Horowitz: The blackout of the Fargo terrorist attack obscures a broader concern in small-town America

We fought endless wars overseas for two decades, only to bring in record numbers of refugees from the very places from which we sought to protect ourselves. Thanks to mass Middle East migration as the only remaining legacy of the trillions of dollars pumped into the “Global War on Terror,” America’s heartland is just as vulnerable to Islamic terror as New York and Los Angeles.

Believe it or not, there was an Islamic terror attack in Fargo, North Dakota, earlier this month, one that local law enforcement believes could have resulted in countless casualties instead of the one police officer killed. Like so many people from Syria last decade, Mohamad Barakat was brought to the U.S. as an asylee and became a citizen in 2019. He returned the favor on July 14 by allegedly randomly firing 60 rounds from his car near the site of a car crash on 25th Street. Likely waiting for police and first responders to come to the scene, Barakat allegedly gunned down three police officers in an unprovoked attack, killing Officer Jake Wallin and seriously injuring Officers Tyler Hawes and Andrew Dotas, as well as a female civilian.

There has been a near-complete blackout on information about this attack, especially in the national media. It took over a week for any information about Barakat’s immigration history to come to light, as Americans watched the streets of France burn during those days, also a result of suicidal generosity in immigration policy.

This was not your run-of-the-mill street thug or mentally ill mass shooter. Given the lack of criminal record or manifesto left behind, this has the hallmarks of a targeted jihad. Police found 1,800 live rounds in his vehicle, along with three rifles and four handguns, all of which were loaded. Barakat also had a grenade, gas canisters, and explosives in his car. According to North Dakota Attorney General Drew Wrigley, the car was filled with large amounts of Tannerite, a highly dangerous explosive compound made from ammonium nitrate and aluminum powder.

Wrigley further speculated that Barakat "was looking for significant crowd events in the area. We do know he had a clear path, he was going to downtown Fargo." Indeed, if not for Officer Zach Robinson taking out the gunman’s rifle from 75 feet (with a 9mm pistol), this could have been a mass casualty event, because Barakat appeared to be on his way to the Downtown Street Fair, according to Wrigley at the official press conference.

The FBI found a computer in Barakat’s apartment nearby that contained a search history revealing he looked up “mass casualty events” and how to cause certain injuries, according to the attorney general. Ominously, the last article that appeared in his search history was a local news article titled “Thousands enjoy first day of Downtown Fargo Street Fair.”

Unfortunately, the FBI still believes there is no motive and of course is totally flummoxed by the attack. Don’t expect the bureau ever to find a motive, and don’t expect this attack ever to wind its way into public policy debates.

We now live in a country where we are marked as political terrorists for believing in the values of our founders, while the government brings in hundreds of thousands of Islamic refugees, often transforming heartland cities into Middle Eastern enclaves, as we are seeing in Europe.

Daniel Greenfield does a great job capturing the transformation of Fargo, a pattern we are seeing in many small-to-midsize cities throughout the south and Great Plains:

8% of Fargo is foreign born. Much of that population comes from the Middle East and Islamic areas in Africa like Sudan and Somalia. Even much of the European refugee contingent is Bosnian. The massive influx of refugee resettlement allowed local politicians to boast that Fargo was growing much faster than the rest of the state or the country.
Fargo’s population shot up from 74,000 in 1990 to 90,000 in 2000 to 128,000 today. Somalis flooded Fargo, as did Iraqis, Bosnians and Bangladeshis. Amid the pure snows rose mosques, ethnic welfare nonprofits, Halal markets and other outposts of the new population.
By 2000, six hundred Somali families occupied Fargo, by 2004, Somalis outnumbered Hispanics in the Fargo public school system. Refugee resettlement, led by Lutheran Social Services, continued bombarding the state with foreign migrants, 70% of them embedded into the Fargo area.

Indeed, according to Census data gathered by the Center for Immigration Studies, 23% of all students in the Fargo City school district are foreign-born. That number was close to zero before the supposed Global War on Terror. And ironically, even though the people most persecuted in the Middle East in general, and in the Syrian civil war in particular, were Christians, almost all of the refugees were Muslim.

From fiscal year 2012 to FY 2022, just 1.6% of 30,000 Syrians settled through the resettlement program were Christians. Almost all of them were Sunni Muslims, presumably because Assad and his allies are Shia. But it’s ridiculous to bring in so many Sunnis when all of the rival factions against the Assad regime were terrorist groups like ISIS or al-Nusra. This is what we did in Iraq for years, as we brought in both sides of the civil war.

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, who is now running a ceremonial bid for president, has turned his state into one of the fastest-growing refugee hubs from volatile parts of the world, inducing a degree of social transformation his citizens never voted for. When President Trump issued an executive order in Sept. 2019 prohibiting refugee resettlement unless the state’s governor affirmatively opted into the program, Burgum jumped at the first opportunity to embrace it.

As a result, the foreign-born population of North Dakota has spiked 103% from 2010 to 2021, according to CIS, the fastest rate of growth of any state. Overall, the foreign-born population has nearly quadrupled since 1990, and again, in recent years, mainly from radically divergent cultures. Nobody ever voted for this degree of social transformation.

Since Biden took office, states like North Dakota have been inundated with unvetted Afghan refugees who were admitted helter-skelter in large numbers when the Biden administration recklessly pulled out of the country without a security plan. In February 2022, the DOD inspector general released a report identifying at least 50 Afghans who pose "potentially significant security concerns." The report noted that dozens of them who had "derogatory information" that would make them ineligible for parole were unable to be located. This sort of derogatory information “include[s] individuals whose latent fingerprints have been found on improvised explosive devices and known or suspected terrorists and for which the NGIC sends derogatory information notifications to appropriate DoD personnel."

So yes, there is a reason the FBI and the media don’t want us focusing on the case of Mohamad Barakat in North Dakota. As we look ominously toward Europe at its struggles with mass Middle East migration, officials don’t want us to know we have a sleeper problem here in the U.S. And in case you thought you could move from the coasts to the hinterlands to escape the problem, just know that our federal government, with the help of red-state RINOs, will make the problem follow you there.