Reflecting upon Maimonides’ timeless wisdom, we must have the intellectual fortitude to contemplate, with candor, from a non-Muslim perspective, whether Islamic jihadism and “madness”/“madmen” may interact in a complementary, even synergistic manner.

At 2:45 p.m., Saturday, December 20, 2014, Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley approached two people on a street in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. After requesting that they follow him on Instagram, he told them, “Watch what I’m going to do.” Within 2 minutes, at 2:47 p.m., Brinsley reached the passenger window of a marked police car, and fired a lethal barrage at the heads of Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu. Fleeing into a nearby subway station, pursued by police officers, Ismaaiyl Brinsley stopped, and shot himself, fatally, in the head.

Immediate post-mortem accounts riveted, appropriately, on Brinsley’s history of mental illness, personal failure, and paroxysms of violent anger—he even wounded his Baltimore area girlfriend, just before departing by bus for New York City, that fateful Saturday morning. However, by Saturday, Brinsley had focused his vengeful rage on the recent deaths of Eric Garner in Staten Island, N.Y., and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. According to the now rigidly enforced narrative, Brinsley executed Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu in cold blood due, solely, to his warped perception of their “shared culpability” in the tragic deaths of Garner and Brown.

Although, doubtless, the aforementioned psycho-social factors contributed in significant measure to Brinsley’s heinous actions, major media reportage and “pundit” commentaries have scrupulously—and selectively—avoided any serious discussion of his Muslim background, and related pursuits, all of which can be gleaned from his social media accounts (see here; here; here; andhere). This willful lacuna in media coverage and analysis is unacceptable given the current spate of Muslim jihadist violence targeting Western institutions of authority, notably, the police (see here; here; and here). Whether such violence is fueled, additionally, by mental illness, etc., or not, we know that Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, official spokesman for, and a senior leader of, the Islamic State, openly encouraged Western Muslims to attack non-Muslims within their own societies in a September 22, 2014 pronouncement.Consistent with traditional, authoritative Islamic jihad war jurisprudence’s designation of even enemy non-combatant “harbis” (those non-Muslims from the “dar al-harb” [“lands of war”] not submitted to Islamic law) as licit targets of sanguinary attacks, al-Adnani, gave broad license to murderous assaults on Western “disbelievers”:

If you can kill a disbelieving American or European – especially the spiteful and filthy French – or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State, then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way however it may be. Do not ask for anyone’s advice and do not seek anyone’s verdict. Kill the disbeliever whether he is civilian or military, for they have the same ruling. Both of them are disbelievers. Both of them are considered to be waging war [the civilian by belonging to a state waging war against the Muslims]. Both of their blood and wealth is legal for you to destroy, for blood does not become illegal or legal to spill by the clothes being worn.

But attacks on law enforcement merited a specific priority for al-Adnani:

More here at Bostom’s.