Was Las Vegas Shooter radicalized? Jihadist? Antifa? Neo-Nazi? Sheriff drops a bombshell

Las Vegas authorities now acknowledge mass murderer Stephen Paddock may have been “radicalized” before his bloody rampage Sunday at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival but they won’t say what species of radicalism the shooter may have embraced.

The deadliest mass shooting in modern American history has been cravenly transformed into anti-American propaganda by the Left, as Democrat commentators race to ghoulishly disparage white men, gun rights and the NRA, Republicans, and President Trump, blaming them for what otherwise looks like a Muslim terrorist atrocity. Islamic State continues to claim responsibility for the massacre. The terrorist group also claims Paddock converted to Islam six months ago and refers to him by a nom de guerre, Abu Abdul Barr al-Amriki. In Las Vegas Wednesday FBI Special Agent in Charge Aaron Rouse said, "We have found no evidence to this point to indicate terrorism, but this is an ongoing investigation. We're going to look at all avenues, not close any."

Paddock may have been “radicalized unbeknownst to us,” Clark County, Nevada, Sheriff Joe Lombardo said at a presser without elaborating. The reporters present for the statement did not bother to follow up. For much of the mainstream media, the fact that Paddock was a white male explained his violent rampage.

The word radicalized “is quite often used to refer to Muslims who wage jihad,” Robert Spencer notes. So the sheriff “may be tacitly acknowledging that the Islamic State’s claims to be behind this attack are accurate.”

Muslim terrorists are increasingly targeting concert venues, as Paddock did on the weekend. There was the bombing of the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, on May 22 that killed 22. On November 13, 2015, Muslim terrorists attacked the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, France, leaving 89 dead during a performance by Eagles of Death Metal.

Or Sheriff Lombardo may be implying Paddock was supportive of Antifa or the KKK. “In any case, [radicalized is] a strange word to throw out there and leave hanging,” Spencer adds.

It’s possible Paddock was a right-winger, but if so, he had an odd way of showing it. Targeting country music fans, who are largely Republican and conservative, seems like a strange way to advance a right-of-center cause.

Besides, in the United States, political violence is almost the exclusive province of the Left and Islamists.

Trump-hating Bernie Sanders supporter James T. Hodgkinson came close to assassinating House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) at a baseball practice in June. A little before then, Sanders supporter Jeremy Christian stabbed three men on a train in Oregon, killing two of them. Egged on by the Southern Poverty Law Center, left-wing gay rights supporter Floyd Lee Corkins II shot up the headquarters of the conservative Family Research Council in 2012.

For all we know at this point, Paddock may actually have been an angry left-winger lashing out at conservatives and Trump supporters. Some evidence does seem to point in that direction, and in the current atmosphere of visceral left-wing hatred towards anything and death threats being hurled at everything Republican or conservative, left-wing violence is becoming commonplace.

As Jack Kerwick wrote after the shooting of Congressman Scalise, left-wing mass-shooter James “Hodgkinson is the logical culmination of the campaign of demonization and dehumanization of Republicans and Trump-supporters that the left has been waging for decades, a campaign that leftists have been ratcheting up as of late, even since Trump and the Deplorables defied the world and defeated Hillary Clinton.”

Paddock’s family insists he wasn’t interested in politics. There have been reports that Paddock was registered as a Democrat in Florida but they appear to be false. Paddock’s middle name was Craig but the Democrats named Stephen Paddock listed online are older than he was and have different middle initials. Nor does Paddock appear in the Federal Election Commission (FEC) online database of campaign contributions.

But a video has surfaced of a pink pussy hat-wearing man at a left-wing protest who looks like Paddock.

As Pamela Geller notes, the man in the video, addressed by one person as “Steve,” is shown wearing a shirt emblazoned with “NASA” at the event that took place in August in Reno, Nevada. As Geller points out, Paddock worked at Lockheed Martin from 1985 to 1988. The company has done contracting work for NASA for decades.

In fact, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration claimed Paddock as one of its own in a 1993 press release highlighted by Geller. “Steve Paddock” of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is identified as a member of the “study team” exploring the possibility of “a return mission to Mars.”

Although relatives say Stephen Paddock kept to himself and wasn’t prone to angry outbursts, new evidence suggests he did have mental health problems.

Paddock’s girlfriend, Marilou Danley, reportedly told investigators that “he would lie in bed, just moaning and screaming, 'Oh, my God.'" Danley also reportedly said he displayed "mental health symptoms." There is also evidence that Paddock routinely berated Danley in public.

Paddock was prescribed 50 10-milligram diazepam tablets by a medical doctor on June 21. The anti-anxiety drug is marketed under the brand name Valium.

The drug can make some patients violent, said Dr. Mel Pohl, chief medical officer of the Las Vegas Recovery Center.

“If somebody has an underlying aggression problem and you sedate them with that drug, they can become aggressive,” Pohl explained. “It can disinhibit an underlying emotional state. … It is much like what happens when you give alcohol to some people … they become aggressive instead of going to sleep.”

The shooter’s father, Benjamin Hoskins Paddock, was a violent criminal who spent much of his life behind bars. He was on the FBI’s most wanted list for a decade. A 1972 newspaper report states that "Paddock has been diagnosed as being psychopathic and egotistical, as well as arrogant, and reportedly has suicidal tendencies." During one arrest, he tried to mow down an FBI agent with his car. The bank robber, car thief, and con man escaped from prison in 1968 and remained at large for a decade before being recaptured. He was never rehabilitated. Late in his life he was charged with racketeering and fraud for rolling back car odometers.

There is an outstanding warrant for the arrest of Paddock’s younger brother, Bruce Paddock, 57, who is wanted in Los Angeles County, California. The brother has been arrested many times on charges including arson, burglary, criminal threats, and vandalism.

There is evidence that Stephen Paddock wanted to kill a lot more people than he succeeded in doing. According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Paddock targeted large aviation fuel tanks that were about 1,100 feet from the concert site with bullets during his shooting spree.

A “knowledgeable source” told the newspaper that the “bullets left holes, but did not penetrate the two circular white tanks, sparing the nearby Route 91 Harvest country music festival from a potentially massive explosion.” Construction workers have since painted over the bullet holes and FBI agents inspected the fuel storage facilities and recorded measurements of the line of fire from Paddock’s hotel.

Searches of a car and one of the homes of Paddock yielded stores of ammonium nitrate and tannerite, ingredients used in homemade bombs.

He was also a licensed pilot. A Nexis search reveals that Stephen Craig Paddock, born April 1953, of 1372 Babbling Brook Ct., Mesquite, Nevada 89034, owned two airplanes, both of which were four-seat, fixed-wing, single-engine aircraft. The first, a Bellanca Super Viking model 17-30A, tail number 28082, was registered in 2005. The second, a Cirrus SR20, tail number 5343M, was registered in 2007. Did Paddock have more plans, possibly involving bombs and airplanes?

A reservation was made under the name Stephen Paddock for the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago corresponding to the dates of the Lollapalooza music festival in early August. The reservation was for rooms overlooking “Grant Park, where 400,000 people -- including Malia Obama -- squeezed in over 4 days to watch big musical acts.” Paddock didn’t show.

Paddock also conducted research online about hotels around Boston's Fenway Park, “a senior law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the matter” told reporters.

Speaking to reporters, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo said there is evidence that Paddock intended to try to escape after the shooting incident but said he was not at liberty to reveal the evidence supporting that claim at this time.

The sheriff suggested Paddock may not have acted alone. “He had to have some help at some point,” Lombardo said. “Maybe he’s a super-guy. … maybe he’s super-yahoo, was working out all this on his own, but it would be hard for me to believe that.”

Sheriff Lombardo also updated the body count. There have been 58 victim deaths so far, not the previously reported figure of 59, which included the perpetrator’s death. The correct casualty figure is 489, down from the previously reported figure of 527 which likely included hospital patients who were counted more than once. Of the 489, 317 have been discharged from hospitals.

The body count surpasses the previous grim record of 49 killed and 58 wounded during the gay nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, on June 12, 2016. The gunman in Orlando was a 29-year-old Muslim, Omar Mateen, who pledged allegiance to Islamic State during the attack and was later killed by police. As with Paddock’s assault, Islamic State claimed responsibility for Mateen’s actions.

It is possible that Paddock was not motivated by politics or ideology at all, even though it seems hard to believe given the gravity of his crimes and the extensive preparations he made to carry them out. But sometimes mass killings are carried by mentally disturbed people with no discernible motivations.

Some have compared the Las Vegas attack to the actions of Charles Whitman, who was a bloody trailblazer in the annals of mass murder. A 25-year-old ex-Marine sharpshooter, Whitman climbed a tower at the University of Texas administration building in Austin on August 1, 1966, and over 90 minutes at a height of more than 300 feet, shot 17 people to death and wounded more than 30. Before his rampage, Whitman stabbed his mother and his wife to death.

The theory is that Whitman’s antisocial behavior was related to a tumor discovered posthumously that adversely affected the amygdala (actually, amygdalae because there are two of them), “an almond-shaped mass of nuclei (mass of cells) located deep within the temporal lobes of the brain … that is involved in many of our emotions and motivations, particularly those that are related to survival. It is involved in the processing of emotions such as fear, anger, and pleasure.”

Over time Whitman changed from all-American boy to cold-blooded killer. At the age of six, Whitman’s IQ measured 138 on Stanford Binet tests. He was the youngest Eagle Scout in the world, attaining the title at the age of 12. In the Marine Corps, Whitman was described as "the kind of guy you would want around if you went into combat." But later in life he had trouble controlling his anger and his sunny personality changed.

There is also no discernible motive behind the actions of Germanwings flight 9525 co-pilot Andreas Lubitz, 28, who on March 24, 2015, sealed the cockpit and calmly flew an Airbus jet into a mountain in the French Alps at 430 miles per hour, killing 150 people. Lubitz suffered from severe depression and had suicidal tendencies. The airline had suspended him from his duties in the past for psychiatric reasons.

There are so many unanswered questions that remain about Paddock and what he did, whether he had help or not.

We can’t count on the pathologically incurious, politically correct mainstream media to bother asking them. Journalists ruled out Islamic jihad almost as soon as the news of the slaughter hit the airwaves, even though it may be the cause.

The media sees only a white male, the very embodiment of evil in America, in the eyes of the Left.

“This guy is either ISIS or ISIS inspired. He didn’t just snap and he followed the Jihadi playbook to T. Multiple dry runs including Lollapalloza and another festival at the same Vegas location in September. Sends the girlfriend away before the attacks. Targets a Conservative leaning crowd. ISIS has tripled down on this guy, the Feds just refuse to admit it.”

It is not just our FBI/DOJ/DOD/CIA.

The similar organizations in the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Australia and __________ fill the blank around the world have been playing the game for close to two decades or more. Never blame the real cause, Jihadists killing innocents for their twisted religion.

‘Religion of peace’ is not a harmless platitude!

To face Islamist terror, we must face the facts about Islam’s history by Douglas Murray

The West’s movement towards the truth is remarkably slow. We drag ourselves towards it painfully, inch by inch, after each bloody Islamist assault.

In France, Britain, Germany, America and nearly every other country in the world it remains government policy to say that any and all attacks carried out in the name of Mohammed have ‘nothing to do with Islam’.

It was said by George W. Bush after 9/11, Tony Blair after 7/7 and Tony Abbott after the Sydney attack last month. It is what David Cameron said after two British extremists cut off the head of Drummer Lee Rigby in London, when ‘Jihadi John’ cut off the head of aid worker Alan Henning in the ‘Islamic State’ and when Islamic extremists attacked a Kenyan mall, separated the Muslims from the Christians and shot the latter in the head. And, of course, it is what President François Hollande said after the massacre of journalists and Jews in Paris last week.

All these leaders are wrong. In private, they and their senior advisers often concede that they are telling a lie. The most sympathetic explanation is that they are telling a ‘noble lie’, provoked by a fear that we — the general public — are a lynch mob in waiting. ‘Noble’ or not, this lie is a mistake. First, because the general public do not rely on politicians for their information and can perfectly well read articles and books about Islam for themselves.

Secondly, because the lie helps no one understand the threat we face. Thirdly, because it takes any heat off Muslims to deal with the bad traditions in their own religion. And fourthly, because unless mainstream politicians address these matters then one day perhaps the public will overtake their politicians to a truly alarming extent.

If politicians are so worried about this secondary ‘backlash’ problem then they would do well to remind us not to blame the jihadists’ actions on our peaceful compatriots and then deal with the primary problem — radical Islam — in order that no secondary, reactionary problem will ever grow.

Yet today our political class fuels both cause and nascent effect. Because the truth is there for all to see. To claim that people who punish people by killing them for blaspheming Islam while shouting ‘Allah is greatest’ has ‘nothing to do with Islam’ is madness. Because the violence of the Islamists is, truthfully, only to do with Islam: the worst version of Islam, certainly, but Islam nonetheless.

Last week, a chink was broken in this wall of disinformation when Sajid Javid, the only Muslim-born member of the British cabinet, and one of its brightest hopes, dipped a toe into this water. After the Paris attacks, he told the BBC: ‘The lazy answer would be to say that this has got nothing whatsoever to do with Islam or Muslims and that should be the end of that. That would be lazy and wrong.’

Sadly, he proceeded to utter the second most lazy thing one can say: ‘These people are using Islam, taking a peaceful religion and using it as a tool to carry out their activities.’

Here we land at the centre of the problem — a centre we have spent the last decade and a half trying to avoid: Islam is not a peaceful religion. No religion is, but Islam is especially not. It is certainly not, as some ill-informed people say, solely a religion of war.

There are many peaceful verses in the Quran which — luckily for us — most Muslims live by. But it is by no means only a religion of peace.

I say this not because I hate Islam, nor do I have any special animus against Muslims, but simply because this is the verifiable truth based on the texts. Until we accept that we will never defeat the violence, we risk encouraging whole populations to take against all of Islam and abandon all those Muslims who are trying desperately to modernise, reform and de-literalise their faith. And — most importantly — we will give up our own traditions of free speech and historical inquiry and allow one religion to have an unbelievable advantage in the free marketplace of ideas.

It is not surprising that politicians have tried to avoid this debate by spinning a lie. The world would be an infinitely safer place if the historical Mohammed had behaved more like Buddha or Jesus. But he did not and an increasing number of people — Muslim and non-Muslim — have been able to learn this for themselves in recent years. But the light of modern critical inquiry which has begun to fall on Islam is a process which is already proving incredibly painful.

The ‘cartoon wars’ — which began when the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten published a set of cartoons in 2005 — are part of that. But as Flemming Rose, the man who commissioned those cartoons, said when I sat down with him this week, there remains a deep ignorance in the West about what people like the Charlie Hebdo murderers wish to achieve. And we keep ducking it. As Rose said, ‘I wish we had addressed all this nine years ago.’

Contra the political leaders, the Charlie Hebdo murderers were not lunatics without motive, but highly motivated extremists intent on enforcing Islamic blasphemy laws in 21st-century Europe. If you do not know the ideology — perverted or plausible though it may be — you can neither understand nor prevent such attacks. Nor, without knowing some Islamic history, could you understand why — whether in Mumbai or Paris — the Islamists always target the Jews.
Of course, some people are willing to give up a few of our rights.

There seems, as Rose says in his book on the Danish cartoons affair, The Tyranny of Silence, some presumption that a diverse society requires greater limitations on speech, whereas of course the more diverse the society, the more diverse you are going to have to see your speech be. It is not just cartoons, but a whole system of inquiry which is being shut down in the West by way of hard intimidation and soft claims of offence-taking. The result is that, in contemporary Europe, Islam receives not an undue amount of criticism but a free ride which is unfair to all other religions.

The night after the Charlie Hebdo atrocities I was pre-recording a Radio 4 programme. My fellow discussant was a very nice Muslim man who works to ‘de-radicalise’ extremists. We agreed on nearly everything. But at some point he said that one reason Muslims shouldn’t react to such cartoons is that Mohammed never objected to critics.

There may be some positive things to be said about Mohammed, but I thought this was pushing things too far and mentioned just one occasion when Mohammed didn’t welcome a critic. Asma bint Marwan was a female poetess who mocked the ‘Prophet’ and who, as a result, Mohammed had killed. It is in the texts. It is not a problem for me. But I can understand why it is a problem for decent Muslims. The moment I said this, my Muslim colleague went berserk.

How dare I say this? I replied that it was in the Hadith and had a respectable chain of transmission (an important debate). He said it was a fabrication which he would not allow to stand. The upshot was that he refused to continue unless all mention of this was wiped from the recording. The BBC team agreed and I was left trying to find another way to express the same point. The broadcast had this ‘offensive’ fact left out.

I cannot imagine another religious discussion where this would happen, but it is perfectly normal when discussing Islam. On that occasion I chose one case, but I could have chosen many others, such as the hundreds of Jews Mohammed beheaded with his own hand.

Again, that’s in the mainstream Islamic sources. I haven’t made it up. It used to be a problem for Muslims to rationalise, but now there are people trying to imitate such behaviour in our societies it has become a problem for all of us, and I don’t see why people in the free world should have to lie about what we read in historical texts.

We may all share a wish that these traditions were not there but they are and they look set to have serious consequences for us all. We might all agree that the history of Christianity has hardly been un-bloody. But is it not worth asking whether the history of Christianity would have been more bloody or less bloody if, instead of telling his followers to ‘turn the other cheek’, Jesus had called (even once) for his disciples to ‘slay’ non–believers and chop off their heads?

This is a problem with Islam — one that Muslims are going to have to work through. They could do so by a process which forces them to take their foundational texts less literally, or by an intellectually acceptable process of cherry-picking verses. Or prominent clerics could unite to declare the extremists non-Muslim. But there isn’t much hope of this happening. Last month, al-Azhar University in Cairo declared that although Isis members are terrorists they cannot be described as heretics.

We have spent 15 years pretending things about Islam, a complex religion with competing interpretations. It is true that most Muslims live their lives peacefully. But a sizeable portion (around 15 per cent and more in most surveys) follow a far more radical version. The remainder are sitting on a religion which is, in many of its current forms, a deeply unstable component. That has always been a problem for reformist Muslims. But the results of ongoing mass immigration to the West at the same time as a worldwide return to Islamic literalism means that this is now a problem for all of us.

To stand even a chance of dealing with it, we are going to have to wake up to it and acknowledge it for what!×

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/01/religion-of-peace-is-not-a-harmless-platitude/

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Jihadist? Antifa? Neo-Nazi? Sheriff drops a bombshell then runs away.