Linden, New Jersey, can rest a little easier this afternoon. A fellow named Ahmad Khan Rahami was found sleeping in the doorway to a bar, and when awakened, produced a pistol and engaged in a running gun battle with police after shooting a cop in the abdomen.

Thankfully the officer was wearing a ballistic vest and was not hurt. The same cannot be said for Mr. Rahami, who apparently collected multiple bullet wounds.

The event stemmed from the morning excitement on Sunday, when a pipe-bomb was detonated at a Marine Corps Reserve 5k fun run at the shore. No one was hurt there, but that was not true about the pressure-cooker bomb blast in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.

Additional bombs were found a couple blocks away, and still more in a back-pack back in Jersey. Five associates and co-religionists were stopped in a car headed over the Verrazano Bridge from Staten Island when they were stopped Sunday night.

Sources said the FBI suspected the men may have had a role in the bombing and were questioning them at the FBI headquarters in Manhattan. It is believed the five, who live in New Jersey, were heading to JFK to catch a flight when they were busted.

That was a lot to unscramble as the story grew. I heard there was something in Virginia during the Cowboys-Redskins game that never was confirmed, and then there was the near-deadly attack at the mall in Minnesota, where nine people (non-fatally) were slashed by a loon brandishing a knife who was explaining at the top of his lungs to his potential victims that he was representing the Religion of Peace (trademark) and would never hurt a co-religionist.

Now, I may have been born at night but not last night. So, I was only mildly surprised to hear that the Governor of New York, and the Mayor of New York City had explained that there was no foreign connection behind the assault and the bombings.

I recognize that failing to protect your citizens against foreign enemies can make you look kind of bad, and that there is always the possibility that disgruntled Baptists or Mormons may have jumped off the reservation, but come on.

Pressure cooker bombs? That is the technique that appeared in the al Qaida glossy magazine “Inspire,” and was promptly adopted for use by the despicable Tsarnaev brothers at the Boston Marathon, and the slashing is a regular feature of Hamas-sponsored violence against Israel.

(Pressure cooker bomb found near Chelsea in Manhattan. It is similar to the designs used by terrorists and originally published by al Qaida. Getty image).

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio told us at his presser yesterday that that the explosions were an “intentional attack” but at the moment there was no “connection to terrorism and no immediate claim of responsibility.”

Well, ISIS actually did claim credit for the slashing attackss, but Mr. de Blasio was doing a little case of careful parsing of words. That attack did not happen in Mr. de Blasio’s city, only a couple bombings with devices that look a lot like the ones the terrorists have been shopping around the Inspired crowd.

I supposed you could make a case that Mr. Rahami’s family was in a feud with the cops and the city council over the disturbances that happened with sad regularity at the family restaurant- the First American Fried Chicken shop on the first floor of the family residence. You know the restaurant business can be a real pressure cooker.

You will note that the only religions mentioned this afternoon are the Latter Day Saints and the Baptists. I don’t think it is too much to ask for Mr. de Blasio to wake up and smell the coffee. Maybe some of the other politicians who are calling so desperately for our votes, too. Or, at least those not dumped in the ‘deplorables’ basket already.

There are people who are being encouraged to do this mayhem to us. They belong to ISIS and al Qaida and Hamas. They target young men. Seven of them acted out this weekend and we are very fortunate that no one was killed. We know exactly who is encouraging them. Even Gov. Cuomo was moved today to acknowledge there might be a “foreign connection.”

But I have to say that a nation whose leaders can’t even bring themselves to utter the words that describe our enemies are not serious about stopping them- or protecting us.

Copyright 2016 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Ed Note: at two this afternoon, Maayor de Blasio admitted that there might be a terror connection to the bombings. No shit, Sherlock.