On the morning of Dec 11, 2017, Akayed Ullah, a Bangladeshi Muslim and the nephew of a Diversity Lottery Visa winner, boarded the F Train near the ‘Little Bangladesh’ colony in Brooklyn. Wearing a hooded jacket and a backpack to cover the pipe bomb strapped to his body, Ullah switched to the A and headed for the crowded corridors of the Times Square station.
Christmas was coming and ISIS had promoted a poster of Santa next to a box of dynamite overlooking Times Square with the message: “We meet at Christmas in New York… soon.” Ullah had used Christmas tree lights as a trigger and detonated his bomb near a Christmas poster.
The meeting between Times Square and ISIS fizzled and only injured three people. Ullah unfortunately survived, with minor burns, and began his assault on our justice system.
9 years later, Ullah defeated the American legal system, with the aid of one of the most radical Biden judges, and his legal victory has serious implications for prosecuting ISIS terrorists.
The case against the Bangladeshi Muslim ‘Diversity Visa’ terrorist couldn’t have been any more straightforward. “I did it for the Islamic State,” Ullah declared. He had been consuming ISIS propaganda that told ISIS supporters to carry out attacks abroad if they couldn’t make it to Iraq and Syria. Ullah had used ISIS slogans and language, and told the court that he was angry because President Trump had been bombing Islamic terrorists in the Middle East.
Ullah’s taxpayer-funded public defender, Julia Gatto, who had previously represented another Muslim Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, only had one counterargument. She couldn’t deny that he had tried to bomb Times Square, but claimed that he wasn’t really a Muslim terrorist, but just a young man suffering from depression and in a “mental health fog” who was just trying to commit suicide and really hadn’t wanted to hurt anyone else in Times Square.
“Tooling around on the internet does not make you an ISIS member,” Gatto had argued.
A few months ago, a Biden judge on the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit agreed and, in the process, she also dismantled the ability to prosecute ISIS terrorists as terrorists.
Even among the legion of terrible Biden appointees, Myrna Perez stood out as the voting rights director at the Brennan Center. The Brennan Center is the leading pro-crime organization in the country and has endless blood on its hands for championing criminals against victims. Sen. Ted Cruz had warned that of all the Biden circuit nominees, “Myrna Perez is the most dangerous. She has been a radical, and an activist for what effectively amounts for her to her entire career,”
The prediction has now come true with her ruling in United States of America v. Ullah.
The radical pro-crime judge wrongly ruled for the ISIS terrorist, arguing incorrectly that “the evidence was insufficient to show that Defendant provided material support and resources to a foreign terrorist organization” because carrying out an attack in support of ISIS does not count as “material support” to ISIS.
Judge Myrna Perez admitted that Ullah had been reading ISIS material, that he used ISIS slogans and that he had carried out the attack “on behalf of the Islamic State” and “for Allah.”
What she argues instead is that volunteering to kill yourself and others in support of ISIS is not “material support” because the ISIS terrorist hadn’t been formally “coordinating” with ISIS. The communication had all been one way, from ISIS to Ullah, rather than from Ullah to ISIS.
Perez wrongly contends that following the orders of ISIS does not count as being “work under that terrorist organization’s direction” and means that he was acting “entirely independently.”
There’s nothing “entirely” about following an ISIS call to attack Times Square at Christmas
Never mind that the entire strategy of crowd-sourced terrorism from Al Qaeda and ISIS depends on reaching aspiring Muslim terrorists and providing them with general directions, rather than specifically directing individual terrorist attacks by the terrorists. By following these general instructions to commit attacks, a terrorist, even if he is unable to communicate with the terrorist group due to fear of being caught, is acting at its direction. And the Christmas attack in Times Square clearly picked up on one ISIS call for a Christmas attack in Times Square.
According to Judge Perez’s pettifoggery, Ullah “chose” to carry out the ISIS attack, which means he wasn’t really under the direction of ISIS and that means it’s not providing material support. Had Ullah shipped some charging cables to ISIS, that would be ‘material support’, but killing and dying for it isn’t considered material support. Neither, she argued, did Ullah “provide a ‘service ‘to a foreign terrorist organization’” by independently carrying out his attack” because “‘to’ requires some ‘connection’ between the service provider and the organization.”
And so because of the definition of “to”, the ISIS terrorist wasn’t providing a service to ISIS.
Judge Steven Menashi, whose grandfather was a Jewish refugee from Iraq, and who was appointed by President Trump, correctly noted that Perez had decided to overrule the jury in the case and completely rewrite the law, that there was no basis for her decision to exclude ISIS propaganda as a form of direction or to define terrorist attacks in response to it as ‘entirely independent’, and that “direction” and “control” are not the same things.
Judge Menashi’s arguments are correct, but he was in the minority, with Perez and Judge Jed Rakoff, a showboating Clinton appointee, who had unilaterally decided that 18-year-olds, like a thug who shot up a Bronx block party, hitting a pregnant woman, were not really criminally culpable, and who had illegally ruled that the death penalty was unconstitutional.
The Perez-Rakoff decision has minimal impact on Ullah, who is already behind bars on other charges, but effectively dismantles the prosecution of ISIS and Al Qaeda terrorists.
The majority of Al Qaeda and ISIS attacks in America have involved ‘lone wolves’ who came around to supporting these Islamic terrorist groups based on consuming online propaganda. Some directly communicated with the group, but instead often reached FBI personnel, others pledged oaths of obedience, while others simply carried out attacks for the terrorist group.
Judge Perez knowingly set out to dismantle a key tool for prosecuting them as she wrote in her ruling, “the resolution of that question will not affect the Defendant’s punishment, but it may make a difference in future cases, and it is our unflagging duty to say what the law is, in cases within our jurisdiction.” Perez was admitting that her ruling is irrelevant to the case, which is why she should not have made it, but will be relevant to other cases of future ISIS terrorists.
Unless it’s overturned, the ruling will make it impossible to prosecute ISIS terrorists for providing “material support” to a terrorist organization unless it can be demonstrated that they were following specific orders from the Islamic terrorist group. Since that rarely happens, Perez has effectively legalized ISIS terrorist attacks in America as long as there’s no direct ‘control’.
This may have limited impact in cases where the terrorists successfully carry out an attack, but it will cripple the ability to prosecute early plots where an attack had not been carried out. It means that some of these terrorists will walk away, as they routinely do in Europe, to carry out future terrorist attacks, some of which will be successful, leading to more dead Americans.
Judge Perez has also given ISIS terrorists a new template for their attacks and told them what they need to do to avoid being tried on ‘material support’ charges. That’s steering rather close to providing ‘material support’ to terrorists… whether it’s intentional or unintentional.
If this disastrous verdict isn’t overturned by the Supreme Court, Americans will die because a pro-crime judge was placed in a key position by extremist leftist judges who twist the law to champion criminals and terrorists at the expense of the United States of America.
The Perez ruling for ISIS shows how radical and disastrous the judges being chosen by Democrats have become and how they threaten the security, safety and lives of Americans.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.
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Every Biden-appointee is illegitimate. Fire her. And please notice before you vote again that Democrats appoint anti-US judges that ruin our lives.
Woke, Progressive ignorance.