Mass stabbing and attempted vehicle attack in Melbourne Australia was inspired by ISIS.

A screencap showing the attacker fighting with the police. Wall Street Journal/STR/EPA.

A mass stabbing and attempted vehicle arson attack in Melbourne Australia which left one person dead was inspired by ISIS. Wall Street Journal. The suspect, a 30 year old Somali immigrant named Hassan Khalif Shire Ali killed one person and wounded two more before being shot and killed by police. Ali was known to Australian police due to radical comments but was not considered a threat. Ali had also set fire to his car that had several gas canisters inside and was apparently attempting to use it as a crude bomb. Though inspired by ISIS an claimed by the terror group as one of their own, no direct links to the terror group have been found. 

EDIT: The video I had posted has been deleted by The Guardian for some reason. 

My Comment:

This attack flew under the radar in America. Our media here is still bloviating on the election and the mass shooting that occurred in California. Those two stories have sucked the air out of the room for any other story, which is why I hadn't covered the story until now. 

It seems like a fairly important attack though. Australia has had quite a few terror attacks recently, mostly from Islamic immigrants. This one is no exception and it just goes to show that even as ISIS has been greatly reduced, the threat of terrorism still holds. Even if ISIS were to be completely defeated their legacy and huge archive of propaganda and followers can still recruit new terrorists. 

This attacker seemed fairly incompetent, which has been a pattern since ISIS has fizzled out. Gone are the complicated and well planned attacks like the Paris attacks back in 2015. Now it's amateur hour. But even amateurs can kill people. This attack won't have the impact as the various attacks during the bloody years where ISIS was dominate but it still will have an effect. 

The attacker was able to set a fire and stab a few people, killing one innocent civilian, but he didn't accomplish much else. His plan to turn his car into a crude bomb by setting it on fire with a few gas canisters was never going to work. He would have been better off hitting people with the car instead, even after Australia has installed barriers to prevent that. I do have to say that he could have accidentally caused way more deaths and injures with the fire if he knew what he was doing. Thankfully it's pretty clear that he wasn't an his plan was a pretty poor one. 

I was totally shocked by the Australian police. Australian police are armed but it was very clear that they didn't shoot this guy soon enough. He as actively trying to stab them and they still didn't put him down until what seemed like several minutes of fighting. In America this attacker would have been ventilated almost immediately after police had arrived on the scene since he was actively trying to kill people. I do know that Australia has different rules of engagement and less violent crime in general, but you would think officer safety would be a larger priority there. It was pure luck that with their current practices that one of their officers wasn't killed in this attack. 

This was another "known wolf" attack insofar as that Australian police were aware of the attacker but didn't realize he was such a threat. It makes me wonder what kind of rules the police in Australia and internationally are using for determining that. My guess is that there are so many Islamic radicals out there that it's hard to separate those that are just shooting their mouths off and those that are an actual threat. If so, I don't envy their job as that sounds extremely difficult to get right.