Being Very Careful: Avoid Mentioning Muslim, Islam or Terrorism in Any Run-On Sentence

"We're going to be very careful and patient to get to the full truth here."
"We have more work to do to be able to say what kind of motivation was behind this. Was it a political motivation? A personal motivation? What was it?"
"We do not know that yet."
"Whoever placed these bombs, we will find them and they will be brought to justice."
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo

An unverified picture on Twitter reportedly shows the moment the suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami is arrested

Caution is laudable. On the other hand, when disparate hints click into place, the answers seem more or less clear enough. And now that the suspect has been apprehended, certainly not willingly or peacefully, his identity and connection to the bomb that shook up a Manhattan neighbourhood, an improvised pressure-cooker device with a cellphone attached, belonging to Ahmad Khan Rahami's father, investigators didn't have to wrack their brains to figure out 'who' their suspect was.

It is, they declare by their caution, the 'why' that eludes them. And that too defies rational belief.

And that's just too coy, in fact, given the additional evidence that has swiftly surfaced, with those who know the 29-year-old personally mentioning to investigators that he had travelled, as an ethnic Afghan, to Afghanistan and to Pakistan. It would appear that the imperatives that drive Afghanis and Pakistanis to commit to the sacred obligation to hate non-Muslims and engage in jihad in devotion to Islam, communicated itself to this man and he embraced it.

The outward manifestations of his exposure to the deep roots of Islamism while in Afghanistan and Pakistan upon his return to the United States were his beard and his affectation of traditional Muslim clothing, declaring his newfound allegiance to the religiously fanatical obligations imposed upon him by birth, custom and religious devotion. The interior manifestation of which was his keen facility in assembling explosive devices and his determination to plant them in areas where he deduced they would produce the most harm.



Good fortune was obviously not with him in his plans. The explosive devices he left to do their work -- though described as 'sophisticated' compared with the similar types used by the Boston bomber brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev -- failed to perform as they were meant to, and that was a most fortunate failure for those who were injured as the first device went off, wounding 29 people, but killing no one, as was the designed intention.

Mr. Rahami, inspired by fundamentalist Islamism, was certainly serious about establishing his credentials as a bone fide jihadist. He is now viewed as having been extremely ambitious, in fact, since it is not only the Chelsea bomb that he has been implicated in, but the pipe bomb that exploded in Seaside Park, New Jersey, causing a charity race meant to benefit Marines to be cancelled. Although no one had been injured, there was no way to tell whether other such devices were in the near vicinity.

Local TV images show the explosion as the suspicious device goes off  Credit: Universal News And Sport

Five explosive devices discovered in a rubbish bin at a train station on Sunday night are also being attributed to this man's zealous intention to please a jealous god. There are those who will find it in themselves to claim that Ahmad Khan Rahami was the victim of discrimination, so it is little wonder that the Afghan-born man was angry and resentful. It appears his older brother Qasim may be as well, having left the U.S. for Afghanistan.

Qasim had been involved in an altercation with police in New Jersey. Rahami and his father, five years earlier sought a law suit against the city of Linden, claiming discrimination when a number of court cases ensued as a result of complaints of noise disturbances at the family's chicken takeout restaurant. Local residents, they had claimed, abused them by their racist comments such as "Muslims don't belong here".

Obviously, the logical next step in response to such an aggravating bit of bigotry was to proceed to prove their neighbours' contention right, after all. 

It was also obviously quite unfair, with more than a  hint of racial discrimination when police arrested him for unlawful possession of a weapon and domestic violence for attempting to stab  his sister, in 2014. In the end, he wasn't charged, likely because his sister withdrew charges. So he was wounded in a shoot-out with police, as a suspect in this bombing after he was spotted sleeping in the doorway of a local bar, and then hospitalized for surgery.

And FBI investigators will deploy themselves in a search for others involved in this terrorist attack since it seems that the scenario does call for the involvement of others. "No way he did this all by himself. The odds of this one person acting alone is infinitesimally small. Normally the way this works, you have a cell doing logistics, bomb-making and assembly, and an operational one", according to Mike Rogers, former chairman of the House intelligence committee. 

As for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, he remains wary of naming the situation for what it obviously was: "information suggests it may be foreign-related, but we’ll see where it goes", is as far as he would commit himself. The 'suspect' has been charged with five counts of attempted murder of a police officer, and is being held on $5.2-million bail while he remains in hospital.