At least 13 people were killed in Barcelona, Spain, today by terrorists who drove a car into a crowd at high speed. Two suspects have been arrested, but only one so far has been named, 28-year old Driss Oukabir, from Morocco. ISIS has since claimed responsibility for the attack.
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer suggested that the terrorists who carried out the attack were copycats of the violence in Charlottesville, where a woman was killed when a car driven by a white supremacist plowed into a crowd of protesters who were marching in opposition to white supremacist rally in the Virginia city.
“There will be questions about copycats, questions about if not what happened in Barcelona was at all, at all, a copycat version of what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia,” Blitzer said. “Even though they may be different characters and different political ambitions, they used the same killing device — a vehicle going at high speed — into a group, a large group, of pedestrians.”
CNN’s Chief National Security Correspondent Jim Sciutto suggested that ISIS, the terror group which has taken responsibility for the attack, was taking a page from the Charlottesville suspect’s playbook, a suggestion at odds with the fact that radical Islamic terrorists have used vehicles as weapons for years.
https://twitter.com/DanRiehl/status/898279769174929408
He later doubled down on the idea.
Plus #Charlottesville VA 8/12 https://t.co/gpsVyZIGJ4
— Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) August 17, 2017
Twice.
I'm aware
— Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) August 17, 2017
But it wasn’t just Blitzer and Sciutto desperately attempting to draw a straight line from Charlottesville to Barcelona. CNN’s Peter Bergen directly equated Islamic jihadists with “right-wing extremists.”
“This is the 14th vehicle attack, terrorist attack, we’ve seen in the west since 2014,” Bergen said. “Most of them have been jihadist terrorist attacks but obviously you had the Charlottesville attack by a right-wing extremist just in the past week.”
CNN seems to have forgotten all the times jihadists have used a car as a weapon to kill innocent people by plowing into groups of them.
In London, England, three terrorists killed five innocent people and injured 50 others by running people over on London Bridge and then proceeding to stab them in June.
In Nice, France, last July, 86 people were killed, and a total of 303 people were taken to the hospital when a jihadist drove a heavy truck into a crowd of people who were celebrating Bastille Day.
At Ohio State University, 11 students were injured when a radicalized Islamist student plowed his car into a group of students and then proceeded to stab them with a butcher knife.
In Jerusalem, Israel, four Israeli officer cadets were killed at 15 others wounded when a truck plowed into a crowd of soldiers.
In Berlin, Germany, 12 people were killed when jihadists driving a semi-truck plowed into a crowd at a Christmas market.
AsThe New York Times‘s Rukmini Callimachi notes, car ramming is ISIS’s calling card. Islamic terror groups have repeatedly called for jihadists to mow over crowds of people with cars, as that type of attack is easy to carry out and have done so for years.
Yes, both the Charlottesville suspect and ISIS terrorists have used cars to kill and terrorize, but pretending that jihadists, who have been weaponizing vehicles for quite some time, were retroactively inspired by the horror scene in Virginia last week is absurd.
