The suspect, Sevdet Ramadan Besim. BBC/9News.
A 19 year old Australian man has been accused of terror plot for Anzac Day. BBC. Sevdet Ramadan Besim had planned to take a kangaroo, paint an ISIS flag on it and then pack C-4 explosives to use against police officers. Besim had expressed a desire to kill police and had also made plans to run down a police officer and behead him or her. Besim was charged with four crimes, including planning a terrorist attack. Besim was also in communication with another teenager overseas who he discussed the planned attack with. The man choose the date of the attack due to the significance of Anzac Day for Australians. Anzac Day is the day Australians and New Zealanders honor their war dead.
My Comment:
And I thought the guy in Milwaukee was dumb for trying to buy fully automatic guns! The kangaroo attack would have never worked. Kangaroos are notoriously difficult animals to work with and there is pretty much no chance of getting them to do what you want them to. And I am seriously doubting that a Kangaroo would let someone paint an ISIS flag on them, plant explosives on them (or in their pouch?) and then be docile enough approach a police officer on command. Trying to pull that off would most likely result in you getting your ass beat by an extremely angry Kangaroo and even if you did load it up with explosives, chances are it would just run away into the wilderness. And the most likely ending for any terrorist trying this plan is to be beaten and clawed to death by an patriotic kangaroo who would want nothing to do with attacking his country!
In all seriousness though, I get the feeling that the kangaroo attack was more of an idle suggestion then an actual plan. I didn't see anything in the articles that I read that Besim was able to purchase anything that he would need to pull off the attack. Getting C-4 would be extremely difficult and even if he did get some, I don't see him getting a Kangaroo easily either. I am guessing that this was more of a "wouldn't it be cool if we could do this?" instead of "we are seriously going to do this and we have taken steps to pull it off".
Though the kangaroo angle is pretty funny, the rest of this story isn't. The more likely and serious plan was "running down" (with a car I assume?) a police officer and beheading them. That's a much, much easier plan to pull off and there is a very good chance that he could have pulled it off. All you need for that is a car and a knife, and the ability to find a cop that is vulnerable. It still might have failed because Aussie cops do carry firearms, but it is a much better plan then the stupid kangaroo stunt. There's a decent chance that he could have succeeded, but like so many terrorists, he had to blab on the internet and someone found him out. That's almost as dumb as trying to use a kangaroo as a weapon.
I do have to say that these lone wolf, ISIS inspired, moron wannabe terrorists actually help groups like ISIS. For every Sevdet Ramadan Besim and Samy Mohamed Hamzeh the anti-terrorist people catch, how many people like the San Bernardino attackers are falling through the cracks? The stupid people are a threat as well, because even a dumb plan could hurt or kill people, but if the focus is on them, the more professional ones may slip away undetected until they pull off a much more serious attack. This isn't something that has an easy answer...
As for Australia, they are having problems with radical Islam. Unlike Europe and the United States though, their issues are largely being ignored, at least internationally. The last incident there that made the headlines was the Sydney siege. Since then they haven't had any major incidents, but the Jihadi threat is truly global. I would not be terribly surprised if Australia had a major terror attack in the near future. And just like everywhere else, they are vulnerable to lone wolf terror attacks. This one was disrupted but the next one might not be...
On the other hand, Australia has some obvious advantages as well. They don't have a large Muslim population for ISIS or other terror groups to draw recruits from. They have less then 500,000 of them and they only make up 2% of their population. They also don't have anywhere near the number of refugees heading to them as Europe has. And being an island continent, it's fairly difficult to smuggle in weapons, explosives and people. Not that it is extremely difficult to get guns in Australia or anything, despite their draconian gun laws, but getting the kind of high powered fully automatic weapons would be even more difficult then it would be in the United States. In Europe, despite all their laws, it is way easier to get a fully automatic weapon. All that makes a huge terror attack, like the one in Paris last year, somewhat more unlikely then it is in Europe.
All that being said, I have to say this kind of story does make me feel a bit better about the threat of lone wolf terrorists. A lot of the people crazy or misguided enough to want to martyr themselves for Islam are also really, really dumb. Besim is just one of a long line of fools that weren't able to accomplish much of anything. Just like the morons down in Texas that attacked a free speech event and died for their trouble without accomplishing anything, the vast majority of these lone wolf and homegrown attackers are going to fail and fail hard. We just have to worry about the percentage that aren't complete idiots...
No comments:
Post a Comment