Programming note: Tonight, Friday, at SteynOnline, I'll be here with the penultimate episode of our seventy-ninth Tale for Our Time, The Quest of the Sacred Slipper. Hope you'll want to swing by.
~This news is too sad. From Old Dominion University in Virginia:
The victim of the terrorist attack at Old Dominion has been identified as Lt. Col. Brandon Shah-- who was a Professor of Military Science and the leader of the university's ROTC program.
He was a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation Enduring Freedom, and Atlantic... pic.twitter.com/79pfI4UwLG
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) March 12, 2026
So Colonel Shah survived the century's worthless unwon wars including "America's longest war" - Operation Enduring Freedom (how'd that endure, by the way?) - only to come home and die at the hands of one of his "fellow Americans" screaming - go on, take a wild guess; yeah, bingo! - "Allahu Akbar!"
For reaction, we go now to rock-ribbed conservative Ted Cruz:
My approach to immigration is very simple.
Legal? Good. Illegal? Bad. pic.twitter.com/eWULZqMu48
— Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) February 26, 2026
Alas, very few people are really "conservative", which is why so little has been conserved - up to and including, ultimately, the continuing existence of the nation-states of the west. The killer of Brandon Shah checks all Senator Simpleton's boxes - as, indeed, the killer of those poor Southport schoolgirls checks all Nigel Farage's. Mohamed Jalloh emigrated from Sierra Leone and became a naturalised US citizen. An alumnus of Old Dominion, he subsequently joined the Virginia National Guard, so he's not only a brother-in-arms of Colonel Shah but also one of those "seventy-two Virginians" we used to hear so much about.
Unfortunately, Mr Jalloh was "compelled to leave the US military" after he was discovered to be a big fan of Anwar al-Awlaki, the late "spiritual advisor" to the Fort Hood killer, three of the 9/11 hijackers and many others - oh, and also the author of the popular book Forty-Four Ways to Support Jihad. Mr Jalloh expressed his desire to pull off his own Fort Hood-style mass murder, and shared his admiration for the 2015 Chattanooga attack, when a gunperson killed four Marines and a sailor.
So the US military gave him an "honorable" discharge, rather than - as healthier societies would - a blindfold and cigarette. Like Ted says: "Legal? Good. Illegal? Bad." The senator is, in my limited experience, a pleasant enough fellow, but an unserious man who will cost you your country.
Thus, the year after departing the National Guard - 2016 - the legal and good Honorable Mr Jalloh was arrested for attempting to provide material support to Isis. In 2017 the prosecution agreed a plea bargain and asked for twenty years - so that would be 2037, right? But the Bush-appointed judge sentenced him to eleven, plus five years "supervised release" - which would bring us to ...2033, is it? Also he was ordered to participate in a "computer monitoring program".
But Mr Jalloh was out in 2024 and fortunately the federal probation office that supervised his "supervised release" supervises with such a light touch that Mr Jalloh was free to stroll into Colonel Shah's classroom and kill him. Even the "computer monitoring program" does not - surprise! - appear to have worked.
I don't wish to pick on Mohamed Jalloh, for like Brutus he is an honourable man. But I do want to pick on all the Americans who served as his enablers. As I wrote on the first day of this new war:
The weapons of war are different today. China has taken control of much of the world without firing a shot. Islam has annexed western Europe without firing much more than the occasional machete or Christmas-market rental-car. Somalia has conquered Minnesota without firing off anything other than federal grant applications.
Which underlines the central point - that, to the United States and the wider west, the 'existential threats' are all on the home front.
Or, to put it another way, no nuclear mullah could do as much damage as three generations of western immigration policy. Just to underline the point, the Old Dominion case falls under the purview of another of those "seventy-two Virginians", Commonwealth Attorney Ramin Fatehi - an Iranian name, by coincidence: I'm sure he'd be happy to return and join the massed ranks rising up and throwing off the ayatollahs if he weren't too busy laying down the law in Norfolk. Yet, faced with an Isis groupie screaming "Allahu Akbar!" as he guns down a fellow American, Mr Fatehi could not resist adding grotesque insult to fatal injury:
Norfolk's Soros-funded Commonwealth Attorney Ramin Fatehi blames Republicans and the "cult of gun absolutism" for the shooting at Old Dominion.
The suspect is reportedly a previously convicted supporter of ISIS. pic.twitter.com/Q2aYdcJUDI
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) March 12, 2026
A fortnight back, when I made my point about prioritising the home front, the rah-rah right was too busy partying like it's 2002. My more temperate critics, however, insisted that there was no need to choose between home and away, because we can do both: the United States, they assure me, is more than capable of multi-tasking.
Actually, there's not a lot of evidence the government is capable of uni-tasking. Let us return, by way of example, to the case of the late Anwar al-Awlaki. Like Bill Kristol, Politico and Jeanne Bourgault, Mr an-Awlaki was brought to you by USAID - which is to say by you the US taxpayer; yes, you, Gladys Scroggins of 47b Elm Street, Totally Screwed Junction:
*FLASHBACK/NEW CONTEXT*
USAID provided "full funding" for future terrorist Anwar Aulaqi to attend college in CO. Big lie-he was born in the US not Yemen. @C__Herridge and I reported on this extensively with my team @FoxNewsFOIA originally obtained by Intelwire pic.twitter.com/ypm9brPY07
— Pamela Browne (@browne_pamela) February 8, 2025
Mr al-Awlaki was fully funded as a "foreign exchange student" - which is a neat trick for a bloke born in New Mexico. Had he blown up the Hoover Dam, he would have been, to the headline writers, a "New Mexico man", yea unto the end of the time. Yet, for the purposes of federal funding, he's a "foreign exchange student".
Would you trust such a government to prosecute a war effectively halfway round the world? The good news is that the Pentagon blew up a perfectly blameless municipal patch of Tehran grass called "Police Park" - presumably because the word "police" had been entered into whichever AI search engine is running the targeting. On balance, that's probably less damaging to US interests than the flesh-and-blood morons who handled Anwar al-Awlaki's college application or approved Mohammed Atta's flight-training visa six months after he'd ploughed American Airlines Flight 11 into the north tower of the World Trade Center and switched his permanent address to Large Hole in the Ground, Lower Manhattan.
Donald J Trump, whom I have supported way longer than you (July 10th 2015), or Mark Levin, to whom the President has unaccountably mortgaged his presidency, says America won this war in the first hour. America wins all its wars in the first hour; it's the second and third hours that start to complicate things. Many Steyn Club commenters have responded that the Islamic Republic is a regime of evildoers who chant "Death to America". True, but so what? In the first place, America is full of tens of millions who wish death to America - they're breaking their Ramadan fast at Gracie Mansion - and you sod-bollockers cheerfully let them in. In the second place, the question is not whether they're evildoers (so stipulated) but whether America is capable of vanquishing the evildoers. After Ukraine, Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Gulf War One, helicopters in the desert, Vietnam, Korea, I am not sanguine on that point. Does the Pentagon do that thing where you're marched into a courtyard and have your epaulettes ripped off? Like Dreyfus in France, or, alternatively, Mr Banks in Mary Poppins? No? Well, there's a surprise.
Nevertheless, many Steyn Clubbers insist that this time it's different; it'll go like ...er, well, Grenada ...because a small island of Her Britannic Majesty with 90,000 people is exactly like a mountainous region the size of western Europe with ninety-three million people.
So, if Grenada is the only exception to the three-quarter-century rule, then failure is the way to bet. It's not 2003, insists my friend Pete Hegseth. But, in fact, it's literally 2003, now and forever. A trio of today's headlines plucked more or less at random. First, the Americans:
Four of the six crew members on a US refuelling plane that crashed in Iraq are confirmed dead as rescue mission continues, with military insisting the aircraft was not shot down. (EMPHASIS ADDED)
Also from Washington:
US Temporarily Allows Countries to Buy Russian Oil
But hang on, aren't the Russians on the other side?
Merz slams US decision to ease oil sanctions on Russia
Aw, never mind. Onto the British:
Russia Behind Attack on UK Troops
In the Donbass? Er, no: this would be at a UK base in Iraq. Hey, wait a minute, I thought the last British troops left Iraq on May 22nd 2011. But no: apparently, they're still there after twenty-three sod-bollocking years.
Okay, forget those tight-assed Brits. How about the French? An overnight announcement from Président Macron's Facebook page:
Chief Warrant Officer Arnaud Frion of the 7th Alpine Hunters Battalion of Varces died for France during an attack in the Erbil region of Iraq. To his family, to his brothers in arms, I want to express all the affection and solidarity of the Nation. Several of our military personnel were injured. France stands by their side and with their loved ones.
So, as older readers may recall, way back in 2003 France decided to stay out of Iraq. Yet somehow, twenty-three years later, the leading member of the Coalition of the Unwilling wound up there anyway. Ah, well. To M Macron, this is all part of some subtle distinction between the war on Iran and the "war on terror":
Their presence in Iraq is strictly within the framework of the fight against terrorism. The war in Iran cannot justify such attacks.
Whatever. But, whether you're the global hyperpower, a longstanding member of the Coalition of the Willing or the archetypal duplicitous skunk for whom they named the "Freedom Fry", your nation is in its final decade-and-a-half as anything a citizen from, say, 1955 would find remotely recognisable.
I'm bollocksed out. From Charlie Kirk's producer:
Based on what we know so far...
It was likely two NATURALIZED Muslim immigrants responsible for two different terrorist attacks in one day.
Naturalized.
We did this to ourselves.
— Andrew Kolvet (@AndrewKolvet) March 12, 2026
Or to cite the very first line of Chapter One of a niche Canadian's cobwebbed bestseller - a quotation from the historian Arnold Toynbee:
Civilisations die from suicide, not murder.
And so a quarter-century on we are still "doing this to ourselves" - blowing up Police Park in Tehran while surrendering Rome, Paris, London, New York and Norfolk, Virginia. There is no Supreme Ayatollah who has inflicted as much damage on America as its depraved political class, judiciary, bureaucracy. Nobody needs a Trojan horse: we're "doing this to ourselves" in plain sight.
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