Ohmeed Aziz Popal - Hyper-Distributed Self-Recruiting Terrorism?

You've just left a Jewish Community Center in a heavily Jewish neighborhood in San Francisco when a young Afghani Muslim man drives over you and 13 others with his SUV just "because he just wanted to". He describes himself as a terrorist to arresting officers at the scene. They choose to ignore his stated motivation. Most of you have heard the story by now.

Hate crime? Terrorism? A random, mentally ill kook?

We don't know the motivation--and probably won't for sure. There is great danger in jumping to conclusions based on circumstantial evidence. And there's a good deal of arbitrariness in classifying such crimes as just one thing in any case. (Why not all three motivations? Why not several more?)

Yet there is equal danger in jumping to benign, dismissive conclusions based on the same circumstantial evidence--and that's just what local officials and the MSM seem to have done here, making "move along now" and/or obliquely administration-bashing excuses for a crime that certainly looks unusual and worthy of further inquiry. Foremost among those excuses is the idea that stress over his recent arranged marriage and over new wife getting a visa to join him in the U.S. drove Mr. Popal to go on his rampage.

Of course! that would explain why immigrants and newlyweds tend to run over Jews on the street whenever they get the chance. And if Bush weren't so paranoid about granting visas from countries he's chosen to invade, poor oppressed men like this wouldn't be so angry. Yeah, that and traffic and bills and telephone solicitors at dinnertime and meter maids and yippy dogs and judgmental people and Starbucks baristas who fill the cup too full for milk.

Here's a (hopefully) fanciful scenario to consider. There's no need to connect it to Mr. Popal's mini-jihad, though you're free to do so if you wish. I'm just thinking out loud:

What if, in light of its difficulty in getting additional airliner-crashing terrorist operations pulled off in or near the United States, Al Qaeda decided instead to switch its focus to automobiles? (or to add them as a 'bonus')

What if - again, just imagining here - Al Qaeda decided that it was a whole lot easier to recruit for and implement thousands of SUV sidewalk rampage actions like the one we just witnessed than to meticulously plot a few 'big bang' events involving 747s and subway systems?

What if they figured out that they didn't even have to recruit for the actions directly? They could just get the word out and jihadi entrepreneurs would spring up as the spirit moved.
Anyone who owned a car and harbored dreams of martyrdom could get in on the action and there wouldn't need to be a money trail or an explicit communication.

Are there dozens of such individuals in the U.S.? A hundred? A thousand? A million? Who knows? Probably not even Al Qaeda leaders themselves. But think about the advantages from their perspective: The terror would be widespread and utterly random. It could be easily extended over time. It might take months before authorities caught on. And once they did, who would they arrest? The drivers, obviously, but who else? No collusion would be necessary. Just willing martyrs for the cause - if the justice system ever got around to martyring them at all. While they sat in prison of course, they'd be free to recruit others.

Paranoid? I sure hope so. But like many industries that started big and migrated to smaller, more modular, more highly distributed forms (think mainframes and PCs, for example), why wouldn't terrorism be a good candidate for the same kind of evolution?

Just asking...

Back to the incident that inspired the digression:

California Conservative speculates on a piece of the local San Francisco scene that might have given him just a little extra motivational boost:

Perhaps Ohmeed Aziz was “inspired” by the recent anti-Israel rally in San Francisco.

Local SFO blogger 'Bookworm' has excellent commentary and coverage of the whole episode, noting in one of many updates an interesting twist on the 'devils' the perp claims to have heard spurring him to commit the crime:

We hear about devils and automatically think of the (we hope) harmless and unwashed lunatic raving on a downtown street corner. That’s because we’re a secular society of associate the Devil with madness. John Updike, of all people, suggests that the prevalence of devils in modern Islamic speak may be a spur to action, and not a sign of madness. [emphasis added]

The Anchoress beats me to blogging a thought I had last night when this broke: What would the MSM, and specifically the SFO-area coverage and political fallout have looked like if a Timothy McVeigh look-alike had gone on a similar rampage in the Castro (gay) district? She writes:

Can you imagine, if someone had (God forbid!) driven a car into 14 gay people, how quickly the press would have managed to cover the story? Can you imagine that Mayor Newsom would call it “road rage” and suggest that there really probably wasn’t a “hate crime” attached to the action?

This morning, she adds this sage, sane comment to the same post:

"When people see a thing happening and are told, “no, that’s not happening, it’s something else and if you think otherwise, you’re an immoral person,” it creates enormous resentment, a sense of disorientation and a further sense that someone, “either me or thee” is nuts and must be guarded against.

Wizbang also has excellent coverage plus many links here and here, as does Hewitt here.