis has galvanized violence by a range of actors around the world, and while it is too early to tell, it is likely that the Gaza conflict will have a generational impact on terrorism.”
On September 17, 2024, Professor of Security Studies Peter R. Neumann published The Return of Terror: How Jihadism Challenges Us. As summarized by the London Times, in the book,
Neumann calculated that there had been a 400 per cent increase in terrorist activity across Europe as a whole over the previous two years.… The unmistakable turning point was the massacre of Israeli civilians by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s ensuing ground invasion of Gaza.
In fact, Jabbar had researched the December 2024 vehicle-ramming attack in Magdeburg, Germany, in which an immigrant from Saudi Arabia crashed his car into a Christmas market and killed six people, including a nine-year-old boy.
Like all terrorism, Jabbar’s actions were evil and inexcusable. President Joe Biden released a statement about the attack in which he leveraged this truth: “There is no justification for violence of any kind, and we will not tolerate any attack on any of our nation’s communities.”
However, at that very moment, his government was fully supporting Israel’s mass murder campaign in Gaza with weapons, intelligence, money, and political and diplomatic cover, provoking this very terrorist attack against innocent American civilians.
Israel’s unrelenting cruelty was high-octane fuel for anti-Western propaganda, especially that of the Islamic State (IS). According to EUROPOL’s 2026 European Union Terrorism Situation and Trend Report:
IS propaganda exploited events perceived as victimising Muslims and generating grievances among its audiences. Most prominently in 2025, it instrumentalised the conflict in Gaza to fuel anti Semitic narratives, including calls to target Jewish individuals, communities and interests.
The bureaucratic phrasing is stunning, placing the Gaza slaughter in the category of “events perceived as victimising Muslims.” Throughout the West, innocents are being slaughtered in retaliation for Israel’s very real crimes.
There has, of course, been more blowback in America since Jabbar’s attack. In May 2025, a so-called lone-wolf terrorist-assassin murdered a young couple outside of a Jewish museum in Washington, DC, and another killed a woman at a pro-Israel rally in Boulder that June. Both terrorists were motivated by Israel’s destruction of Gaza.
Trump ultimately picked up where Biden left off in Gaza, and on February 28 of this year he launched a regime-change war of choice against Iran on behalf of Israel. The very next night, Austin, Texas, was hit with another blowback terrorist attack. Ndiaga Diagne, a 53-year-old born in Senegal and living in the city, opened fire on patrons at Buford’s Backyard Beer Garden on West Sixth Street. He killed three people and wounded 15 more before responding police officers shot and killed him. This time the FBI was more forthcoming. In a May 7 investigative update, it said that the investigation
indicates an escalation in violent behavior in part tied to specific personal triggers and grievances related to U.S. and Israeli military actions involving Iran, culminating in a violent, impulsive attack. The investigation revealed that Diagne admired the recently deceased Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. At the time of the attack Diagne was wearing clothes that included an Iranian flag design t-shirt and a sweatshirt that read: “Property of Allah.”
Again, one must simply marvel at the bureaucratic rhetoric referencing the “recently deceased” Khamenei. During Operation Epic Fury, Khamenei was killed by airstrikes while at home, along with several members of his family, including his three-year-old granddaughter.
Blowback terrorism caused by Israel and U.S. government support for Israel is nothing new. The entire bin Ladenite war against America was in part based on it. Infamous examples include the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which killed six people and injured more than 1,000; the 1995 Saudi National Guard bombing, which killed five Americans training Saudi internal security forces; the 1996 Khobar Towers attack near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 U.S. airmen in their barracks (which the government dishonestly blamed on Iran); the August 7, 1998, dual truck bomb attacks at the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing hundreds of people; and the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole while it was in port in Aden, Yemen, which killed 17 U.S. sailors.
And then there were the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. These attacks were motivated by U.S. combat forces stationed in Saudi Arabia to bomb and blockade Iraq as well as balance against Iran, as part of the Israeli-demanded “dual containment” strategy in the aftermath of the first Gulf War, and by America’s support for Israel’s brutalization of the Palestinians and Lebanese.
A crucial motivating incident was what is now referred to as the First Qana Massacre, which occurred during Israel’s Operation Grapes of Wrath in Lebanon, launched on April 11, 1996. On April 18, the IDF shelled a United Nations compound in Qana, killing 106 Lebanese civilians who had sought shelter there, including pregnant women and women who were breastfeeding or bottle-feeding babies.
This massacre was featured prominently as a cause of war in Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s first fatwa against the United States, entitled “Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places” and released in August 1996.
The day Israel launched Grapes of Wrath, lead 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta filled out his last will and testament. This was meant to symbolize his dedication to jihad and revenge. After seeing how upset bin Laden was by Grapes of Wrath and especially the Qana massacre, he joined the general cause. The Egyptian Atta made the decision to enlist in the service of the Saudi bin Laden—to kill Americans as revenge for what Israel was doing in Lebanon.
As intelligence reporter James Bamford explained in April 2004:
[Bin Laden] frequently mentioned Qana during those times. It was a very inflaming incident in terms of his own development of his hatred for the United States, and as well for other people throughout the Middle East.
In his book A Pretext for War, Bamford wrote,
Ayman al-Zawahiri argued that al-Qaeda should bring the war to “the distant enemy” in order to provoke the Americans to strike back and “personally wage the battle against Muslims.” It was that battle that bin Laden and Zawahiri wanted to spark [with the 9/11 attacks]. As they made clear in their declaration of war “against Jews and Crusaders,” they believed that the United States and Israel had been waging war against Muslims for decades. Now their hope was to draw Americans into a desert Vietnam, with bin Laden in the role of North Vietnamese president Ho Chi Minh.
The order to shell the UN compound in Qana may have been given by Naftali Bennett, then a junior commander in the IDF, who would later become prime minister. He is now a prominent politician who could again succeed Benjamin Netanyahu. The next Israeli PM to issue orders to America’s president may very well be the man who brought Mohammed Atta and Osama bin Laden together, helping cause 9/11 and kicking off this entire last generation of war.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Secretary of State Colin Powell, recognizing the centrality of this issue in the motivation behind the terrorists’ war, advised President George W. Bush to push for a sincere two-state solution for Israel and Palestine to help prevent terrorism against Americans. He was overruled by the Israel lobby.
Support for Israel’s crimes has continued to motivate bin Ladenite attacks against the U.S. in the years since. These include the attack at the LAX El Al ticket counter in 2002, the UNC-Chapel Hill vehicle attack of 2006, and the Little Rock Army recruiting office shooting attack of 2009. The San Bernardino and Chattanooga attackers of 2015 were both described as “obsessed with” and “upset about” Israel and Palestine as well.
Another example is the attack by Saudi Air Force officer Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida, in December 2019. He specifically cited “support of Israel” among his motives in a statement he left on Twitter before killing three young sailors.
A quarter century since the dawn of the terror war and the spirit of Zionism still dominates American foreign policy, putting all of us in peril. And we can now add those killed in New Orleans to the long list of Americans sacrificed on Israel’s behalf. In many ways, those killed that night represented the best of America. There were white, black, Hispanic, and Middle Eastern victims. Two of them were British. At least one was Muslim. They were students, workers, athletes, family members—good people. Their survivors were devastated.
They were all peacefully celebrating the new year, showing that we Americans (and our foreign guests) can rise above our differences and pursue prosperous unity. If one were to randomly select a group of American adults, none less responsible for American foreign policy could be found than the 14 men and women Jabbar killed. Had he sped his electric truck down the halls of power in Washington, it would still have been a heinous and evil crime that all good men and women would despise. Yet the complete innocence of the Bourbon Street celebrants regarding Gaza makes their slaughter intolerably unjust.
Americans are sick and tired of their compatriots being killed for Israel’s sins. Who will be next?
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