At 9:30 PM, partygoers in Times Square wearing purple Planet Fitness hats heard a bang.

The ball hadn’t dropped, another Jihadi had. Along with three cops.

Trevor Bickford, 19, had taken the train down from Wells, Maine: a town of less than 10,000 souls. The born-again Jihadi had turned to Islam after his father's drug overdose. He urged his mother and brothers to join him in serving Allah or they would perish in "hellfire".

Maine isn’t a big hub of Islamic terrorism so the local teens who convert to Islam have to go to more exciting places to kill infidels in the name of Allah and earn their fellow 72 virgins.

In November, Xavier Pelkey, 19, of Waterville, Maine, a city of 15,000, was indicted for joining ISIS and plotting to kill some Shiites at a mosque in Chicago.

Pelkey and three other Jihadists intended to “enter the Shia mosque and separate the adults from the children, then murder the adults”. Then they planned to move on to a synagogue.

The plot to massacre Muslims in a mosque (never mind Jews) received virtually no coverage in the media because while Xavier is white, he’s a Muslim who had changed his name to Abdullah or ‘Servant of Allah’. Xavier’s two other pals, an unnamed 15-year-old in Chicago and a 17-year-old in Kentucky, had assembled hand painted ISIS flags and homemade bombs.

Xavier told them he wanted to be a martyr “and die while fighting in the cause of Allah”.

Trevor might have been jealous that Xavier/Abdullah beat him out by a month as the first ISIS terrorist out of Maine and took the train to New York City for what must have seemed like the biggest and juiciest target: the massive crowds gathered in Times Square to cheer the ball drop.

Muslim terrorists had previously hit public celebrations. And while Trevor was only armed with a machete, in a crowd that big, he probably figured that he couldn’t fail to kill someone.

Like Islam, there was nothing new about Trevor’s idea. His is the third Muslim knife attack on NYPD officers.

In September, Dzenan Camovic was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

The Bosnian illegal alien had approached police officers on Church Avenue who were trying to keep 2020’s Black Lives Matter looters at bay, stabbed a Haitian police officer in the neck, seized his gun and shot at an Indian-American police officer while yelling, “Allahu Akbar”.

Just in case there was any ambiguity, he later explained that, “religion made me do it”.

Despite the ISIS materials on his devices, his lawyers explained that “he has been struggling with untreated mental health issues” and “comes from a hard-working, loving family”.

Thirty years from now, Dzenan is due to be deported back to Bosnia to join his loving family.

There was a notable lack of interest in a white man stabbing a black man in the neck during the year of Black Lives Matter because the white man was Muslim. The message is that it’s okay for white men to attack black men as long as they shout, “Allahu Akbar” first.

It’s also okay for a white man to plot a mosque massacre as long as he converts first.

Before Trevor or Dzenan, Zaim Farouq Abdul-Malik went after four cops with a hatchet in 2014. Born Zale Thompson, he was a convert, like Trevor, but unlike the Maine teen, was black.

Abdul-Malik managed to strike one officer in the head and slash at the arm of another officer before discovering that shouting about Allah didn’t make him bulletproof. He was inspired by Alton Nolen, another black Muslim convert, who demanded that other employees call him Mohammed, and tried to behead two white women at an Oklahoma meat processing plant.

He only succeeded in beheading one which falls far short of the original Mohammed’s record.

The black nationalist convert, the Bosnian illegal alien and the Maine teen don’t have much in common except their religion and their determination to kill New York City cops for Allah.

Two of the three terror attacks were perpetrated by Muslim converts. That’s in line with the growing role of Americans inducted into Islam as the foot soldiers in the Jihad. Converts have always been viewed as dumb and expendable by Muslim terrorist groups. And how better to kill Americans than to recruit other Americans to do the killing without risking Arab Muslim lives?

Abdul-Malik had set the pattern of stalking and then slashing NYPD officers. Dzenan Camovic built on the plan by trying to also use their weapons against them. Trevor Bickford, Islamic name unknown, had tried to combine it with an attack on a major celebration. None of the Islamic terrorists managed to kill a cop, but between them they wounded seven police officers.

Three knife attacks on NYPD officers by Muslim terrorists, two of them in the last three years, ought to have gotten more attention than that. But if the media is uncomfortable talking about Islamic terrorism even when, like the Chicago plot, it targets other Muslims, imagine how uncomfortable it is bringing attention to Muslim terror plots against police officers.

The three Muslim terrorists were just trying to defund the police a little more directly.

This list doesn’t count Fareed Mumuni, a second generation Ghana immigrant and aspiring social worker who joined ISIS and was sentenced in 2022 after stabbing an FBI agent during a raid in Staten Island. Mumuni and his pal Munther Omar Saleh had planned to set off a pressure cooker bomb to take out the law enforcement personnel who had been tracking them.

Nor does it count Awais Chudhary, a Pakistani immigrant, who pleaded guilty in 2022 to plotting an ISIS stabbing spree in New York City. There are innumerable such attempted terror plots that hardly anyone keeps track of them and no one is especially interested in hearing about them.

Since 9/11, Islamic terror plots have become the background noise in our lives. We’ve learned to live with them and grown numb to them. When the plots are broken up, we ignore them. And even when they succeed, we quickly shrug and move on. Islamic terrorism is just part of the price we’ve learned to pay for the wonderful diversity of having white guys from Bosnia stab black guys from Haiti during the Black Lives Matter riots. Or a small town Maine teen realizing that his destiny lies with a theology from the hot desert that requires him to kill other Americans.

Islamic terrorism has become a statistic. Three Muslim knife attacks on eight NYPD cops in eight years is just a number. Like 2,977 dead on 9/11, 2,456 in Afghanistan and all the smaller lives lost in between, they’re just numbers. If we look at them closely, they can either tell a personal story or form a bigger picture of a bigger threat. But for now it’s easier to ignore it.

They did in Times Square. After a little shouting, the situation was soon under control. The revelers put on their 2023 glasses, posed for the news cameras and took selfies of each other.

And somewhere in America, a man sitting in a room watched it all go down and is taking notes. In a few months or maybe a year from now, we’ll find out his name and how good his notes are.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

Three Muslim Knife Attacks on NYPD Officers…